Microsoft Office

Building the metadata structure in the Term Store Manager in SharePoint 2010 is not the most convenient way. I prefer working with the metadata structure and terms in an Excel document so that I can discuss the structure with colleagues and clients before implementing it. The Term Store Manager allows you to import a comma separated text file containing a Term Set. By default the Excel 2010 Save as CSV does not save in the correct format and for that I have made a Excel 2010 macro enabled template which produces the correct format.

Recently came across a really interesting bug in SharePoint 2010. It’s when you are trying to upload multiple files using the ActiveX control, where you can drag and drop files or select multiple files. I started receiving “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” exceptions from the STSUpld control. The usual Google, ahem, Bing check revealed nothing. Just that I was not alone having this problem (hence this post).

The Office Web Apps, OWA, in SharePoint 2010 is a great way to enhance the SharePoint experience. It allows users without a decent OS or a locally installed Office client to view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents. When you install and correctly configures Office Web Apps (yea, can be a bit of a hazzle if you like me avoid the Farm Configuration wizard) and then enable the required Site Collections feature a cache will be created. This cache is used by Word and PowerPoint Web Apps to store the renditions (XAML) of the documents to speed up the process. Office Web Apps will create one cache per Web Application and the cache is stored in one of the Content Databases attached to the Web Application.

The new Office 2010 clients have been released as a Technical Preview and I’m fortunate to get my hands on them and free to talk about them. The new clients are awesome! Visio is one of the applications from the Office suite that I use on a daily basis to design, model and draw diagrams, workflows and solutions. Visio 2010 has gotten a really nice facelift and a whole new set of features. The Ribbon has been one of the things I really missed in the 2007 release and the SharePoint integration, that can be seen in the Sneak Peak, looks awesome!

Today almost everyone have more than one computer; one at work, a few at home, a media center, a PC, a Mac etc, your family members, friends and colleagues have the same. One problem is that a lot of us need access to files on one machine when we are using one of the others. For example I want to access my images when I’m at work sometimes and I do not want to copy all of these images onto my work laptop, when I’m at home I want to have the same favorites and documents that I use at work and so on. Then I have another scenario, let’s say that I do not have any of my computers with me and I want to access one of my files, then I want to have some way to access the files using a standard browser - and why not have editing possibilities.

Canvas for OneNote is another new and interesting innovation from the Office Labs team. Canvas for OneNote creates a new way for you to manage your OneNote section and pages in a more “inspirational” and “irregular” way. OneNote is traditionally organized into Note books, sections, groups, pages and subpages - just like a classical book shelf filled with note books. It works really nice if you know in which note book you placed your notes (of course you can search to find it…faster than you search your shelf). This feels a little bit old-school to me and I still have a lot of hand notes and documents spread out over my desktop (not the Windows desktop, a real physical one) organized in a very strict chaotic order.

Not that unexpected, but Microsoft chief executive office Steve Ballmer has confirmed that the new Office 14 clients and servers (read SharePoint) will not be released during 2009. The products will be “generally available” during 2010. Generally available may indicate (I’m always positive) that we have a release for volume licensees and partners in late 2009 and in the shelves during 2010 (just like the previous version). Read SharePoint Daily Special Edition for more information.

The Technet and MSDN sites are great to have when you have to look things up when developing or maintaining solutions for the Microsoft Office Servers, such as SharePoint. But I also like to have this information closer to me and have even faster access to it. Microsoft is providing much of the content as downloadable CHM files, which is a great feature. Here are a list of some of the downloadable help files

The time has come to make a summary of the past year and have a look into the future – the year of 2009. About a year ago I made a similar post with a summary and some predictions. This year has been a fast year and I have made so much, both personally and at work. For a few months in the spring I was at home taking care of my daughters and tried not to work (which I find really hard). It was a great time and I really need that. At work I think I’ve never felt this pressure from the market, no financial crisis in sight here. It’s mainly been about SharePoint, SharePoint and SharePoint. Our team at Pdb has had some really interesting projects and we have some even more interesting in the pipe.

