What could be more interesting on a weekend than an article about Microsoft Office? I know...a story about the most common aspects of it that everyone knows about anyway.

Those of you with recentish incarnations such as Office 2003 may be aware that unless you tell it not to, Office monitors (parts of) what you're doing and reports back to big bad Microsoft which collates this information, hopefully to inform their designers and developers rather than another step towards world domination. So guessy guess time: what were the most used commands in Word based on this data (circa 2006 anyway)?

Clue: it's not Insert -> Autotext -> Closing -> Love, - although it is nice to know that you could replace the arduous task of typing the letters L, o, v, e and a comma with the keyboard sequence Alt, I, A, down, down, down, right, down, down, down, enter.

Well, it wasn't that unpredictable to be fair, but the top-5 in order of use real answers are:

1. Paste
2. Save
3. Copy
4. Undo
5. Bold

Clearly, given the absence of Undos, people generally work to a rather higher standard of accuracy than the Poorhouse. It is good to see the (correct) high level of distrust of system stability suggested by the prevalence of saving too - a command that in an ideal environment would only need to be used once per Word document session. Fascinating we know.

Shortcut of the day: call the Poorhouse naive, but only recently did he learn of the following joyously useful keyboard shortcut in Excel. Ctrl+D - which is an alternative for the command Edit -> Fill -> Down, or dragging that silly fiddling tiny black box on the grid down to produce a nice sequence of numbers. You also have Ctrl+R for fill right. Nice. Fill up and left do not have quite so convenient shortcuts.

Shortcut desire of the day: Especially in Excel, but wherever such shenanigans are found. Can't we please have a short cut for Paste -> Special -> Values (or any sort of Paste -> Special -> Plain Text equivalent commands). Yes, the Excel toolbar button lets you do that but a) the mouse is for losers and b) the triangle dropdown you need to click is too tiny for swift and repetitive usage.

And now for some pure entertainment. In these days of wunder-multimedia, Microsoft Windows et al. of course is preprogrammed with all sorts of beautiful sound effects. Beep, blart, dedahdahhh, ping and so on permeate the modern office workplace. For typo-ridden users such as the Poorhouse, the mute ability of computer speakers is a godsend to prevent the constantly inducing the headache-inspiring phenomenon known locally as "goldfishing", where the error ding is output every 5 seconds, just like the air bubbles leaving a fishes mouth - at least in cartoons. Being no stranger to the bureaucratic time-wastingness of modern corporate life, the Poorhouse wonders about what sort of entertaining meetings must have occurred during the debate whether "de dah dauuuur", "fahhhlaaa" or "pppffhhtyah" was the best sound effect to denote the fact that you just received mail.

However, some people have had better things to do with their time than ponder these things. Here (via b3ta, ta) is an effort from "SomethingUnreal" who spent his/her/its time creating beautiful music using nowt but the sounds built into Windows XP and 98.

Think that was supercool? Well it is, of course. But to ramp up the impress yo' friends and earn cool-kid street cred some more, here it is somehow shoved into Guitar Hero. Oh yes.

If that's not enough default-sounds p0rn for you, check this link for a mix involving no less than 6 instances of Windows sound recorder. Happy days.