Annoyance

There are a few minor things on my computer (PowerBook G4) that have been bothering me for a while now, so I finally decided to sit down and figure out what needed to be done to fix them. If you share my annoyances, here’s what to do:

First, when you install Adobe Acrobat Professional, it puts a PDF Toolbar in Excel, PowerPoint and Word that automatically pops up when you open each program.

I never use either button on the toolbar, and when I want to make a PDF I just use the “Save As” option, so I wanted to get rid of the toolbar entirely. Unfortunately, you can’t just deselect the toolbar in the View/Toolbars menu, since it just comes back the next time you start the program, so you need to:

1. Go to: /Applications/Microsoft Office/Office/Startup/
2. Open the Excel folder
3. Trash PDFMaker.xla
4. Open the PowerPoint folder
5. Trash PDFMaker.xla
6. Open the Word folder
7. Trash PDFMaker.xla

That should solve the recurring toolbar problem once and for all.

Second, when you install Adobe Creative Suite, it a bunch of .exe droplets that can be used to quickly edit photos and documents with common changes. Each of these .exe droplets shows up in my “Open With” menu when I go to open a photo (I use a variety of photo editing programs to edit photos for DYH, so I do this a log). Again, I never use any of the droplets, and they just make it harder to find the program that I really want, so I decided to get rid of the droplets entirely. Unfortunately, you can’t edit what shows up in the “Open With” menu (Dear Apple, I would love this function), so you need to:

1. Quit all running applications
2. Use Finder’s search funcion to find all .exe programs
3. Delete the Adobe ones that you don’t use
4. Go to /Macintosh HD/Library/Caches/
5. Trash com.apple.LaunchServices-0140.csstore
6. Trash com.apple.LaunchServices-014xxx.csstore (xxx is your uid number)
7. Restart your computer
8. Empty the Trash

For some reason, Adobe doesn’t play nicely with user customizable options. It would be nice to just disable certain options, but if you can’t do it the easy way, there’s usually a hard way that gets the job done. Just make sure to create backup copys of each file if you’re worried about bricking your computer.

Sometimes it’s the little things that can make all the difference.

[Removing PDF Toolbar via: Kassblog]

[Resetting Launch Services via: The X Lab]

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