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Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability in Microsoft
Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003, Microsoft
Office Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2000, and Microsoft Excel 2004 for
Mac. At this time, our initial investigation indicates that customers who are
using Microsoft Office Excel 2007 or Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac, or who have
installed Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 3 are not affected by this
vulnerability.

This vulnerability cannot be exploited on Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service
Pack 3, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Service Pack 1,
or Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac.

Full details Microsoft Security Advisory (947563)

So you've made the switch from gmail to hotmail, but how do you move all your old Hotmail email messages and folders to the new Gmail address. That's no worries at all, Amit has written a nifty little article telling us just how to do it using the Outlook Connector. To move your emails from Hotmail to Gmail via Outlook:

1. Install the Outlook connector and then configure your MSN Hotmail / Windows Live Hotmail accounts with Outlook.

2. Once you have all your Hotmail email message available locally inside Outlook, configure Gmail IMAP access inside Outlook.

I ran the annual KROSTech 30 hour LAN last weekend. While we have a fair amount of gear that was purchased specifically for the LAN we needed to take some of our home network installation as we had decided to host the the Bathurst spectacular (6 hours of racing) on a Gigabit Network for better performance.

In order to work out how to strip components from home and set up the LAN properly as well as leaving the family with network and intenet connections I used Visio to create my network diagrams. It took me 45 minutes to set this up.
Click the image thumbnails below to see the fullsize network diagrams.

Home network before reorganising. There is redundancy built into this network. What you can see from the diagram is the physical layout of the house and that has made decisions about where switches and the wireless router are located. Most switches can be instantly replaced in case of failure. The tablet is in the media room running Windows Media Centre. It is connected wirelessly and also through a 100Mb wired connection. Gives us portability and stability of connection. The other laptop roams the houe as needed - eg to play games in the dining area or to use as a workstation for extra staff on occasion.

David Gainer writes an Excel blog for Microsoft. He often has guest posts written by insiders from Microsoft exposing cool excel secrets.

Two in particular I have noticed recently are these.

Scott Ruble, a lead program manager on the Excel team who focuses on the area of data visualization discusses how to create an intraday time series chart.

Periodically, users need to create a chart where the data occurs within a single day such as by the minute or hour. This is actually fairly easy to do but unfortunately isn’t very obvious. A typical scenario is you own a restaurant that takes phone orders and you want to reduce the wait time for customers placing an order. This is influenced by a number of factors but a big one is the number of people calling at the same time. As such, you would want to staff your phone lines with more people during the busy times. The key here is to determine when the busy times are and by how much.