Profile Wizard

Using Default Paths in Office Profiles

The Profile Wizard helps you distribute default settings to your users as you deploy Microsoft Office 2000. Among other types of settings, you can use the OPS file to set default paths for documents, templates, clip art, or other files on your users’ computers.

For example, if you have a specific set of clip art files for your Marketing team to use, you can add a Marketing ClipArt folder and configure Office to look there for clip art by default. By distributing such settings when you deploy Office, you can cut down on support costs, because you’ll always know where certain types of files are stored on each user’s computer.

Default paths and the ORAPI database

Like previous versions of Office, Office 2000 uses many path settings to define user-specific configurations. These settings are stored in the Windows registry. However, if there are user-specific paths in the registry, these paths might be recorded literally in the OPS file and your settings might not apply to all users when the OPS file is distributed during Office 2000 deployment.

To handle path information for Windows registry settings with more flexibility, Office 2000 stores default paths as part of the Office Registry API (ORAPI) database. The path setting is not written to the Windows registry unless you or the user changes it from the default value. Some of these paths appear in the user interface, and they might even appear to be user-specific. However, because Office looks up the default value for each user, these settings function more like variables.

For example, in the Options dialog box (Tools menu) in Microsoft Word, the File Locations tab includes a Location setting for documents. The default value is the user’s Personal folder (Microsoft Windows NT) or My Documents folder (Microsoft Windows 95/98).

In versions of Office earlier than Office 2000, the actual path and folder names were stored in the Windows registry. Office 2000 uses the ORAPI database instead, in effect making the value generic for all users. The information is written to the Windows registry only if the user or administrator changes the path or folder name from the default.

This means that even paths visible to the user in the user interface do not need special attention to be generalized for all users, as long as the default setting has not been changed.

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Customizing a default path to apply to all users

When you create an Office profile settings (OPS) file on a test computer, you can customize a default file location, or you can customize any other setting that includes a path. However, you must also customize the actions of the Profile Wizard to generalize this setting so that it applies to all users. To generalize the setting, you use environment variables instead of a literal path.

For example, suppose you want to set the default location for saving files in Word to a folder called Engineering Documents located in each user’s system profile folder. By using the user name AdminM on your test computer, you set this option on the File Locations tab in the Options dialog box (Tools menu). The following path is written to the Windows registry and saved in the OPS file:

C:\Winnt\Profiles\AdminM\Engineering Documents

Because this path points to your user name, this file location won’t work for your users. To make the file location work for all of your users, you can replace the specific path with an environment variable, such as the %USERPROFILE% variable for Windows NT, resulting in the following path:

%USERPROFILE%\Engineering Documents

Note   If the Profile folder is part of the desired path, as it is in this example, make sure that system user profiles are turned on for the client computers.

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Adding environment variables to the Proflwiz.ini file

One of the components of the Profile Wizard is the Proflwiz.ini file. You can customize the INI file to change what is stored in an Office profile settings (OPS) file. The Proflwiz.ini file includes a section for defining environment variables. You add environment variables to the SubstituteEnvironmentVariables section of the Proflwiz.ini file before you run the Profile Wizard to collect the user profile settings.

This section of the INI file already contains some environment variables, such as the Windows environment variables %USERPROFILE% and %USERNAME%. You can remove the default environment variables from this list. If you remove both %USERPROFILE% and %USERNAME% from the list, and you do not add any other environment variables, then no settings are generalized through environment variables.

When you run the Profile Wizard, it compares any Windows registry values of type REG_EXPAND_SZ with the strings stored in the environment variables listed in the Proflwiz.ini file. If a match is found, the Profile Wizard substitutes the environment variable name for the literal string.

The Profile Wizard checks for the longest possible string that matches the path, starting with the first element in the path, before substituting the environment variable name. If two variables resolve to paths with equal length strings, they are sorted by the order in which they appear in the Proflwiz.ini file.

For example, in the previous example of the Engineering Documents folder, the Profile Wizard matches the string C:\Winnt\Profiles\AdminM with the %USERPROFILE% environment variable. The Profile Wizard then records the value %USERPROFILE%\Engineering Documents instead of the actual path from the test computer. Now you can deploy Office 2000 with this setting to any Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 computer with no additional adjustment.

Note   If you use environment variables to customize how the Profile Wizard works, you must also ensure that the appropriate environment variables are correctly set on all users’ computers.

Tip   Customize default file locations after performing all of your other Office 2000 configurations. This step minimizes the risk of inadvertently overwriting a default path with a computer-specific path when you are customizing other Office 2000 features.

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See also

The Microsoft Office 2000 Resource Kit includes a copy of the ORAPI spreadsheet with all of the default settings for Office 2000. For more information about the ORAPI spreadsheet, see Office Registry API.

You must edit the Proflwiz.ini file to add any environment variables that you plan to use in your user profile. For information about editing the Proflwiz.ini file, see Customizing the Profile Wizard.

You can use a system policy to set a path with environment variables. For more information about environment variables and system policies, see Using Environment Variables in System Policies.