Office Live Preview under Terminal Services

technomummy — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:07:07 +0000

When running Office 2007 through a remote desktop connection to a terminal server, I found that the Enable Live Preview option was greyed out and unavailable (e.g. in Excel 2007: Office button, Excel Options). The tooltip shows Previews have been automatically disabled based on Terminal Server settings, connection speed or animation settings on this machine.

Extensive googling got me as far as relating this problem to the display settings. Specifically. right-click on My Computer and go to the Advanced tab, then click on the Settings button under Performance. The option for Smooth-scroll list boxes has to be ticked for Live Preview to work, either explicitly as part of Custom Settings or as part of Adjust for Best Performance. So far so good – however, I found that whenever I changed these settings, they were not held, so that next time the user logged in the display settings reverted back and Live Preview was unavailable again.

Then came the hard work – was it set in Group Policy? No. Was it possible to fix it using Group Policy? No. Was it possible to nail down the registry settings involved? No. Googling pointed me to some settings, but I still couldn’t get a handle on how to force these settings every time the user logged in.

Finally, the answer – it’s not a server-side setting at all, it’s set in the RDP client! Specifically, in the connection settings for the Remote Desktop client, go to Options and the Experience tab, and make sure that Menu and Window animation is checked!

And voila! Enable Live Preview is checked in Office 2007 using Remote Desktop to a terminal server!

Where did my headings go?

technomummy — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:18:21 +0000

Using Excel to work on large spreadsheets can get confusing, when you scroll down to the bottom of the page – and lose your headings as they scroll off the top! Here’s the solution – it’s called “freeze panes”. In Excel 2007:

Go to the View tab on the ribbon.
Click on the Freeze Panes button, and you’ll see three options:
1. Freeze Panes: this will “freeze” the rows above and columns to the left of the current cell. So say your sheet has two rows of headings (that’s rows 1&2), and one column of names down the left hand side (that’s column A). So you would click on cell B3 and choose Freeze Panes. This would keep rows 1&2 and column A always visible, no matter which way you scroll.
2. Freeze Top Row freezes the top row, obviously, and
3. Freeze First Column freezes the leftmost column.

Note that each of these options also has a little picture next to it, showing which rows/columns will be frozen:

The Freeze Panes menu dropdown

And that’s it! Now your spreadsheets can be as big as you like, and you’ll always be able to see your row and column headings.

Technomummy » Excel 2007

Office Live Preview under Terminal Services

Where did my headings go?