If you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on a new server you will find that your Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx etc) files is not indexed as they should but the old binary document (.doc, .xls etc) format is indexed. This is due to the fact that the Office 2007 IFilters is not installed by your WSS installation. To resolve this issue you have to download the Microsoft Filter Pack and install it on your server. This will install the actual IFilters which are used for indexing the Office 2007 files.

Microsoft is currently extremely offensive on their new cloud services targeted to consumers and business users with their Live services. I use a number of them daily with the Live Mesh as the newest addition. A couple of months back I started to move my and my family’s documents to Skydrive, 5Gb free online storage, and I’ve made some efforts to get started with the Office Live Workspace, to have a better place work working with the documents. Then Live Mesh came into the picture, and it lets me automatically sync documents between our PC’s and cell phones – really awesome!

So the last day of PDC 2008 is over. The brain has been cooked for a few days… This very day did not have any keynote and I kicked off with a session on the Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint. I have note used this add-in since the first releases of it since I didn’t like it that much but had instead relied on manual packaging and deployment as well as STSDev. But after this I might think about moving over and try it out once again. During the session a basic site was built with some lists, event handlers and a Silverlight application using the new Charting controls.

Day two is official over. I’m just back from the attendee party at Universal Studios. Keynotes This Tuesday started with a couple of keynotes. I was fortunate and arrived just as they opened the keynote hall and got myself a seat in the front row. After Ray Ozzies intro Steven Sinofsky took over and showed Windows 7 for the first time in public. You can read about the demos on almost every blog, but here are the stuff that caught my attention:

I gladly received the news that the Office team announced Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007. Not only for the clients but also for the server products (read SharePoint). First of all it’s the support for the different file formats that I long for (ODF for example) and then there is the Outlook performance – both of these are addressed! XPS and PDF will be supported from scratch – no need to install a free plugin (just as it was in the Office 2007 betas).

The Microsoft Office Labs team have now launched their own web site/community at www.officelabs.com. This is a site dedicated to “Concept testing”. This means that we can expect to see some nice productivity enhancements to the Office family and get a chance to take them for a test-drive. The aim of the site is for the Office Labs team to gather information from their “tools” and evaluate the usage of them and get a discussion started. So when you download and install the tools from Officelabs.com then make sure to participate in the Usage Metrics.

After a lot of turmoil the ECMA Office Open XML document format has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard - IS 29500. The news came out a day earlier than stated, due to a leak which made ISO to go public with the news. The process has not been easy for any part in the process and it has for sure made footprints in the standardization history. A lot of lobbying money as been spent (Politics matter) and a lot of committed people has engaged in verbal and written battles.

The Microsoft Office Binary File Formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt…) are now available for everyone under the Open Specification Promise, OSP. This is good news for all of you working with the traditional binary format, when for example moving them to the new Office Open Xml, OOXML, file format. The binary file formats have previously been available for download for a long time (under RAND-Z), but now you download them here. This change to put it under OSP, is due to the comments on OOXML by the national bodies and Microsoft has now promised ECMA International to make it easier to get hold of the specifications.

I have several time stumbled upon clients who complain that their hyper linked Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) opens up in the web browser, Internet Explorer, instead of in their respectively Office application. In SharePoint document libraries these problems are solved using a special JavaScript that fires up the correct application, but today I had a client complaining about this problem when having Office documents linked in a Wiki. So I dug up some information from the Microsoft Knowledge Base on this matter and though I should share it (or at least have it written down for future reference).

I found this pretty funny misspelling in the Office Server System Requirements today. Is it a tribute to Linus Torvalds?

The year of 2007 is about to come to an end, and it has been a really exciting year. First of all I’ve had a great year with my family; my daughters turned four and one years old during 2007 and it’s so wonderful having them around giving me energy. My wife has been home with them the whole year and next year I will take a few months of parental leave and give them my full attention.

Not only the Office 2007 clients got updated to Service Pack 1 today, Service Pack 1 is also out for the Office Server family and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Here are some of the downloads… Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1 - for new installs Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 - for upgrades Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Language Packs Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1 - SharePoint Server, Project Server, Forms Server and Groove Server Microsoft Office Server Language Pack 2007 Service Pack 1 Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 Service Pack 1 All are 32-Bit Editions, you can find links to the 64-bits in the instructions.

