I have to use Microsoft Office sometimes when I need to make sure a document I've created with OpenOffice or NeoOffice looks okay to send to someone living in the PC world. One thing that annoys about MS Office even when I'm not running it is that it writes the user preferences to a directory in my Documents folder (~/Documents -> Microsoft User Data). Now, as far as I know the Documents folder belongs to the User for, well ... um, documents. Stuff like preferences and user data needs to go into the Library for a lot of good reasons. My particular annoyance is that when I do an incremental back-up using tar, I exclude the Library folder, but I still end up with a dozen back-up discs containing "Microsoft User Data." Now, as is typical, I can't change this feature any way I can think of from the Microsoft preferences pane (if you can, let me know! Changing file locations does little for me).

So, my hint has two parts, the first is to make a directory called 'ms crap' or something in your Library. Now, make an alias of this folder and move the alias to your Documents directory. Rename the alias you just moved to "Microsoft User Data" (just move the contents of the old Microsoft User Data folder over to the folder we just created in the Library). This fixes the user data showing up on my incremental back-ups. However, we'd like to get a little more sophisticated because its ugly seeing this folder that doesn't belong there in the Documents directory. So, for the next part, you need the Developer Tools. Type the following:

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

This sets the Invisibility bit to on the alias to 1, so it won't show up in the Finder. That way, I don't have to even look it. As you might guess, I've had a hard time with Office products. To bring it back, run the above, but with a lower-case v instead of an upper-case one. See the man SetFile page for details.