Software Tricks

An old chain email used to circulate claiming these were "tricks Microsoft can’t explain." They’re all real behaviours — and one popular claim is an outright hoax — but none of them are actually unexplained. Here’s what’s really going on with each.

1. You can’t name a folder "CON"

True, and it’s not a mystery. CON, along with PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1–COM9 and LPT1–LPT9, are reserved device names that Windows inherited from MS-DOS. The system treats them as hardware devices (CON = console), so it won’t let you use them as ordinary file or folder names. It’s documented behaviour, not a bug.

2. "Bush hid the facts" in Notepad

In old versions of Notepad, typing this phrase (or any 4-3-3-5 letter pattern) and reopening the file showed garbled characters. This was a flaw in the way Notepad auto-detected text encoding (the IsTextUnicode function) — it mistook the plain ASCII bytes for Unicode. It was a known bug and no longer happens in modern Windows.

3. =rand(200,99) in Microsoft Word

Typing =rand(200,99) and pressing Enter fills the document with text. Again, not magic — it’s a documented Word feature. =rand(p,s) inserts p paragraphs of s sentences of placeholder text, handy for testing page layouts.

4. The "Q33N" 9/11 flight number in Wingdings

A long-running chain email claims that a flight which hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 was numbered Q33N, and that if you type Q33N in Notepad or Word, increase the font size, and change the font to Wingdings, you see a plane, two documents, a skull, and a Star of David.

This is a hoax. None of the four aircraft involved in the September 11 attacks had the flight number Q33N — they were American Airlines Flights 11 and 77, and United Airlines Flights 175 and 93. The Wingdings symbols are simply that font’s normal glyphs for those letters; you can type almost any characters and get a row of pictures. It’s a coincidence dressed up as a hidden message, and it has been widely debunked. We’ve kept it here only to set the record straight.