Is anyone else being to see this happen?

I’m finding it more and more common as people update their PC’s and laptops, they get the new edition of Office, and just don’t realise that the file formats have changed and that their files can’t be seen by others user. That, and when you do point it out to people, it’s real easy to forget to save files to an older format. Is there a default file type setting in Office 2007?  How are people dealing with this problem? I can only see it get worst, over the next few years, for 2007 becomes more widely used.

Well my copy arrived this morning, and what a beauty it is! I’ve obviously only had a cursory glance (stupidly busy with work – UAT any one?) but I have to say that it’s really impressive.

There’s loads of updated content from the first edition and it’s an extra 200 pages long. There’s  an interesting chapter about interface, that looks really good, the .Net stuff looks excellent, and there’s lots of Excel 2007 info in there, including a chapter about cross version applications. Not to mention all the samples and code on the CD!

If you develop in Excel, do yourself a favour and get  a copy, go on you deserve it! Looking on Amazon, the second edition appears to be cheaper than the first edition, which is fun! You could always try an win a copy over at Dicks!

Oh, and dont forget the PED  support forum!

There are 2 things that strike me about this post over at Daily WTF. Well there are 3 things, but 1 of them (…my god, computer programmers are soooo anally retentive it’s untrue..) always strikes me, I should work on my duck and weave.

1. The formula sucks

2. Have I been miss an opportunity to “pick up chicks” by debugging excel formulas*?- Check out the comments?

*It seems unlikely…

The response to my blog post “Request an Excel blog post” was not stellar! But 2 people did request things. XL Dennis (aka Dennis Wallentin)  asked about Tables in Excel 2007, and Sam had some interest in function performance.
I did a quick video about tables in Excel 2007, which I need to compliment with one about how to use the new referencing system too, but that’s for another day.
Sam was kind enough to send me some work he’s done around function execution speeds. Sam used the MIE calculation tool to help him time these functions – good stuff!
The workbook is here, and the findings might make more sense when you see them in the worksheet ;-)
In Sam’s own words, here’s what he found out:

The — version of sumproduct is faster than the other two
Dsum - Sum is faster than Sumproduct and for Excel 2003 and below should be the most preferred way of summarising data
For 2007 - Sumifs beats everything else hands down
—————————————–
A Match/ Index combo is slightly slower than a Vlookup but more flexible.
But a Single Match column and multiple index columns is much faster than Vlookup. Index is super fast
—————————————–
Dynamic Names(with Index / Counta)  are faster than Table References both of which are faster than full column references
Dynamic Names with UDF is faster than Index/Counta
However  Fixed Range references are faster than Dynamic names of any kind

Here are my thoughts:
Sumproduct and DSum do slightly different things and the fact that DSun is faster kinda makes sense. However it’s easy enough to fall into the trap of relying on SP when other functions are better suited, I hardly every use Dsum, in fact I can’t think of a time I did, so this in a handy reminder!  It also makes me think if there are other instances which I’m missing out on, I bet there are loads!
The Sumif functions seems to trump everything that has come before it (see the vlookup times too) we should try and use these as much as possible.  Sumif’s are arguably easier to write and read the sumproducts too.  If the data fits try and use sumifs in 2007 plus. The performance gains are vast!
Having said that there are some instances when only sumprodct will achieve what you need, and for small data sets or number of functions then the benefits might not be noticeable, but for large data sets and high numbers of function calls it’s worthwhile thinking hard about which function to use.
Indexing/match lookups are about twice as fast as the equivalent vlookups in this example, but be careful because often only one vlookup is needed, and the performance gains might not be as good. I really should test this, but I just want to make the post right now!

References to ranges act as you would expect. Tables in 2007 might be a bit slower than dynamic ranges – not sure there’s that much in it though, but there are significantly different – see t-test on wks. Again I would like to see how these results are effect by relative data set size and number of function calls.

So there you have it a fairly comprehensive look at various “lookup” functions in Excel and Excel 2007. Thanks to Sam for his hard work, putting the tests together and shearing his findings with us, good work Sam!
If you have a topic you’d like to be discussed on this blog, then feel free to leave a comment on the Request post and mail me any supporting data you have.

Download Workbook (.xlsm)

Here’s the deal. Access database on a network share. Very, very, very complex set of queries (queries on queries on queries etc, etc). Ross, can you automate my reporting spread sheet?

So while the spreadsheet work is straight forward, the hard part here is getting the data into the spread sheet. I started off just writing some standard SQL and using ADO to pull a data set back. I soon realised, that the query had to be much more complex. In fact it was such a horrible set of logic, that I didn’t want to touch it with a barge pole!

What I thought I would try next is calling the query that the database used to produce a report, but return the dataset to my rs, and stick that in to Excel. That required the use of parameters that where getting fed into the underlying queries from a form in the database at run time. This was something I had not done with ADO before. A colleague showed me the way, basically:

This code worked!!!!  Success? Joy? The gratitude of an over worked account? Not quite.

