The good men and women of Woody's Office Watch have cracked the mystery of the Word 97 Easter Egg: If you don't subscribe to their excellent email newsletter (and you should!) here's the deal (meanwhile, head on over to the WOW Web site and subscribe):
Basically, when the Word thesaurus can't find a match for a selected phrase, it displays a 'Not Found' dialog box with a full list of possible phrases; the next alphabetical match is highlighted. In the case of the phrases we mentioned last week in WinInfo, Word is simply jumping to the next phrase, alphabetically, in its list of phrases. As the WOW newsletter notes, Word is telling you that a match was not found and it is not suggesting any particular phrase as a replacement.
I received a couple of emails explaining this as well; thanks to everyone who wrote in. I should have known I was overstepping my bounds with the "Easter Egg" issue anyway: countless emails later, it's clear this isn't something that was snuck in by the programmers.
OK, I'm never mentioning this again. Seriously. :)
--Pau
