Aside from the constant crashing, misbehaviour with Spaces, &c., the most annoying thing about Microsoft Office 2008 is the fact that it places an identities folder in my Documents directory called “Microsoft User Data”.

The main reason I don’t like this is that I am very organised, and like to have my Documents folder exactly as I like it. Having another folder in it that I did not create, wherein I do not store my documents, is really quite an eyesore and ruins the beauty of my organisation system.

I went searching for a way to hide the folder (apparently, you can’t really get rid of it without losing all your Microsoft preferences and data or something; why on Earth they didn’t just put it in the Library folder like everyone else is beyond me!). I was hoping that there would be some sort of flag I could tick in order to make it hidden, either in Finder or in Terminal. The closest thing I found was on Mac OS X Hints:

/Developer/Tools/./SetFile -a V Microsoft User Data

(To use this, you must have Developer Tools installed on your Mac; but who doesn’t?) I tried this, but I suspected it would not work, because of the spaces in the name of the folder. I’m used to command-lines, especially unix ones, so I knew to modify it to the following:

/Developer/Tools/./SetFile -a V Microsoft\ User\ Data

That way, it counts the spaces as part of the name of the directory. Needless to say, this command must be run with your Terminal inside your Documents folder.

If, for some odd reason, you want to access this folder, you can still get into it from the Terminal, or from Finder using the Go to Folder menu item.

Hopefully this helped. In the meanwhile, I wish Numbers would get support for trendlines and better charts! That is the only thing keeping me using Microsoft Office. For everything else, I can use Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Mail, iCal, and most importantly, XeTeX. I have no use for Word, Powerpoint and Entourage.