[Word] OT: Fun Windows & Word Oddities

[Liz]

LOL, Thanks for the background, Ron, we knew there must be some "logical" 
answer, I remember that with each version release of Office we'd wait to 
hear about the secret Easter eggs....usually one in each product. Excel ones 
were neatest, I thought. I'll have to check the wikipedia site for a visit 
down memory lane.

So....this far along and we still have just wrappers on DOS??? My personal 
feeling is that the Office 2007 is definitely just a wrapper, go down a 
couple of levels and there's Office 95 all over again. And the stuff that 
was bad before is still bad. I went through a horrendous exercise with my 
class yesterday, we followed the instructions in an O'leary series on how to 
set up and get page numbering right in a Word document!!! OMG - could we 
make it more complicated...I do not think so.

Liz




> Trick #1:  This goes back to the stone age of computing, it is a "DOS"
> thing.  Back in the old daze, you originally didn't have a monitor,
> you had a "CONsole" like a teletype (typewriter).  One of the basic
> DOS activities was to redirect input from the CONsole to other output
> devices like a printer or card punch or tape drive.
>
> So even today in Vista (which I'm now running) the old DOS keyword
> "CON" is reserved to identify the console.  Another related keyword is
> PRN for printer.  The same thing will happen if you try to use it to
> name a directory.  It goes to show that even Vista is still just a GUI
> (sucking up 99% of your CPU cycles) slapped on top of DOS.
>
> The notepad one doesn't appear to work in Vista / Office 2007.
>
> This type of bug is also sometimes known as an "Easter Egg".
> Actually, an Easter egg is some function hidden by the computer
> programmer that requires an unlikely set of inputs to activate.
>
> http://www.eeggs.com/items/48349.html - this page discusses the Notepad 
> thing
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_eggs_in_Microsoft_products - this
> wikipedia goes on at length on many eggs in various M$ products
>
> And the word one is nothing special, just a function to generate lots
> of test text.  It's been there "forever" and I use it quite often.
> Actually, googling it to find out special thing you were trying to
> point out I found that there are 2 other similar functions:
>    =lorem()
> which generates the latin text as explained here:
> http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=114222
>
> And in Word 2007 =rand.old still gives you the "quick brown fox ..." text
>
> Actually, in Word 2007 =rand() generates a different set of text than
> previously, some text from the description of how the new Ribbon
> works.
>
> Sorry to rain on your parade ...
> Ron