Deploying custom Microsoft Word 2007 registry settings at logon

As a systems administrator in a reception to 12 school (K to 12 for any non-aussie's reading) I get allot of requests for settings delivery, much more than I ever experienced in the corporate world. These settings range from printers, network drives to office templates, application configuration and anything else you can think of.

Recently I was asked to deliver some Microsoft Word 2007 settings for our younger students, the requests from staff were that the "picture in front of text", "hide formatting" and "search everywhere in clipart" options were automatically deployed. For students as young as 5 logging onto the computer and opening Word can be a challenge, let alone going into options and manually configuring these options.

All of these settings are buried deep in Office 2007's registry entries but with some trial and error and the ever trusty procmon from sysinternals, it is easy to work out.


Setting clipart to search web collections

This one is fairly easy, the key in question is:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Clip Organizer\Search\Last Query\Extra]

The easiest way to get the setting you want is to open Word, tick the appropriate boxes and then export the above key with regedit.

Applying the setting is as simple as importing it into the users HKCU store as part of your login script, below is an example of a kixtart script.

if ($isUserReception)
   SHELL "regedit /s $logonpath\registry\word2007pictureinfront_hideformat.reg"
   SHELL "regedit /s $logonpath\registry\word2007clipartcollections.reg"
endif


Keeping picture in front of text and hiding formatting

Changing these two settings are slightly more difficult but can be extracted in exactly the same way. Both of these settings are controlled by a large value named:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data\Settings]

This REG_BINARY value is unconfigured by default and is only set when the user specifies some non-default settings in Word, such as the "keep picture in front of text" and "hide formatting" from the options menu.

1. Before we try to capture the settings it is best to start wish a fresh [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data\Settings] value, you can do this by deleting the value in regedit.


2. Next open Word 2007 and set your options. For me those options are "keep picture in front of text" and "hide formatting" but you can set as many settings as you want. You may need to do this multiple times for multiple settings "packages" as its not possible to export individual settings as most are contained within this single value.

3. Close Word, this is when the settings are written to the registry.


4. You can now export the key and deploy it with a logon script. Remember this is a HKCU key, so it must be deployed in a user based script.


Hopefully these couple easy processes will help you deploy more advanced settings for your users.