The next snag was an Access classic “Undefined function”. The function that caused the error was MonthName, which produces a string indicating the specified month. This is not supported via DAO, so now what!?!?!

Here’s an inelegant solution. Copy the database, it’s a front end back end job, so just the UI/ reporting part; keep the linked tables and get ride of the stuff you don’t need. Add some code to call the required query in access and pass the parameters, you can do this with code like this:

You’ll notice that this also prints out a text file (nice!), So in Excel automate this copy of the mbd,  (which you stick on the same local PC as the excel spreadsheet, right!!!) then collect the text file in to Excel and there you have it! Perfection, no way, works, yes. Why the local copy? Well I didn’t what to “effect” the org db, and I didn’t what to automate over a slow network, I’m note sure if it’s a valid, but the thought of performing automation on a file saved on a network drive, doesn’t fill me with warm fuzzy feeling!

This may well be a contender for a WTF, but I’m WTF’d if I can think of a better way to solve the particular problem. Any ideas, ever done anything similar.

Today I took my first look at Excel 2007 tables. I’ve hardly use Excel 2007, for obvious reasons, so I’ve not really played with many of the “new” features.

I did a bit of research and basically there are already a few good spots out there for table related stuff:

An incredibly cheesy Microsoft video, it does show all the main features (doesn’t that table look professional!)

Jan Karel Pieterses’ introduction and VBA methods

And Ron de Druin VBA page here

This chart shows my feeling towards tables in Excel 2007 over the last 3 hours:

In summary, I think tables have been done really well, there are easy to use and makes sense. I think that the new reference system (table name[column])  is good, but just like named ranges, can cause as many issues as it might solved, especially when used by relatively low skilled Excel users.  Most of the stuff that I can see in tables was already there, and has “just” been made much easier to get at, I like the auto-update-y nature of tables, but that always worries me a bit too.
Just for completeness I have done a quick video to add to the tables database!

Do you have an idea for a blog post? If you have a request, then add a comment, if it fits in with what I know about I’ll try and do a post on it. If you want to write the post your self let me know!!!

Lets see how this goes!

(Dick, I will not blog about if statements!!!)

Sunday night was an important day for the Methods In Excel blog, because he got an upgrade. I have been meaning to do this of a while, but have been a little bit nervous about the whole thing. I didn’t want to end up losing all the content I've added over the years. Well as it turns out I was worrying about nothing. After I backup the database and the actually blog files (the pictures and workbooks etc.) the upgrade process was as simple and pain free as dragging some files across and clicking a few buttons.

I have only really noticed one problem, that’s that, some apostrophise have been replaced with funny text (“). I’ll just pop through the post and update them as I get time I think. I could probably find some SQL that would fix the problem, but I think it would be a good idea for me to re-read my posts anyway!

I have to say that I’ve not upgraded this blog ever, so the version I was running on came from 2005, which is a good few years  in open source terms. I like the new version, and the plugins and themes I use still seem to work OK. I might have a look for a new theme that is capable of exploiting the new version.

So it you notice anything odd around here let me know!

Back in 2005 Stephen Bullen, Rob Bovey and John Green collaborated on one of the most useful Excel development books ever written. That book, affectionately known as PED (Professional Excel Development) has been a staple for most Excel Devs ever since. As you can see my copy has had a lot of use!

I am happy to say that the second edition is due out later this year, and XL Dennis (aka, Dennis Wallentin) has joined the team to share some of his .NET expertises. I caught up with Dennis to delve into what we can expect from the refresh, his views on Office and .Net and the sate of public telephone boxes in Sweden!

Hi Dennis,

Q: I notice that 2009 marks the 20 year milestone for "XL-Dennis", for the few readers that might not be familiar with your work and background could you tell us a little bit about what you do?

A: I have a Masters in Business Management & Accounting and I started to use spreadsheet in the mid 80's. Back then Lotus 1-2-3 was the #1 spreadsheet tool which I used on a daily basis. The concept of XL-Dennis was created in the end of the 80's and it started out with the Excel 2.1c version. XL-Dennis utilises Excel and other tools to develop professional business solutions. For the last 3-4 years I have been specialising in .NET and VSTO and today most clients' solutions are based on these two technologies.
20 years with Excel has so far been an exciting journey and I'm looking forward for the coming 20 years.

Q: How did you become involved in the second edition of the PED?

A: When Rob and Stephen outlined the second edition they wanted a new section that covered Excel and .NET. They quickly found out that there are not so many developers in the Excel community that have the knowledge and the practical experience to work with Excel and .NET. So they ended up with a non-English and non-MVP person like me.

Q: I believe this is your first outing as an author, how does it feel to have your name in print and how much work did it all take?

