Hobbling Australia's Internet

The recently elected Australian Government has done some wonderful things and some completely boneheaded things. Its current plan to filter the Internet definitely belongs in the latter category.

If you haven’t heard about this, here’s a brief rundown. The Australian Commonwealth Government is introducing legislation that will force all Australian servers to filter Internet traffic and block any sites deemed inappropriate. The government gets to decide which sites earn that “inappropriate” tag and the resulting blacklist will not be made public in its entirety.

Let’s put to one side the political reasons why this is a bad idea (that’s quite a pile we’ll have on the side) and simply focus on the impracticalities. Testing has already shown that:

• the filtering will slow traffic on the Internet (in some cases throttling it down to only a tenth of its usual pace);
• legitimate sites are sure to get blocked. It will be a nightmare for these sites to get themselves freed up once more;
• automatic filters will miss a whole lot of “inappropriate” content.

Almost everyone who has a practical understanding of the Internet has said this is a stupid, unworkable plan. But you know governments: sometimes that urge to be paternalistic trumps commonsense. This is one of those times.

GetUp is organising a campaign to stop the idiocy and save the Internet for all Australians. If you’re from my homeland, I urge you to add your signature to GetUp’s petition and support its campaign. You can do so using the box below. [Update: The campaign has closed, so I’ve removed the box as it was slowing the loading of this page.] You can also learn more about the scheme by reading GetUp’s Factsheet.

Tip: Delete the open document in Microsoft Word

Have you ever wanted to delete the document currently open in Word? I find I often want to do this when I’m trying to clean out a whole bunch of old documents: I open each one, check the contents and, if I no longer need it, delete it on the spot.

Word won’t normally let you do this: you must first close the document, then delete it. That’s a sensible safeguard, but sometimes it gets in the way of what you want to do.

Using a macro, you can get around this restriction and delete the active document. Note that because you cannot undelete any document you eliminate using this macro, it takes some preliminary precautions:

• First, the macro checks that there is, in fact, an open document to delete.
• If there is an open document, it checks that you really want to delete it. If not, the macro ends without doing anything else.
• If you give the go ahead to delete the document, the macro checks to see whether the open document has already been saved. If it has, the document is closed and then deleted. If it has not yet been saved, it is simply closed without saving any changes.

To create the macro:

1. Press Alt+F8 to open the Macros dialog.
2. Type DeleteActiveDocument in the Name box and click Create.
3. Copy and paste the following code between the Sub DeleteActiveDocument()and the End Sub statements (Note: if you want, you can download a full text copy of the code, complete with comments describing what it’s doing at each stage):

Sub DeleteActiveDocument()

Dim strFileToDelete As String
Dim docOpen As Document
Dim intDocCount As Integer

intDocCount = 0

For Each docOpen In Documents
   intDocCount = intDocCount + 1
Next docOpen

If intDocCount > 0 Then

   If MsgBox(“Are you sure you want to delete the open document permanently? ” & _
   “You won’t be able to undo this action.”, vbYesNo) = vbYes Then

      If Len(ActiveDocument.Path) <> 0 Then

         strFileToDelete = ActiveDocument.FullName
         ActiveDocument.Close SaveChanges:=False
         Kill strFileToDelete

      Else

         ActiveDocument.Close SaveChanges:=False

      End If

   End If

Else

   MsgBox “There is no open document to delete.”, vbOKOnly

End If

End Sub

1. Close the Visual Basic editor.

Add it to Word’s toolbar

To make the macro easily accessible, add it to the Quick Access Toolbar in Word 2007:

1. Click the arrow at the right end of the Quick Access Toolbar and select More Commands.
2. In the Choose Commands From box, select Macros from the drop-down list.
3. Click the newly created macro (it’s full name is Normal.NewMacros.DeleteActiveDocument) and then click the Add button.
4. Click the Modify button, select an appropriate icon for the macro (there’s a handy one with a cross in a red circle that fits well), type Delete This Doc in the Display Name box and click OK.

To add the macro to a Word 2003 toolbar:

1. Right-click any toolbar and click Customize.
2. On the Commands tab in the Categories list click Macros.
3. Locate Normal.NewMacros.DeleteActiveDocument in the Commands list and click-and-drag it onto a toolbar.
4. Right-click the new button you’ve created, in the Name box type Del (or something else short and descriptive), then click Text Only. If you’d prefer to use a graphic icon instead of a text-label, although none of the default icons is particularly apt you can create your own by selecting Default (instead of Text Only). Then click Edit Button Image, then Clear and then do a quick paint job (a red X works well).
5. Click Close in the Customize dialog box.

If you have any problems running the macro, take a look at the code in the Visual Basic editor and make sure you don’t have any broken lines. That’s the usual cause of problems.

Tip: Automatically open last edited document in Word

If you frequently find yourself wanting to edit the same document you were using in your last Word session, you can create a shortcut which does just this, using a command-line switch.

Here’s how:

1. Right-click an empty spot on your desktop and choose New -> Shortcut from the pop-up menu.
2. Click the Browse button and locate the winword.exe program. If you installed Word in the default folder and you’re using Word 2003, you’ll find it in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11; if you’re using Word 2007, it’s in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12. Click winword.exe when you locate it and then click Open. Windows will automatically fill the location box with the full pathname surrounded by quotation marks.
3. Click within the location box and, after the closing quotation marks, add a space followed by /mfile1, then click Next.
4. Give your shortcut a name, such as Last Word, and click Finish.
5. If you like, drag your newly created shortcut onto the Quick Launch bar to the right of the Start button to make it easier to use.

Put them somewhere handy

I like to place both shortcuts side by side in the Quick Launch bar: the normal Word shortcut and my Last Word shortcut. That way, I can choose whether to launch Word with a blank document or with the last-edited document pre-loaded. I distinguish between the two by altering the icon for the Last Word shortcut:

1. Right-click the Last Word shortcut and select Properties from the pop-up menu.
2. On the Shortcut tab, click Change Icon.
3. Click one of the alternative icons and click OK.

Almost the same thing with a macro

Note that it’s also possible to open the last-edited document using a macro, but this method has the drawback of making Word always launch with that document loaded. If that’s what you want to do, here’s how to create the macro:

1. Press Alt+F8 to display the Macros dialog.
2. Type AutoExec in the Macro Name box and click Create. The Visual Basic Editor will load.
3. In the code window on the right, you’ll see that Word has automatically created a code stub for the AutoExec macro. Between the Sub AutoExec() and End Sub statements, on a line by itself, type:

RecentFiles(1).Open

4. Close the Visual Basic editor.

The commands you stick in a macro named AutoExec run automatically whenever you launch Microsoft Word, so creating this AutoExec macro will open the most recently edited document every time you launch Word.