Fix: embed Office & Acrobat Active Documents in IE WebBrowser control

Since the LvS desktop application (from Learning Via Subtitling project) uses Internet Explorer to embed Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat PDF documents (among others), I added some useful info to the LvS download page on how to work around issues one may face in such a scenario:

If you don’t have Microsoft Office (or have very old Office versions like Office 95 or Office 97) and want to embed Word documents you should better also install:

• free Microsoft Word Viewer: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=4
• free Microsoft Excel Viewer: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=10
• free Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=13 (this older version also supports Windows 2000: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=6 but might not support all PowerPoint 2010 features)

To show .docx (Word 2007+) files if you use Office XP or Office 2003 or the free Word viewer you need to also install "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats" from: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=3

Office 2007 doesn’t show documents embedded in Internet Explorer by default (which LvS uses internally to host Active Documents), use FixIt button at following page to fix this: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=927009 

In LvS if you have Office 2007 without this fix you will see message "Type the correct address" when your unpacked activity folder contains Office files

To embed Adobe Acrobat files you need Adobe Acrobat or the free Adobe Acrobat Reader from: http://adobe.com/reader

If Adobe PDF files don’t show embedded and open up in separate window: Use Start/All Programs menu from the Windows Taskbar and run Adobe Reader application. Then go to its menu "Edit/Preferences…" and at the dialog that opens up, go to "Internet" and check "Display PDF in browser", then press OK (can then close Adobe Reader).

When such files open embedded you may be asked to open or save the file for each one – select open and DO check to not be asked again (since it gets very annoying).

Since this "not ask again" will be remembered for IE too, if you want to clear it later on see the following article: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/reset-opensave-choice-for-internet-explorer-downloads-in-vista/

How to sort text lists in Word 2010

A very useful action in Microsoft Word is that of text sorting. You select some rows of text and then use the icon “AZ” on the “Home" tab of Word’s ribbon UI. At the dialog that appears you usually would want to “Sort by: Paragraphs”, select “Type: Text” and choose whether you want to sort “Ascending” or “Descending”.

Note that this action can also sort tabular data (see “Sort by: Field” and the option on whether the list has a header row [column captions] or not).

How to change text case in Word 2010

The “Change Case” action (portrayed by an “Aa” icon) is a useful one that is usually not noticed by Microsoft Word 2010 users (although often sought for and not spotted by many – probably because somebody misnamed the respective ribbon tab as “Home” instead of “Edit”).

It provides several options, the most useful being “UPPERCASE” and “Sentence case.”. The options are formatted as the resulting text will be converted which is I’d say a bit older practice (font selection dropdowns used to be like that in various software), since in other places like HTML styles Word 2010 shows live how the selected text (or the whole text if there’s no selection) will be converted as you move the mouse over different styles.