The Microsoft Office Online now contains links to the Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1. The links are not currently working, but I will keep you updated. Here are the links: Office 2007 Service Pack 1 Visio 2007 Service Pack 1 Project 2007 Service Pack 1 Update: You can find all the updates and changes in this Excel. Let’s hope for a faster Outlook 2007 experience…Update: It feels faster at first glance…

For the last year I have had really annoying security troubles when working with documents in SharePoint (2003 or 2007, WSS or MOSS) on my Windows Vista machine with Office 2007. Every time I have opened up a document for editing the Office applications have asked me to log in to access the document. I have been able to press Cancel three times, but then the document is opened up in read-only mode. The problem has not occurred on any Windows XP installations. I have seen this problem on several computers with Vista. There have been several reported workarounds, of which none has worked for me.

Microsoft has announced their new enterprise search setup of server products, which include the Microsoft Search Server 2008 together with an Express version, that are free (currently a release candidate). This new server product is an evolution of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search. This is great news since the Search Server (MSS) has great possibilities to integrate to other search engines or data sources (something that you only could do with some heavy BDC programming using MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition). MSS is based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and it can extend your WSS installations with better search, even cross-site which has been the major factor to upgrade to MOSS.

The Microsoft SharePoint blog has a new post called “Known issue: Office 2007 on Windows Vista prompts for user credentials when opening documents in a SharePoint 2007 site”. The article is a result of many reported support cases on this issue and contains a few possible (I repeat possible) workarounds. We have had this problem ourselves and on several customers. In some cases these workarounds really work, but most of the times not. And the problem is not only with SharePoint 2007, we also see it for SharePoint 2003 installations so I think it’s more related to Vista, and its new security features, than SharePoint (the problem does not appear on Windows XP with IE7).

Today the Office 2003 Service Pack 3 popped up in my Windows Update (Vista Ultimate) as an important update. Duh! I have only installed Office 2007, as far as I know!? But after a check in Programs and Features of Vista I found out that I sometime installed the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components and Office 2003 SP3 applies to the OWC. So the update was not for Office 2007…

The net is crowded with SharePoint blogs, including this one, and I have missed one thing - information for the end-users. I think that there is a great void in knowledge for SharePoint users out there,for example how to use SharePoint as an end-user in the most efficient way, how to do the simple stuff such as creating sites or lists etc. Today I stumbled upon “Get the ‘Point” by Suzanne Ross, which has a focus on the SharePoint end-users. The blog is quite new but features a two-part article series on how to set up a Team Site. It does not sound like rocket science to us developers, but hint you customers and/or users about this blog.

Yes, you read it right! Microsoft now offers a royalty-free file format program for the Microsoft Office Binary File Format (the old .doc, .xls and .ppt used in previous versions of Microsoft Office). Microsoft Office 2007 is built-upon the Office Open XML file format which is an ECMA International standard, and an ISO proposal (you have all read about it). But some of us still have application and/or customers that heavily rely on the old binary format. Until now it has been a mess doing something with these documents (for example in the SharePoint event handlers) or producing them without expensive 3rd party applications. We have solved it in some cases by making compressed HTML files (.mht) and renamed them to .doc (it actually works smooth). But if you still have to dig in to the old binary formats you can recieve the binary file formats specifications, which covers the latest versions as well as earlier ones, you can send an e-mail to Microsoft and request an agreement which you have to sign. I have not read up on all the legal issues, but you can read the agreement here.

istartedsomething dug up something interesting from the Steve Ballmer presentation at the Microsoft Show and Tell 2007. It’s a roadmap for Microsoft products for the fiscal year of 08 and beyond! Some things caught my attention: Expression Studio V2 - there will be a new version of the Expression series pretty soon Microsoft Tellme - this can be really cool. Windows Server 2008 Update Release and Service Pack 1 - wonder what nice stuff they have in the pipeline for these releases… Microsoft Surface - it will be a real product and is not just a showcase! It’s worth browsing through the whole PowerPoint by Steve Ballmer.

