Secret Screens, Part 2 by Michael J Miller Courtesy of PC Magazine Secret screens are everywhere. Since I wrote about the ones in Microsoft Windows 3. 1, Word for Windows 2.0, and Ami Pro 2.0 in our August issue, I've received lots of letters from readers sharing the ones they've found, and also from some who don't like the whole concept. Many readers have discovered that the trick of dis- playing the four figures in Windows 3.1 works not only from Program Manager, but from most of Windows' applets as well. And a number of readers described this Windows 3.0 trick: First, minimize all your applications, hold down F3 while typing WIN3, release F3, then press the backspace key to get a list of the Windows 3.0 devel- opers. But only Will Musgrove of Chatham, Illinois, wrote in with the Windows 2.x sequence that does the same trick: Hit Fl, F5, F9, F4, Backspace. One of the first letters I received was the most com- plete. Mark Shook of Oklahoma City submitted a long list of Windows doodads for Windows 3.0, Word for Windows, The Norton Desktop for Windows, Visual Basic, Excel, and hDC's family of applications. He was the first person to unveil Excel 4.0's secret. First, make the Standard Tool Bar visible. Then, right- mouse-click on it, click the Customize option, and select Custom from the Categories list box. Drag the Solitaire icon (a pack of cards, top row) to any empty spot on the Standard Toot Bar. Under Assign to Tool, click OK, then Close. Now hold the Ctri, Alt, and Shift keys and click on the newly added Solitaire icon. You'll see an Excel logo clean up after a buggy replica of the Lotus 1-2-3 logo. The most frequently cited secret screen was the one in Excel 3.0. Readers pointed out several varia- tions on this one from E.W. Mandoky of Venice, California. They all start with moving to the last cell in the worksheet by hitting F5 and typing "ivl6384." Use the scroll bars to make sure that the last row and column are the only ones visible. Adjust the row height and column width to zero so that the Select All Cells button is the only button on screen to the bottom of the screen, crushing the 1-2-3 logo. FROM AGGRESSIVE TO MILD Considering Excel's repeated attacks on 1-2-3, and Word for Windows' attack on WordPerfect, Microsoft is the most aggressive developer of secret screens. All of the other screens I've seen are mild in comparison. Mr. Musgrove also noted the secret screen in Win- dows Write 3.0. With a new document open, hold down the Ctrl key while you right click in the "Page 1" area at the bottom of the screen. Then select About Write in the help menu. The dialog box proceeds to fill up with balloons. Here's another one he found in Word for Windows I.x: Pull down the Format menu and select Define Styles. In the dialog box, click on Options to bring up additional controls. Enter Normal in the Based On box, which will cause an error box to appear. Click on OK to clear the error, then click on Cancel. From the Help Menu, select About, and with CapsLock on, hold down the 0, P, U, and S keys. Release them and the box turns into a fireworks display with the names of the developers scroll by. In fact, the primary goal of most of these secrets is to list the application's development staff. hDC's FileApps, Power Launcher,and Windows Express share this secret in another tip from Mr. Shook. Select the About box from the Help menu. A little animation appears. Press the Ctrl and Shift keys while double-clicking on the star at the end of the animation and a list of credits appears. David B. O'Donnell of Providence, Rhode Island notes that pressing Shift and Ctrl while clicking on the icon in the Amish Desk utility of Amish Utilities for Windows displays a credits graphic with fireworks. Robert Myers of Kansas City, Missouri, offers this CorelDRAW 3.0 (Revision B) tip: If you pull up the About screen and hold the Ctrl and Shift keys while double-click- ing on the Corel balloon icon, you'll see a new screen with a balloon at the bottom. Next, hold down the left mouse button, and the balloon will start to rise, towing a banner listing the Corel developers. Release the button, and the balloon starts to sink. From Robert Stone of Schodack Landing, New York: If you go into the Program Manager and change the icon for IRMA Workstation for Windows' EMU.EXE, your choices include a picture of someone he suspects is the lead programmer. Several readers pointed out the secret screen in The Norton Desktop for Windows. From the Help menu, select About. Hold down the N, D, and W keys and click two or three times on the NDW icon. Photos of the NDW development team appear,along with a few quotes from the group displayed in the title bar. But only Shawn Wallack of New York City discovered that you can enlarge the individual images by drawing a box around one of the developers and clicking with the left mouse button. The right mouse button restores the screen. I'm not sure what to make of this tip from Greg Carroll of Huntsville, Alabama: In Procomm Plus for Windows, there's a credits screen readily available from the About box. Move your cursor into the credits screen and a cartoon face pops up. Peter S. Young of Mill Valley, California found the following secret in the About box of Calera's WordScan Plus. The screen dis- plays the box cover, and by clicking on the left or right red squares in "Calera" or in the purple "O" in OCR, you'll see a list of contributors. But if you click on the copyright symbol, your PC performs Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." Can multimedia secret screens be far behind? Lest you think all this activity is confined to Windows, Sherwin Zadeh of Los Angeles found an IBM OS/2 2.0 screen. Minimize all your programs and hold Ctrl, Shift, Alt, and the letter 0. A beach scene (Boca Raton?) is displayed along with the names of the OS/2 developers. Like so much in the PC world, secret screens seem to have started out on the Macintosh platform. On the Mac Ilci, if you set the date to the date of the machine's introduction and hold down command-Cl. you'll see a full-color picture of the develop- ment team. And if you had an original Macintosh, the secret wasn't in the software. Instead, the names of the development team were inscribed on the inside of the case. THE CASE AGAINST SECRET SCREENS As you can see, plenty of readers shared the secret screens they found, but a few readers were offended by the idea of software developers taking up users' disk space and memory to bide these secrets. As several readers mentioned, in most cases, the secret screen code stays on disk until it is accessed by a certain sequence of events, but there has to be some space devoted to recognizing when those events occur. Many readers thought that developers should all have a simple, easily accessible credits screen instead of all these hidden secrets. In a practical sense, they're right. Creating secret screens takes developer time, and the resulting code needs disk space and of- ten a little memory. But software is still as much art as science, and I suspect we'll be seeing secret screens for a long time.