Office 2007 Review

I've been running the final code for Microsoft Office 2007 for a little while now, and I'm very impressed. In fact, everyone that has seen the work that I've turned out has been impressed. Sure, the new "ribbon" UI takes a little getting used to (my wife still isn't over it), but it makes finding features much easier now that most of them aren't buried in menus.

The biggest changes have come to Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The new version makes creating professional-looking documents incredibly easy. To give you an example, this picture is a slide from my Market Research project that my group is presenting tonight.

This presentation took very little time to prepare. The data was collected by paper survey, dumped into Excel, and then used the built-in functions to create Excel graphs. Those looked great on their own. Then it was literally a cut and paste operation into the PowerPoint slides.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. All three Office programs have built-in graphic themes that can be applied to your work. The themes are essentially painted with the new SmartArt engine behind the Office programs, basically vector art with some nice polish. However, the real power comes in by the fact that the font packages and color packages for all of the graphic themes are interchangeable and customizable. With literally a couple of clicks, you can take a "basic" theme and customize the look.

The wild thing was what happened when I took a chart from Excel (with one basic theme) and pasted it into PowerPoint. It immediately picked up the local theme settings and conformed itself to the style of the presentation I'd already created. Knocked out a few background elements and viola ... you've got a gorgeous presentation.

My only concern is that once more people adopt the new Office, this level of polish will become baseline, and suddenly my "magical" PowerPoint abilities will have to really step up to the plate. But until then, the new Office makes me look like a million bucks.

Free Windows Vista Ultimate for Technical Beta Testers

Just got an e-mail from Microsoft. Unlike the Office team, the Vista group decided to reward any tester who submitted at least ONE bug. I know that there are a lot of testers out there that used only the Windows Error Reporting tool to submit data back to Microsoft, but in this case, you had to have used the actual Microsoft Beta tool to submit bug data. Even if the bug was a duplicate, you qualify.

You can download the RTM bits as an .ISO formatted DVD from Microsoft Connect. You cannot generate a product key ... Microsoft will e-mail out keys to anyone that accepts the offer. You have 30 days before you need to activate, and you don't need the key to install.

Unlike the XP beta, it appears that this is a SINGLE license, as opposed to the five licenses granted for the XP beta. Also, Microsoft will not be mailing out any product ... it is a downloadable only.

My sincerest thanks go out to the Vista team for this decision, and hopefully the Office team will follow that example (although it's doubtful).

Windows Sans Support?

I was reading the forums over at Microsoft's "Shell: Revealed" blog site, and came across a posting asking if skinning would be supported in Vista. The expected answer came, one that I've grown very familiar with. No, because for one thing, Product Support would be a nightmare.

Now I've heard this explanation a lot. There are a lot of visual things that don't happen in our modern OS that are possible (and even happen in some environments, like Linux), but don't come to fruition because of the need to support such widgets and whatnot. I'm intimately aware of this having worked in Microsoft's Product Support Services (PSS) once upon a time. And while it was very easy for me to walk a user through just about any scenario with only keyboard commands if necessary, I could certainly see how the majority of PSS personnel might not be able to deal with uncertainties.

Being savvy myself and knowing how to bend the almighty Internet to my will, I can recall every time that I've had to call Microsoft for a support issue with any of their software. Twice. And those were for issues that I already knew the answer, but wanted to find out if there was a workaround of some kind. And as someone who rarely calls Microsoft for support, I wouldn't be heartbroken or even a little inconvenienced if PSS was unavailable to me. I don't even think I could name a single other person I know that's ever called Microsoft for help, but that could be because they'd call me first, and I usually fix it. :)

That's when the idea struck me. Why doesn't Microsoft offer low(er)-cost licenses to people who waive the right to contact PSS for any issues?

I'm sure it's similar to the school vouchers issue (it's the aggregate of purchases/taxes that pay for PSS/school for everyone), or possibly just a way to keep the price inflated for everyone. Then again, most people I know are getting their versions of Windows and Office from lower-cost means to begin with. They either know someone who works at Microsoft, or they can get an educational discount, or OEM version or something. So profit protection is probably not the answer. Not to mention that the R&D involved is a sunk cost anyway, and software is a business built on the marginal. In fact, PSS is really the only on-going cost tied to an individual product after it is out the door. Why not get that extra copy or two from me through these means, rather than pushing me to these other options? Anyone out there know if this conversation has ever come up inside Microsoft, and what the answer was?