The OOXML versus ODF discussions are getting more intense and either side lays out the same arguments why the other one are better than the other. Some arguments are valid - but some are definitley not! Why do the ODF side always use the “it’s to much to read” argument!? Just take a look at Andrew Updegroves open letter to the state of Massachusetts, two of his five points is about this argument!

ECMA International has started a technical committee, TC46 - XML Paper Specification (XPS), to “produce a formal standard for an XML-based electronic paper format”. One of the points in the TC46 programme is to consider a submission of the XPS format as an ISO standard. This is really good news to all users of the XPS format and is really vital if XPS is going to be able to compete with the PDF format (which already is an ISO standard, ISO 19005-1:2005/ISO/DIS 32000).

I previously blogged about the lack of Office 2007 file format support in Windows Mobile 6. Today Jason Langridge revealed that you will not longer need any third party application for this - but instead Microsoft will provide an update to Microsoft Office Mobile 2007 with support for the new Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). A free update will be available for Windows Mobile 6 and 5 devices and all new shipped devices will have it in the ROM, all starting in Q3 of 2007.

Microsoft has released a CTP for Microsoft SDK for Open XML Formats, which can be downloaded here. The SDK contains a strongly typed library, built on top of System.IO.Packaging namespace, for creating documents based on the Open XML Format. Great, now we don’t have to use the System.Xml.XmlWriter to create Office 2007 documents. Here is a sample on how to write out the number of characters in a Word 2007 document: XmlDocument extendedProperties = new XmlDocument(); using (WordprocessingDocument wordDocument = WordprocessingDocument.Open("document.docx", false)) { ExtendedFilePropertiesPart part = wordDocument.ExtendedFilePropertiesPart; extendedProperties.Load(part.GetStream()); } XmlNodeList characters = extendedProperties.GetElementsByTagName("Characters"); Console.WriteLine(characters.Item(0).InnerText); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; overflow-x:visible;border:0px} .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

This part of the Dissecting XPS series will focus on some XML Paper Specification tools that are available as of today. The success of XPS, vs PDF and others, are really depending on the number of supported devices, operating systems and tools. Right now the XPS support is limitied in applications outside the Microsoft Windows sphere, but there are plans for other operating systems. (Maybe Silverlight will boost this with the CoreCLR).

DataViz have released a new version of DocumentsToGo for Windows Mobile with support for viewing Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx etc). This is great, I have not used DocumentsToGo since my Sony-Ericsson p910i days but instead relied on the Office Mobile suite embedded in Windows Moblie 5. The current version only supports viewing of Office 2007 documents as of today, but if you purchase the application you will get free upgrades and the coming versions will support creation and editing of Office 2007 documents.

Today I recieved an e-mail from the Swedish Standards Institute, SIS, containing the proposal for the Office Open XML as an ISO standard (ISO/IEC DIS 29500). Office Open XML is today an ECMA standard, TC-45, and ECMA has submitted the standard to the ISO fast-track process Office Open XML. The fast-track means that it can be an international standard by this August, read more on the fast-track process in this post by Brian Jones. I’m definitely going to second to the proposal.

I will in a number of posts try to explain the XML Paper Specification document format, XPS format, that has been developed by Microsoft. I think the XPS initiative is nice from a developer and ISV perspective, since creating and reading XPS documents is easy and supported from various environments. This series of XPS articles will start off with an introduction to the XML Paper Specification and then continue with general support and competitors and then of course some nice introduction on how to use XPS in applications.

Previewing files and attachments in Microsoft Outlook 2007 is one of the new killer features that makes my, and hopefully yours, life easier. When installing Outlook 2007 you will get preview functionality for the standard Microsoft applications and images. Previewing files is also integrated into the Windows Vista Explorer. Tim Heuer (mr double-snake error) has together with Foxit software created a PDF previewer. The PDF Preview Handler is easy to set up and is incredible fast in rendering PDF documents for preview.

