Opening the Temporary Internet Files folder for Outlook attachments (OLK5A, for example)

One of our employees opened up a PowerPoint attachment (ugh, I know) from an email in Outlook. He then edited it extensively and saved it using the File → Save As menu command. Unfortunately he did not bother changing the folder he was saving it to, with the result that it was saved in whatever temporary folder Outlook uses for holding email file attachments. The problem is that this folder is hidden and very hard to find. Even typing in the path directly in Windows Explorer does not work. So when he closed out of PowerPoint he realized he was in danger of losing all the work he had done unless he could find and open that folder.

I found the solution here after some searching, but even that page only explains how to learn where this temporary folder is located; it does not make it clear how to actually open the file. I found how to do it though.

Open Registry Editor (Click Start → Run, type regedit and hit Enter). Browse to the following location in the registry structure, depending on the version of Outlook you use:

Outlook 97	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Outlook\Security
Outlook 98	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.5\Outlook\Security
Outlook 2000	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Outlook\Security
Outlook 2002/XP	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Security
Outlook 2003	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security
Outlook 2007	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security

Double click the OutlookSecureTempFolder value, and copy that value to the clipboard (i.e., select all the text, right-click and hit Copy on the popup menu).

Then go to Start → Run and paste the value in, and hit enter. An Explorer window will open showing the folder, containing probably every attachment you’ve ever opened.

Word 2003 crashing when trying to format lists

One of our users was having Word crash on her every time she accessed the Bullets and Numbering… function in Word. The problem seemed intermittent at first but eventually became 100% consistent. We checked Office Update but the site reported that we were all up to date on that front, so there was no possibility of downloading an update that might fix the problem. An internet search uncovered a solution to the problem, the problem being a corrupt "List Gallery". When you access the Bullets and Numbering… function, Word shows you a gallery of list styles so you can preview them all and pick the one you want. Over time, Word tries to adapt this gallery so that the defaults match the styles you most frequently use. However, this adaptive behaviour is kind of flaky and poorly implemented, so if you are working on a lot of documents from a bunch of different people and spend a lot of time fixing broken and mis-formatted lists (as this user often does), the gallery itself eventually fills up with the broken and mis-formatted list styles you happen to be working on. In this case it got so bad that Word itself couldn't even handle the garbage and it crashed every time it had to display the list gallery. To fix the problem (source):

1. Open Registry Editor (go to Start, click Run, and type regedit)
2. Navigate down to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\List Gallery Presets key (What look like folders in the Registry are actually called keys)
3. Right click on the List Gallery Presets key and Delete it

When you next start word, click the Format menu and choose Bullets and Numbering — the List Gallery will now display with all the simple, clean defaults it had when you first installed Word.