To answer the original question ... No, Microsoft will not officially support skinning the OS, in part due to the support issues, and in part to protect the UI as a branded experience. That said, an interesting solution was posed ... why not offer a key combination (CTRL+ALT+END was suggested) that reverts to a standard skin and includes some support diagnostics? Even one of the shell guys seemed intrigued by the suggestion.

Vista on a Tablet PC (and my resulting workflow)

Now that I've finally tracked down my sporadic ink issues to a bad pen (which coincidentally I ordered a replacement for the same day that the clip finally broke), I've get myself back into the habit of using my Tablet for school work. Each class is different, with different levels of use for things like notes, slides, handouts and whatnot. But I've gotten pretty comfortable with Vista on my Tablet, and along with Office 2007, things are moving pretty smoothly.

Here's kind of a snapshot of how I've set things up for my classes at the UW, and a bit of info on how I work with the tablet in one particular class.

First, I have a Notebook file set up for each class, as well as one for work, and one for "random junk". For each class, I have a section called "Syllabus". I log into Blackboard (which thankfully, each instructor I'm taking is using this quarter), and download an electronic copy of the syllabus. I then Select All, Copy, and Paste into a page, so that I have the text searchable (printing and using Send to OneNote 2007 doesn't seem to yield searchable text). Any other "first day" information will usually go in this tab as well, such as class schedule, unless we actually start to cover course material.

I set up new section for each lecture, usually titled by the theme (if there is one), or by the date. This particular instructor will give out the slides for each lecture early, however, they are only a preview (to encourage attendance, and to ensure the material has been read. I'll print these slides into a page for that lecture. In a new page, I'll take notes as I read the material for the day, with a new page for each assigned reading (so if there are three things to read, there are three pages). Any optional assignments will get another page as well.

During the lecture, I'll take notes right on the slides. For some lectures, if I don't understand the material well before hand, I'll record the lecture as audio (if the instructor permits ... some are touchy about that), and take just enough notes to make an audio bookmark and jog my memory. If we go off-topic, I'll start a new page in order to get those notes down. Any web resrouces mentioned get a quick lookup in IE, and either sent directly to OneNote, or copied and pasted using the Snipping tool (for stuff like graphs or charts).

Official assignments get their own section, where I'll copy and paste requirements and whatnot. Any research is compiled here as well, but the actual work is done in Word or whatever tool is needed.

Some classes require a journal. In those cases, I'll check with the instructor first to find out if using the tablet is acceptable. This quarter, one class requiring a journal had very unusual uses for it, namely that your journal can be used on quizzes. Luckily, this instructor offered to let me use my tablet in this fashion so long as I could limit what I see to just the journal. In this case, I'll put the Journal into its own tab to accomodate that request, but I'd probably have done that anyway.

That's just about it, though I'm sure I've forgotten things. If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know!

Windows Vista ReadyBoost on a Tecra M4

I've been running Windows Vista (Build 5728) on my Tecra M4 Tablet PC for a little over a week now, and I'm pretty impressed with how they've implemented the Tablet PC features. The whole system feels a little better put together than the XP and Tablet stuff that Toshiba had loaded. Could be that it's just the niceties of having a clean install, though. Still a few bugs (the Tablet does NOT like being put into sleep or hibernate while in Portrait mode), but overall, I'm very impressed. Resume from hibernate is snappy enough where I might just use that instead of Sleep.

Office 2007 (Beta 2 Technical Refresh) runs very well on Vista. I love how great all of my work looks, but I'm already starting to pine for the day that everyone's work looks just as good as mine. It's just so effortless to make quality documents and charts. I'm going to need to find some documentation on how to create my own themes, so that I have a look that's all my own. That'll also be handy for keeping documents limited to company-approved fonts and colors as well.

One thing I've been wanting to try out is ReadyBoost, a feature that uses flash memory to speed disk access (sort of like a tertiary cache, after CPU cache and RAM). I've got an SD card slot built into the machine, and I was surprised to see ReadyBoost offered as an option when I stuck an old 256MB SD card in there. Sadly, it wasn't fast enough to use the feature. I'd much rather use the SD slot than a USB stick poking out (especially since I use USB for other things).

Any Tecra M4 owners out there running Vista know of a brand/model of SD card that works with ReadyBoost? Please let me know ... I don't relish the idea of just randomly testing cards until I find one that works. According to Microsoft, you should have at least a 1:1 ratio of ReadyBoost to RAM, so I'm looking at either a 2GB or 4GB card.

School has started again at the UW, and this being my senior year, I'm going to be incredibly busy. I can't wait to be done; it seems like I've been at this grind forever. It'll be nice not having the UW suck a couple grand out of my wallet every few months, too.