Here is a list of cheat sheets for the Windows and .NET platform that I frequently use and I think are of great interest. Visual Studio 2005 Keyboard Shortcut References Visual C# 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color Visual C++ 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color Visual Basic 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color SharePoint and Office stuff CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3) CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2003 New Office 2007 User Interface - Word | PDF Web and ASP.NET stuff Microsoft AJAX ClientScript Cheat Sheet - ZIP JavaScript Cheat Sheet - PNG | PDF Other stuff

Microsoft Windows Vista contains new common dialogs, such as the Save As and Open dialogs, which have a new sidebar navigation to the left. The navigation can show the folder tree or your Favorite Links. Windows XP had a similar concept, but not as customizable as in Windows Vista. If you are like me and like to have your files organized and have easy access to them you can customize the Favorite Links really easy. All the links in the Favorite Links sidebar is plain old shortcuts (.lnk files) which are located in the Links folder of the Users directory, to be precise: %USERPROFILE%\Links\, for example c:\Users\wictor\Links\.

A few months back I showed how you could add the new Office 2007 icons to a SharePoint 2003 or Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 site. The Right Stuff has made a complete post on how to add the complete set of icons for the different Office 2007 applications. The post also contains a few different sets of Office 2007 icons so you can choose the one that suits your site best.

Today I start my two weeks vacation and I thought I should summarize this year. The year of 2006 has been characterized, for me, as the year of Betas and Technology Previews. I have been trying to involve myself as much as possible in the all the goodies flowing out of Redmond. Microsoft has released numerous amount of new applications and upgrades. Internet Explorer 7 The new version of Internet Explorer is the application this year that will have most impact in the short run on users. More standardized and a slicker interface with support of for example blogs.

No big deal, but I thought this was funny… The monthly Microsoft partner toolkit arrived today and it included a Partner Demo Readiness Toolkit with Windows Vista RC1 and Office 2007 beta. Okey, RTM has not been available that long, but at least RC2 or some other intermediate build would have been more appropriate :-)

After downloading the latest bits of the Office 2007 RTM ISO’s it was time to install it. There are no changes in the installation as I can see at first sight from the latest beta, everything worked fine and smooth and was without much interaction, just the serial key and some optional customization and then about 10 minutes of waiting and I was up and running. Before installing make sure that you remove all betas and updates to them including any add-ins such as the Save as PDF or XPS , otherwise the setup will exit.

Office 2007 is now available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads and on TechNet, after a weekend of updates on the sites. Vista is not yet ready for download, but Maria Johansson says it will be available by Friday the 17th.

The MSDN Subscriber Downloads site will be unavailable this friday “…from 7:00PM to 9:00PM Pacific time on Friday, November 10, 2006,for planned maintenance and upgrades. Both downloads and product keys will be unavailable…” I guess that they are making an update to handle the heavy download request for all the RTM:ed products this week such as Office System 2007 and Vista.

The new Office document format present in the new Microsoft Office 2007 suite is completely new and open and based on XML. This opens up a lot of possibilites for us developers; there is now an easy way to create your own Word or Excel documents from an application. The file format used is called Ecma Office Open Xml format. Previously it has been very difficult or expensive to provide the customers with nice Word or Excel output from an application. For example when delivering an Excel sheet from a website it has been done by creating a table in html and then sending it to the browser with the correct content type (application/vnd.ms-excel), the same thing for Word. But when it came to embedding images or attachments or creating advanced layouts (headers or footers) it has been troublesome. It can be done; for example I created a web application that had a Word document as output, nicely formatted using the mht format.

A few days ago Microsoft officially released a modified Royale theme in black. The Royale theme is the one used in Windows XP Media Center. Now there is an updated variant of that theme called Zune desktop theme, download it here. This theme looks really great and matches the black and silver themes in the new Office 2007 and the default theme for Windows Media Player 11.

Microsoft has released Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW and it’s available for download here (XP x86, other versions are available at Microsoft Download Center). I have been using the beta 2 extensively since the release, and the betas before that. It’s a great desktop search application and integrates incredibly nice with the upcoming Office 2007. Finding e-mails in Outlook 2007, documents on your harddrive or captured images in OneNote 2007 is really easy and fast. Give it a try!

