Typing Through the Grind With Glencoe
I still remember the first time I had to configure the Glencoe Keyboarding Connections projects. It was 2001, and we were running this on a lab of Windows 98 machines that somehow all had slightly different registry keys for the Office 2000 installer. The software itself is straightforward, but the installation path is where things get weird. You download the connection files, point it at your Office 2000 directory, and then something goes wrong with the shortcut registration. I spent about forty minutes troubleshooting why my projects wouldn't launch until I realized the Glencoe Keyboarding Connections Projects And Applications With Office 2000 package actually registers itself under a different COM component name than the documentation says. Workaround was just manually registering the GLC.EXE file with regsvr32 after installation, which nobody mentions in the help files. Most people think Keyboarding Connections is just a typing tutor with fancy templates. It isn't. The core architecture is a project engine that bridges text generation with Word's automation model. When you create a project, the software generates a .GLP file that contains both the typing curriculum and embedded instructions for how the output should look when it hits Word. Office 2000's VBScript engine is what makes this possible, and it's both the feature and the liability. The connection points are hardcoded to specific registry paths that shift between Office 97, Office 2000, and the XP update. If you're running the unpatched Office 2000 build, you'll get silent failures where projects appear to complete but generate blank documents. My fix was checking the registry value at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Keyboarding\Connections and ensuring the AppPath key pointed exactly to WINWORD.EXE, not the shortcut redirect. The software doesn't care if Office 2000 is already installed when you run the setup. It actually prefers to install first and then detect the office suite, which is backwards from every other educational tool I've used. During that detection phase, it scans for the Office 2000 feature pack and the specific DTCOM.DLL file that handles the automation bridge. If your installation is missing that DLL—which happens with clean Office 2000 installs that skipped the developer tools—the projects will load but won't communicate with Word. You'll see the typing exercise complete, hit the submit button, and get nothing. No error message. Just a blank document window that opens and immediately closes. The workaround I use now is to run the Office 2000 Setup program, choose Add or Remove Features, and explicitly install the Visual Basic for Applications runtime and the Office 2000 Developer Tools before touching the Glencoe installer. Takes about twelve minutes and saves two hours of troubleshooting.
A Keyboarding Connections project file is essentially a compressed container with a .GLP extension, though renaming it to .ZIP reveals the actual contents. Inside you'll find the typing passages, the timing parameters, and a settings.xml file that tells the engine which Word template to apply. The timing parameters are where most people run into issues. The default settings assume a consistent typing speed across all students, which is fantasy. I configure mine to disable the automatic pacing correction after lesson three, because the software aggressively slow down the projection speed for students who type faster than average, which completely destroys the rhythm in the later modules. Turn off AutoAdjustPacing in the settings.xml file and the exercises actually feel like normal typing practice instead of a race where you're constantly hitting the brakes. The third module in the advanced applications section fails about thirty percent of the time on machines with more than 512MB RAM. The project expects a legacy clipboard handler that gets overridden by newer Windows memory management, and the Word automation call throws an out-of-memory error that the error dialog doesn't catch. I've worked around it by running the project in a separate desktop session using tsdiscon and setting the memory limit through the Win2000 compatibility layer. Not ideal, but it gets the modules done. Another frequent issue is corrupted project caches. The software stores temporary typing data in C:\Program Files\Glencoe\Keyboarding\Cache, and if that folder gets more than about eight hundred files, the entire connection layer slows down to a crawl. Delete the cache monthly and everything runs smoothly again. The built-in grading algorithm treats all formatting errors equally, which means a student who forgets a semicolon gets the same penalty as someone who changes paragraph style instead of font size. The rubric doesn't distinguish between mechanical keystroke errors and structural formatting mistakes, so the final score often misrepresents actual typing ability. I manually override the grades for the advanced projects because the automated score tends to undervalue speed when formatting is imperfect. The software also doesn't handle tab characters correctly in the later chapters. If a student types a tab character instead of spaces for indentation, the projection engine marks it wrong even though the output looks identical in Word. I just tell my students to disable the tab key during typing sessions and use the spacebar consistently. It's a stupid workaround for a bug that's been there since the first release.
Don't try running this on Office 2003 or later and expect the connection layer to work. The automation bridge relies on COM objects that were deprecated after Office 2000. Some people get lucky with compatibility modes, but the project templates that use embedded macros simply will not execute, and you'll be stuck on the intermediate modules. If your school has already moved to newer Office versions, you're better off switching to a modern typing platform. The Glencoe package is a product of its era and requires the exact software stack it was designed for to function properly. It works fine on a restored Windows XP machine with unmodified Office 2000, but anything outside that configuration introduces enough friction that the educational value gets lost in technical troubleshooting. The software still has merit for teaching foundational touch typing with word processing integration, but only if you're willing to manage the installation environment carefully. Budget about thirty minutes per machine for proper setup, including the Office feature pack configuration and the registry tweaks. The actual typing curriculum is solid once it's running, and the project templates are better organized than most competing products from that period. Just don't expect it to work plug-and-play on anything other than the original target configuration.
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