FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-14-05: Backing Up Word Part I

Last week I was reviewing Word Annoyances by Guy Hart-Davis (O’Reilly 2005) for Kickstartnews.com, and I discovered several tips for making backups not only of Word documents but of Word macros, settings, dictionaries, and templates, which can be especially tedious and time-consuming to re-create if you have to reinstall Word after a crash.

The book addresses Word 2000, 2002/XP, and 2003 for Windows, with a brief section at the back on Word X and Word 2004 for Mac. Most of the backup tips are in the Windows section, though there’s a sidebar on page 179 which tells you how to back up key Word files on your Mac, and I’ll work them in here. (If any Word for Mac users out there would like to write in with a guest column on how to perform the tasks I discuss on a Mac, or about other Mac-related backup subjects, I’ll be happy to publish it in a future newsletter and on the blog, with appropriate credit and links to you.)

If you use an older version of Word (for either PC or Mac), you might want to skip this article and go straight to making your backup for this week. On the other hand, if you’re inspired by the possibility of wrestling Word into submission, you can order the book from
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wordannoyances/.

These are all the things that tell Word how you like to work, such as whether you want that annoying Office Assistant around and whether you have automatic spell-check turned on. They’re not as easy to back up as you might like, but Office XP and 2003 do provide the Save My Settings Wizard.

This is lurking in the Microsoft Office Tools folder in the Start Menu. If you haven’t moved it from its default location (as I so often do), it will be in Start | All Programs | Microsoft Office 2003 | Microsoft Office Tools for Word 2003 and Start | All Programs | Microsoft Office Tools for Word XP. If you have reshuffled your Start Menu items, you’ll know better than I do where your Microsoft Office Tools folder is hiding.

The Save My Settings Wizard actually backs up settings for all your Office programs, which means 1) you need to close all Office applications before you use it and 2) It can create quite a good-sized file. I can’t tell exactly what’s in it, but I know it scanned over my templates, among other things, while creating the backup, and the resulting file for my own Office 2003 settings was 32 MB in size.

Microsoft used to offer a downloadable Save My Settings Wizard for Word 2000, but for some reason they stopped doing so. That means that if you didn’t get it when it was available, you’ll have to ask around among other Office 2000 users to see whether they have a copy, or be persistent in doing a Web search, as someone may have archived it on an FTP server somewhere. You can still back up your templates, dictionaries, and autocorrect entries if you have Word 2000.

Take a look in ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist (Word 2004) or ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (10) (Word X) and copy whatever you find there to a CD or external drive.

Because I create my own Word templates fairly often, and Publisher and PowerPoint templates as well, I’ve made a point of backing them up for some time. For any version of Word, you can find these and copy them to a network folder, external drive, or disk. I seem to remember that back in my Word 7 for Windows 95 days, templates were stored in the Word program folder.

Windows XP seems to like to keep them in your Documents and Settings folder, down a few levels. To find out where yours are, go to Word’s Tools menu, select Options, and click the File Locations tab. Then see what it says under “User Templates.” That’s the folder you’ll need to copy your templates from. (You can also search in Windows Explorer for any files ending in .dot, which is the extension for Word Templates.)

You can automate the backup of these files with any program which does file backups, and of course they’ll be backed up in any complete drive image such as those created by Ghost. Even if you do that, however, you might wish to put your templates onto a CD or a USB flash drive in order to transport them over to another computer to work on.

Go to Word –> Preferences | File Locations | User Templates to see where they’re stored. It’s a fairly good bet that they’ll be in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/ for Word 2004 and /Applications/Microsoft Office X/Templates for Word X, but it depends on how much you’ve customized your Word installation.

If you’ve added your own Autocorrect entries to Word, you’ll find them hiding in a .acl file. The book recommends typing “%userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Office” (without the quotation marks) into the Run box to get to it. I found it by doing a search on the extension .acl, but it took longer. For some reason I have two .acl files, an MSO1033.acl (autocorrect for English language) and an MSO1036.acl (autocorrect for I have no idea what language).

Copy this file (or files) into your chosen Word Settings backup location. Now that you know where the file is, you can also automate this backup by selecting the source and destination in a file backup program like Karen’s Replicator or SmartSync Pro (to name the two that I’m using myself). By contrast with the .ocp file which contains your Office settings, the .acl file is quite small.

You’ll find your Word for Mac ACL file in ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office ACL[English] (I’m presuming all you Mac users know what that “~” stands for in these examples, because I don’t.)

If you’ve added words to a custom dictionary to stop Word’s spelling checker from harassing you about words it doesn’t recognize, you’ll want to back up those dictionaries so you don’t have to enter them all over again if you need to reinstall Word or you get a new computer.

Your dictionaries are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Microsoft\Proof\. The file has the wildly original name CUSTOM.DIC unless you’ve chosen to give it a different name, or have created more than one custom dictionary. (I needed custom dictionaries more when I was in academia, because of the large number of foreign words I used.) Again, copy this to the appropriate backup media.

And yes, you can automate this backup, too. If you keep a file backup program running in the background, you can back up the custom dictionary every time it changes, but once a day should be plenty unless you suffer frequent system crashes (not to be confused with drive crashes—once your drive has crashed, it stays that way) or Word crashes (with which the Word Annoyances book may be able to help you.)

So there you have the key to backing up your non-document Word files. Next week we’ll continue with tricks for making more and better backups of your actual Word documents.

Until then, may your data be safe.