Here is a quick instruction on how to install the Microsoft Excel 2007 and Microsoft Word 2007 default icons to your SharePoint 2003 site. First of all you need these two icons, right-click them and choose Save Picture As. Copy the two .gif files into the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\ folder. Then open the file C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\XML\docicon.xml with your favorite XML editor and add these two lines under the ByExtension element:

I have been running Microsoft Outlook 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh now for a while and it’s a great improvement to the Beta 2 but. There have been a lot of changes to the user interface in this release. One thing that annoys me is the location of the Send button in a mail that you are composing. The most natural place should be where the Paste button is placed today.

Microsoft just released the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh (download here) to the masses. One of the interesting parts Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats, are also updated as B2TR With this download (available in English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish) you can open, edit, save and create Microsoft Office 2007 files using Microsoft Office 200, Microsoft Office XP or Microsoft Office 2003. The following formats are supported:

Jensen Harris bring us good news, as always… This morning, we announced that starting tomorrow (Thursday, Septemeber 14) you’ll be able to download the Beta 2 Technical Refresh build of Office 2007 (build 4407.1005).

I spend a lot of time using mainly two applications; Microsoft Visual Studio (2003 and 2005) and Microsoft Office (2007). Microsoft Office 2007 introduces a new user interface that simplifies the usage a lot. I am a devoted reader to Jensen Harris Office User Interface blog and it has taught me a lot and given me influences on how user interfaces should be built and I try to take his advices in account.

According to Lawrence Liu Microsoft will release a a demo with Microsoft Office Server System 2007 for Virtual Server as a .VMC and a virtual harddisk for Microsoft Certified Partners as a part of the Techinical demonstration toolkit during the next 4-6 weeks. This is great, I guess that it will contain the latest build, and gives us a good opportunity to test and show the new functionlity of MOSS without having to set up new servers or VM’s.

Finally an update to the beta of Windows Desktop Search 3.0. The user interface is back, looking like the 2.6 version, and it works really nice. Looks like the problems with Outlook 2007 and One Note 2007 Beta 2 is gone and it consumes less memory. This update is required for the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 Techincal Refresh release that will be upon us soon.

The incredible Jensen Harris gives you all the details on how to use Fitt’s Law to improve the user interface of your application in the post Giving You Fitts. The article gives you a good insight on how to create a great interface using a mathematical approach instead of just lettting a art/creative director making the job. It explains why the northwest corner (as Jensen told us it should be named) has changed so dramatically.

Microsoft Office 2007 will come with a new set of icons. Although they look nice and modern I will have to see them in smaller versions (16x16) to see if they will do. Justin Prine has some opinions and comments on his Flickr photostream.

Daniel Escapa blogs that the XML Schema reference is available for OneNote 2007 beta 2, the download also contains schema references for Visio 2007 and Outlook 2007.

The Outlook 2007 feature Quick Click is a really nice feature; a Quick Click is a defined action to be done when you are single clicking a column on a mail item. You can define Quick Clicks in the mail item views for the columns Categories and Flag Status. Right click the column and select Set Quick Click… to change the action. For example; you can define the Quick Click in the Flag column to add a flag with a Tomorrow reminder (default is today).

I use the Outlook calendar for everything - the calendar is a central part of my life :-) Outlook 2007 has some great features in the calendar view and my favorite is that you see all your completed and upcoming tasks in the calendar view. I normally flag all the incoming e-mails, when I don’t have time to read them or when I have to take some action with them. This automatically creates a task in Outlook. From the Calendar view you can then easily see all tasks for the current week or day and you can also easy go back in time and see exactly when you did what and perhaps why.

For me this second quarter of 2006 has been so interesting with all these beta and CTP products from Microsoft. The summer will be a long wait for the Release Candidates and the autumn a huge and shaky wait for the gold products. Here is a short summary of what i think so far; **Microsoft Expression Graphics Designer**An interesting product which I have big hopes for, I really like, and have just adjusted, to the vector way of doing my graphics.

