MS Office Beta Notes

The Definitive Office 2007 Review

2006-11-16T23:24:00.000-05:00

Yes, this ActiveWin review is so in-depth, I haven't even been able to get all the way through it yet. Take a look, let me know what you think of it.

Technorati tags: ActiveWin, Office2007Review

Learn about using Office 2007

2006-11-05T18:36:00.000-05:00

The Microsoft Office 2007 Learning Portal would be the first place to start learning how to use the next version of Office, wouldn't it?

Technorati tags: Office2007LearningPortal

Free Accounting Software

2006-10-30T22:40:00.000-05:00

I saw when reading my feeds that Microsoft announced today that they are putting out Office Accounting Express Version for free download today. You can get it, or read more about it here. Looks like it integrates nicely with Office 2007, and at that price, it may make quite a dent in the market share currently held by other small business accounting software. Obviously, it doesn't do as much as the Professional version, but it might prove to be pretty useful for the home business crowd.

Technorati tags: OfficeAccountingExpress2007

Junk Mail Reporting

2006-10-29T20:49:00.000-05:00

Looks like Microsoft, finally, has released a tool to report spam that gets past the Outlook junk mail filter. Easily, this is one of the features that has been missing since Outlook 2003 first introduced us to the junk mail filter. It's nice that they're releasing it now, before Outlook 2007 comes out, it would have been nicer to have this included in 2007.

Technorati tags: Outlook, Spam

IE7

2006-10-20T21:45:00.000-04:00

Had the same affect as getting Office 2003 patches on my laptop, after getting the update to the release version of IE7 and rebooting, Office 2007 beta, specifically Outlook needed to reconfigure itself.

Just goes to show how much IE really is integrated with everything!

Technorati tags: IE7

Patch Tuesday

2006-10-12T23:17:00.000-04:00

Because of the issues Microsoft seems to be having with the update servers, it was Thursday before I got my Patch Tuesday patches for my laptop. Included in the various patches were some patches for Office 2003, which I have installed (except for Outlook) alongside my beta 2007 install. Lo and behold, after installing the patches and restarting, I opened a spreadsheet that I needed to enter some information in and it opened in Excel 2003. Apparently the patches reset my defaults. I had to go open a 2007 application and wait about 10 minutes for a configuration wizard to run before things got back to normal.

So, don't be surprised after getting patched if you need to run this configuration when first opening any 2007 applications.

Technorati tags: PatchTuesday

The end is near

2006-10-08T23:17:00.000-04:00

Yes, the end of the beta. Office 2007 is due to be released to manufacturing soon.

More importantly, for those of you might be interested in getting a beta look at it before it's released to the public, you only have until Oct. 25th before the preview site is gone for good, along with the downloads. According to that article the beta's will expire March 15, 2007. However, I should note that the licensing agreement on my install still says it will expire Feb. 1. Guess I'll find out the truth then, huh?

I'll still be writing more about what I'm finding in 2007 over the next few months, provided I find more free time!

Technorati tags: RTM, Office2007Preview

Calendar Printing Assistant

2006-09-27T22:54:00.000-04:00

Picked this up from Outlook Tips today:

The Calendar Printing Assistant for Outlook 2007 allows you to print and customize your Outlook 2007 calendar information. It includes many often-requested printing options, including multiple calendars in one view and customizations such as fonts, colors and images. It includes ready to use templates.

Download it from
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/programs/outlook/cpa.mspx
This utility is for Outlook 2007 only.

Looks pretty nifty if you ask me. I might have to give it a whirl!

tags: Outlook2007, PrintCalendar

Daily Journal for OneNote in 2007

2006-09-21T21:39:00.000-04:00

Thanks to this post, I have found out how to get this Powertoy to work with the OneNote 2007 beta. Gee after all that time and effort I put into it before, it figures that there was a simple work-around the whole time. :)

tags: OneNote2007, DailyJournal, Powertoy

Subscribed

2006-09-18T21:40:00.000-04:00

To the brand new MS Office Word team's blog. Looks like there will be lots of good Word 2007 information floating around there.

tags: Word2007

Windows Desktop Search

2006-09-16T22:05:00.000-04:00

I decided to download WDS along with the technical refresh on the recommendation of Chris Pratley, who says they've fixed many of the problems with it that I had been plagued with. We'll see how it goes.

tags: WindowsDesktopSearch

Technical Refresh

2006-09-15T23:55:00.000-04:00

I was able to get all the technical refreshing done today. Not too shabby a process. The immediate thing you notice is that the interface has been prettied up quite a bit. New icons, new splash screens, the ribbons' been tweaked a little bit, etc. It looks really nice, but let's face it, we don't use Office for the eye candy, the real test is how it helps you get things accomplished.

