Thursday, June 08, 2006

Microsoft Office News

Courtesy of Slipstick - Outlook and Exchange News

CompanionLink for Google Calendar is a two-way synchronization tool which extends the Google Calendar onto your desktop calendar systems or mobile devices. It can synchronize Google Calendar with all the latest Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry devices in addition to Outlook, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, and Groupwise applications. When you make changes to your calendar from any device or desktop program your Google Calendar will be updated automatically the next time you sync.

Courtesy of Doug from Unofficial Microsoft Office Stuff
Brian Friesen has created a web site called Freezerware.

One of the clever pieces of free programming on the site is named ZoomIn
ZoomIn is a screen magnification program allowing you to view any area of your screen under magnification. ZoomIn allows you to control the amount of zoom, view a pixels location and color, and save it as a bitmap.

Enter data in one place in a document and have it repeated elsewhere.
There comes the time when you need to enter a clients name at the beginning of a document and you know that it will be repeated again many other places.
Greg Maxey has collected a number of ways to make the task easier.
Repeating Data

Courtesy of J-Walk a preview of Office 2007 on Vista - using a screen effect called Glass.
Microsoft's Jensen Harris on Office 2007: Welcome to the New User Interface.
One of the questions people ask about the new user interface is "how much training is required to get up to speed?"
Well, our design goal was to require no training at all. From the earliest prototypes, we were trying to design an experience so that people could sit down in front of Office 2007 and be effective right away at getting their work done. One of the reasons we didn't go more radical on the overall design was that we wanted to make the product comfortable to use--after all, at the end of the day, it's still Microsoft Office.
John comments:
I may be wrong, but I think it's unlikely that many large companies are going to perform massive upgrades to Office 2007. Those that do will require training, regardless of what Microsoft says.

Are the new Office 2007 features worth the effort and frustration? For some, yes. For most, no.

Courtesy of Marc from The Office Weblog

Jensen Harris reports some very welcome news on his Office blog - Personalized Menus will no longer be switched on by default when Office is installed. Since the introduction of this feature, the default preference in Microsoft Office has been to have the Personalized Menus feature - one of Microsoft's most ill-advised attempts to be helpful IMO - turned on by default.


Posted by: Jethro | 3:19 PM |