Profile Wizard

Customizing the Profile Wizard

You can customize the Profile Wizard to include only the settings you want to track. This is very helpful when you deploy Microsoft Office 2000 in stages with a default user profile.

For example, you can roll out Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft PowerPoint with one set of customizations now, and then roll out Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer later. In this scenario, you can customize the Profile Wizard to track only the settings you need for each stage of your deployment.

To customize the performance of Profile Wizard, you edit the Proflwiz.ini file. Open the file in Notepad or another text editor, and then add or delete references to settings that you want to include or exclude. When you edit the Proflwiz.ini file, you can include or exclude specific applications, registry settings or Application Data folders, template files, and so on.

Each section of the Proflwiz.ini file contains comments documenting the usage and syntax for entries in that section. The default entries are designed to gather a complete set of user configuration data, including both files and Windows registry values, for Office 2000.

Note   Some settings in a user profile are shared among applications in Office 2000. When you customize the Proflwiz.ini file for a staged deployment, make sure that you change only nonshared settings or that you set any shared settings to work correctly for all the applications before you save the Office profile settings (OPS) file.

Top

Preserving your customized settings

When Office is deployed in stages, it’s easy to overwrite settings in previous user profiles. It’s even easier to overwrite settings when you aren’t the only administrator installing Office applications. The best way to control which settings are affected in a given deployment is to customize the Profile Wizard.

For example, you might invest a few late nights customizing Office 2000 in the lab. You run the Profile Wizard to capture your user profile settings. You don’t configure Outlook because someone else is installing Outlook next month. Then, right on schedule, you deploy Excel, Word, and PowerPoint with a default user profile.

One month later, your colleague deploys Outlook. Like you, he customizes Office 2000 in the lab and uses the Profile Wizard to capture his user profile settings. But he doesn’t customize the wizard to exclude settings for any of the other applications — the customized settings that you deployed and the customized settings that users have been working with for a month.

When your colleague installs Outlook, he accidentally changes your settings for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. And, if he happens to use the Reset to defaults option, all of your OPS file settings are gone — along with any later user configurations — even if he didn’t explicitly change them in his profile.

You can avoid this bleary-eyed scenario by editing the Proflwiz.ini file to exclude all settings except those needed by the Office applications that you are deploying at any given time.

Top

Editing the Proflwiz.ini file

You can edit the Proflwiz.ini file to exclude selected settings when you run the Profile Wizard. You can also edit the Proflwiz.ini file to include additional files, folders, or registry subkeys and values when you create the OPS file.

Note   If an OPS file is set to include an empty folder, that folder is created when the settings are restored.

The following table describes the contents of the Proflwiz.ini file. For a full description of each section, including examples of syntax, see the Proflwiz.ini file itself.

Note   When you use the Profile Wizard to restore the settings from the OPS file, and use the Reset to defaults before restoring settings option, be aware that any customizations you have made to the ResetToDefaults sections of the Proflwiz.ini file are ignored. The settings in the ResetToDefaults section of the Proflwiz.ini file are added to the OPS file when the OPS is written. If you want to use your customized ResetToDefaults settings, use the Office Custom Installation Wizard to include the OPS file as part of the Office 2000 Setup process.