On that front, a couple of things I noticed quickly and loved, I can copy/paste from the attachment preview in Outlook now, instead of having to open the file, and the Send button on an email is no longer part of the ribbon, and therefore subject to not being available when I'm doing different things. It's taken up permanent residence below the ribbon, near the To, CC, BCC and a new button that lets you select which account to send from. It's a small thing, but a useful change to my mind.

Things I was a bit less excited about? The first time I opened Word, I got an error about the template. I think that's because I was running it 2003 compatibility mode and when the refresh installed it took me out of that mode, but left the .dot 2003 template as my default. Opening Word, saving a new template as a .dotx got things golden again, however.

The other thing, and I know they got a lot of complaints about it not doing this, but now the big Office button on the left side has a slightly different function. Click it once, and you get to take a look at the options, or the Open menu, double click it, and you close the program. Again, I understand that the very upper left of the window in previous versions would close the program with a double click, but you never, ever clicked on that spot in the normal process of using the program. You click the Office button all the time. I've already accidentally double-clicked it when I went to view the options in Word once, and I haven't been using it for a whole day! I'm going to grow to hate this, I've a feeling. Anyone know if there's an option to disable that?

What have been your thoughts so far?

tags: TechnicalRefresh, Outlook2007, Word2007

Live Documents

2006-09-12T22:18:00.000-04:00

It looks like Microsoft is getting in on the on-line collaboration game with Live Documents, an add-in for Office 2000/XP/2003 that allows people to synchronize documents across several users and machines on the Internet. This is a service that certainly bears watching.

tags: LiveDocuments, Office

No more Windows Desktop Search 3.0

2006-09-07T21:49:00.000-04:00

Yes, I can attest to exactly the sort of performance hits Marc Orchant talked about a while back. The search indexer would tie up a bunch of RAM even when there was nothing new to index, occasionally my laptop would simply stop responding for a good couple of minutes. It would start, and show the desktop but nothing would open, not even the task manager. Then, suddenly, it would all open like nothing happened. As much as I wanted to check out the advanced search capabilities of Outlook and OneNote than came with WDS, I just couldn't tolerate this mess any longer. It's gone.

I turned off the nagging about it in Outlook by going to the Tools/Options/Other/Advanced Options and unchecking the box for Show prompts to download Windows Desktop Search.

Lucky for me, I found the registry hack to turn off the nagging about having it installed when I open OneNote in the comments on this post by Chris Pratley:

Set these regkeys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\OneNote\Options\Other\EnableWDSIndexing = 0 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\OneNote\Options\Other\ShowWDSUpdateWarning = 0

Seems to be working for me.

tags: WindowsDesktopSearch, OneNote+2007, Outlook2007

Chris Pirillo on Outlook 2007

2006-09-05T21:23:00.000-04:00

The interesting thing about this post from Chris is that he has steered clear of Outlook 2002 and 2003 because they were too slow, but he sees a speed increase in 2007. I haven't seen the same thing. Of course, I'm using it on a laptop, so my performance may not be your performance.

tags: Outlook2007, ChrisPirillo

2007 File Types

2006-08-25T21:42:00.000-04:00

I was quite surprised to get an email from one of our users this morning asking if we could open this attachment that he was having trouble with. It was a .docx file, the default file type for Word 2007!

In the interest of getting it converted for him quickly, I yanked out my personal laptop with the beta and saved the file as a Word 97-2003 .doc file, but then I also grabbed the compatibility pack, so I can use 2003 to do this the next time.

Seemed a bit early for someone to be sending 2007 formatted documents, though.

Daily Journal for OneNote

2006-08-22T22:21:00.000-04:00

When I read about it on Andy's blog, I thought it sounded like a pretty decent powertoy to help make OneNote even more useful than it already is. Unfortunately, after I had trouble getting it to work, I discovered that it's not compatible with OneNote 2007, so I will have to wait until a promised new version is released.