Just a friendly reminder to all of you that have the Office 2007 beta installed and still have Office 2003 installed: do not install the Office 2003 updates available through Windows Update. I did - stupid me I had the update service on automatic and when turning off the computer I said ok let’s install the patches. After installing the latest patches, Update for Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter (KB917149) and a few others, I started to receive the following errors in Outlook:

Microsoft Outlook 2007 is great and it has really improved on a lot of things for this version. One of the things that have been messing with me is the possibility to send e-mails using Ctrl+Enter. I have accidentaly sent away a number of emails, maybe due to my thick fingers :-) when pressing Ctrl+Enter. Outlook 2007 issues a warning when you press Ctrl+Enter and allows you to enable or disable this function. Isn’t it great - small things does matter!

XPS (XML Paper Specification) is an electronic paper format and is competing with Adobes PDF. Since Microsoft is forced to withdraw the function of publishing to PDF from Office 2007 the XPS will be more widely adopted. Read more about it here; Adobe PDF vs Microsoft XPS. Windows Vista will include a XPS reader, but if you already now get XPS files you can download either the WinFX runtime components or the XPS Essentials Pack (beta).

I’ve asked the OneNote 2007 team about why the Ribbon is not implemented for OneNote 2007, which I would find very useful, and they answered me that they considered it but it will not get into the 2007 release but they will think about it for the next release (OneNote 2011?). Please help me out here and post a comment if you would like to see the Ribbon in OneNote or not and if you do how would you like it?

Jensen Harris, the Office 2007 User Interface guru, writes about what will happen to Office 2007 beta until the final release which contains a number of interesting gems. One of the first stuff I found out when using Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) was that the system menu was gone from the upper-left corner, sorry Jensen I mean Northwest corner, so I could not double-click to shut the application down, and that I had to use the cross in the Northeast (upper-right) corner, introduced in Windows 95. This feel like a big issue to me, since I am used to it, and my mouse cursor is most often located to the left part of the screen, so I am a Windows 3.1 lover, according to Jensen Harris.Instead of opening the system menu you get the new Office File menu in the new user interface.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 introduces a new view for the contacts called Business Cards. It’s a view, much like the old Adress Cards view, but the business cards view lets you customize how the different contacts look - just like a business card. You can customize the business cards and give each one a unique look. This can make finding contacts easier, if the business cards resembles the real ones.

Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report blogs about What do you think of Office 2007 so far? I’ve been using it, mostly OneNote, Outlook and Word, since the release of the latest beta, and I like the most of it. The Ribbon bar and the User InterfaceThe most significant change is the user interface and I like what I see. I took a while for me to be aquainted with the new shortcuts and the Ribbon bar, I am a keyboard user. But I think it’s working fine. I only wish OneNote 2007 had the Ribbon bar, as I wrote before. Outlook does not have it either, but Jensen Harris explains why.Previewing works really fine and is great.

As Microsoft OneNote 2007 will be a part of the Office Home and Student 2007 suite OneNote will and can be used by students. And it’s a great tool for that! I remember when I studied for my M.Sc. and all the notebooks and pens I used, making notes was very important for me and helped me remember things better. And it still is, I have used OneNote for a few years and been satisified with that, but the new OneNote is so great.

Just a follow up to my last post on Outlook 2007 Instant Search and Windows Desktop Search problems: My scenario in the post does not always happen and it may work for you. The System Restore I did was not that complicated since I did not install anything while I had the troubles, and I have not had any problems after it either, so don’t worry about it.

I have installed the Office 2007 beta, including Outlook 2007, and I wanted to enable the Instant Search functionality and followed the instructions in the dialog that popped up in Outlook. It said that I had to go and download the Windows Desktop Search Beta 3.0 Engine Preview, read about it in Microsoft Help and Support. I did, but I had a previous version of Windows Desktop Search installed. There was no warning and when I tried to search in Outlook I recieved a message saying that Outlook cannot perform your search. And when I tried to use the Windows Desktop user interface that was still there (the 3.0 beta has no UI yet) the explorer.exe crashed.