Had the same trouble with Remote Calendars and Outlook 2007 as well. Seems like being a beta tester is sometimes a royal pain. :)

tags: DailyJournalforOneNote, RemoteCalendars, OneNote2007

There are books already

2006-08-18T22:39:00.000-04:00

Yes, it seems that MS hasn't even released Office 2007, and there's already a book out about using it. Does that seem odd to anyone else?

Office Rocker's got the review of First Look at 2007 Microsoft Office System.

tags: Office2007Book, OfficeRocker

Not exactly good performance

2006-08-17T19:06:00.000-04:00

I ran into a bit of a mess the other day trying to send a couple of pictures to someone. Now, granted these were full-sized files, but the whole message with attachments was only about 7MB. I've sent larger attachments before, after all that's why I have broadband! :)

I was using Outlook to send these through my Gmail account. They never left the Outbox. Gmail, on the other hand showed it as a sent item in the web browser, in fact it showed as sent 3 times. But it never really went anywhere. That's not exactly the integration I was hoping for between Outlook and Gmail.

I was able to get them sent easily using Gmail's web interface. Just not through Outlook 2007.

Save as XPS

2006-08-15T22:06:00.000-04:00

Just wanted to post some links that talk more about what XPS is, and how to get a viewer:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/default.mspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeff_bell/archive/2005/10/27/485937.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx

Performance

2006-08-13T22:35:00.000-04:00

I've written a bit about the performance issues I've been seeing with Outlook 2007 over at the Friends in Tech group blog. I'd love to hear about any speed issues you might be having as well.

Office 2007 and ActiveWords

2006-08-13T01:31:00.000-04:00

I've been having a weird issue with ActiveWords, and it's something that only recently has started. It seems that a keyword I use in ActiveWords to open a specific Excel spreadsheet keeps losing the file it's associated with. The file name and location haven't changed at all, but for some reason ActiveWords isn't recognizing the file. Could Excel 2007 be doing something to the filename that I can't see? It's running in "Compatibility Mode", so I wouldn't think so, but I've never had this problem when I was using 2003 exclusively.

Popular options

2006-08-09T23:07:00.000-04:00

Jensen Harris does a pretty good job explaining the Popular tab under Options for Office 2007, explaining what is listed there and why. He says:

We know that although most people don't change options, to the extent that they do, user interface tweaks are the most popular kind of option to change.

Which I find interesting, because it shows how important the look and feel of the interface is when you're trying to do something, and I imagine it also gives us a hint as to how high a hurdle the new interface of Office 2007 is going to be to all those users who are just used to seeing what they see now. I know just a small change like the difference between Track Changes being a sub menu from the Tools menu in Word 2000 or part of the reviewing toolbar to being only available on the reviewing toolbar can cause serious consternation levels in users, I can't imagine what this completely new interface is going to do!

Putting their words to the test

2006-08-02T22:48:00.000-04:00

So, if the decision to charge $1.50 for the beta of Office 2007 was a way to offset the bandwidth costs of additional downloads then it stands to reason that if I already have the installation files and only want to get another license key to put them on another machine, I should be able to get that for free, right?

Well I went to the Beta site tonight, and that is not the case at all. You're getting charged the "download service fee" before you ever get the option to get a new key or download the software. So maybe Leo LaPorte is right, maybe this is about "keeping the riff-raff out".

Update: Given the opportunity to ask Darren Strange, Office Product Manager in the UK, I left a comment on his post about the download charge. His response, which you can read there, is that it's a non-issue because you can use a beta license key on multiple machines. I only have one machine available to load the beta on so I will have to assume that's true. On the other hand, if I didn't keep my license key after downloading, I should be able to get one easily without paying the download fee, but that's just my opinion.

Outlook.exe

2006-08-01T21:19:00.000-04:00

This is a problem I've seen a lot with Outlook 2000, especially at work where the Mailsite document management system add-in to Outlook has a great deal of difficulty closing when you close Outlook, but I really haven't seen it much in 2003. I'm starting to see it a bit with 2007. The problem, of course, is the outlook.exe process continuing to run even after I've closed Outlook. Heck the other day I even got notified of new mail about 20 minutes after I closed Outlook!

Here's hoping this is only a temporary problem. It's quite distressing to close Outlook in order to free up some resources (Outlook does tend to tie up a good deal of memory) only to discover those resources haven't been freed up.