The IQBlog has a post, Microsoft OneNote: Great program, interesting design flaw, in which they disucuss the lack of the Save button. Chris Pratley, Group Manager of the OneNote team, responds to the post in a comment - it’s worth reading. And as a side note, the posting page is reported by Internet Explorer 7 as a potential phising page.

When starting OneNote 2007 beta you will get a warning that informs you that OneNote 2007 requires Windows Desktop Search to fully support Instant Search and Searchable images and audio. This warning will pop up until you install the Windows Desktop Search 3.0 or until you edit the registry, which then will inform OneNote to use Slow Search. Here is how to modify the registryCreate a new text file called onenoteindex.reg and copy and paste below this text into it. Then double click the file and answer yes to the question.

At this page you can read about all the knwon OneNote 2007 issues as well as all the other Office 2007 issues that are known to Microsoft.

I walked through the OneNote Guide for beta 2 and found even more interesting stuff, here are some of the nice ones: Win+N creates a new sidenote Writing and pressing the Tab key automatically creates a table Read through the guidelines before starting to use OneNote 2007

The new Office OneNote 2007 has a built-in Calculator, really nice stuff! To try it out, just write a mathematic formula in a page and end with an equals sign followed by enter or space, for example:3+2=This will result in a row like this:3+2=5 It is quite powerful, it can handle operations like: +, -, /, * parenthesis so you can do formulas like this (3+3)*3=18 ^, for example 10^3=1 000 sqrt(n) for square root sin(n), asin(n), cos(n), acos(n), tan(n), atan(n) mod for modulus And I’m sure there are more…

I’m a huge fan of Microsoft OneNote since a few years back and I use it to store anything about everything. It all started 10 years ago with a simple Notepad document in which i kept all important notes; such as programming tips, important Urls etc. When OneNote came I felt that I was a few years behind :-) The new Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 (beta 2) is such a nice upgrade to the 2003 version. The most interesting things I found after using it for a day is:

So, Microsoft Office 2007, applications and servers, are finally here for download at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx. Expect some huge downloads; Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is at 75 MB and the SharePoint Server at 1.000 MB. The Office Suite and programs is a tiny download of 2.049 MB. That would be a massive hive of 3.5" disks :-). I think a lot of bandwidth will be used on the backbones tonight, and this is just a faint hint of what will happen in a few weeks when the new public Vista beta will arrive.I still remember when I installed Visual C years ago, that was somwhere around 40 disks, thats about 60 MB!

I’m a bit concerned about all the new user interfaces and layouts that will appear when application developers starts taking use of the Windows® Presentation Foundation (formerly code named “Avalon”). This “tecnology” is awesome but it has it’s drawbacks. With the WPF you can create applications that are really neat looking and have high usability, just take a look at Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer. I saw a really nice demo, on a Microsoft Partner event, of a medical journal application looking like a “medical journal” - not the old fashioned MDI interface with a File, Edit… menu. And I guess most of you have seen the Microsoft Max application and the new Office 2007 interface. But what will happen to the usability between applications? As of today almost all Windows applications has a user interface with a menu bar with the File, Edit etc menus, a toolbar with icons and either one document (SDI) or multiple documents (MDI) in the window area. This is very good when adapting to new applications, you know where to find the functionality you want, not in all cases but the most vital functions are easily found. You know how to save a document or to paste something in to your application. Windows Presentation Foundation does not prohibit this usage but it allows developers to create really cool looking applications with a nice user interface. But when it comes to recognizing functions and behaviours I think this will cause a lot of trouble. Let’s take an example of a hospital, where I have seen similar troubles, having several applications from several vendors; they have Microsoft Office 2007, some kind of medical journal system, a financial report system, an intranet etc. Most of the employees use more than one application. It will be very problematic if these applications doesn’t share the same user interface guidelines. This is the point of my entry! Where is the guidelines for these new awesome user interfaces? Do you have the same opinion or experience as I do?Where can I find information on how to make these new applications run smoothly togheter using common guidelines?