A: That's correct although I have contributed with some materials in other Excel books. Having your name associated with these guys'  is an absolute honour. To see your name on the coverage (second billing) on a book like PED is very pleasant and satisfying given all the work.
I didn't count the hours but imagine that you start out with a blank Word document and the final version is 50-60 Word pages per chapter. Although my English has improved the language itself is a barrier that has consumed much time for me.
I take this opportunity to thank Rob for all his support. He has been the team leader for this edition and in my opinion he has done an excellent job. I would also like to thank Gabhan Barry (a Program Manager in the Excel group at Microsoft) who has been the technical reviewer of the .NET chapters.

Q: That's a significant effort, was it worthwhile, would you do it again?

A: I would say it's nice when the work is done but during the process you go through all the emotions. At present I would turn down any offers however in the future, and if a new edition of PED is to be produced, then I'll have probably forgotten all the hard work and say "yes" again.

Q: PED was a critical success, how did you go about writing new material for it. Was this a challenging undertaking and did you feel you had to live up to the high standard it originally set?

A: Initially it was a burden for me but when I realized that I'm the guy with all the .NET knowledge and experience in the team I managed to place myself in a better position. Because I always try to deliver high quality myself the standard of the first edition was not an issue for me. In fact, I got more motivated.

Q: PED's treatment of Excel was as a powerful development platform. It was aimed at experienced developers, really wanting to push the boundaries of Excel development. Should we anticipate the seconded edition to be pitched at the same audience?

A: Yes, the second edition also targets the professional Excel developer. We continue to support best practice and try to catch up with the latest technologies .NET and VSTO. This is the first Excel book that covers VB.NET and VSTO in detail.

Q: What can we expect to get out of the second edition, what's new and what's been updated?

A: Because this is the second edition we feel it is important to be very clear on this aspect so that potential buyers can make a good decision to buy or not.
The second edition includes five new chapters. One chapter covers Ribbon UI in Excel 2007, another new chapter is about creating cross-versions applications and three chapters are about .NET and VSTO. The book has 29 chapters in total so 24 chapters have had minor updates.
If the potential buyer has little interest in .NET and VSTO and already has the first edition of the book then I would recommend to save the money and wait for the next edition.
It is also important to know that to follow the chapters about .NET and VSTO it requires VS 2008 Professional or later. To fully leverage the VSTO chapter it also requires Office 2007. In addition, to put .NET solutions in production it is also recommended using a commercial digital certificate.
With this edition we will launch a site devoted to the book. It will consist of updates, additional materials etc and a forum in which the readers can communicate with us.

Q: The VBA community have been a little reluctant in adopting .NET technologies; do you see this as a problem?

A: As long as the standpoints are based on genuine business terms I cannot see anything wrong with it. For the professional Excel developer the question is not if rather when to adopt .NET. We hope that the second edition will get them started.

Q: VSTA shipped with info path in office 2007 but was not integrated in any other apps. Do you think getting VSTA in Excel would spark some passion for .NET with Office Devs?

A: Looking ahead we know that Microsoft will incorporate a new IDE with Excel. The question is two folded; in which version of Excel will the new IDE be available and which .NET language will be in use. To answer the question I must honestly admit that I have no idea.

Q: What are some of the major benefits to leveraging the .NET Framework over more traditional VBA solutions?

A: Two words: Security and deployment. With .NET we have a new security model and VBA has nothing like it. As for deployment we can now deploy our solutions in several (secured) ways.

Q: Like any new technology .NET has a learning curve. What do you think the average time investment would be for a VBA developer coming to .NET?

A: All I can say is that requires a lot of hard work. As a kick start I would recommend to take a class in general VB.NET programming.

Q: How do you see the future 5 to 10 years shaping up for Office developers? Will VBA still be king, or is a move to .NET just a matter of time?

A: In the foreseeable future we will work with two types of environment: the desktop and the web office. As long as VBA is around it will continue to play a central role for the desktop environment together with .NET while for the web Office environment .NET is the only available alternative.

Q: In the first edition chapter 22 was dedicated to Excel and .NET and its focus was VSTO. Will the update include details on managed Com addins and/or automation?

A: I’m pleased to say that the second edition includes three new chapters devoted to Excel & .NET:
Chapter 24 Excel and VB.NET (77 pp): This is an introduction to the VS IDE, VB.NET and automation of Excel with VB.NET. We have intentionally tried to pitch it at a beginners level.
Chapter 25 Writing Managed COM Add-ins with VB.NET (90 pp): This is the "flagship" for the .NET section in the book and we step through all the steps to create and deploy managed COM add-ins, including a discussion about managed Automation add-ins.
Chapter 26 Developing Excel Solutions with Visual Studio Tools for Office System (58 pp): In this chapter we discuss what VSTO is and when to use VSTO. In our experience this is a must so that the reader can decide if VSTO is something to pick up or not. We also discuss VSTO add-ins and single workbook's solution together with how to deploy VSTO solutions from a web site.
For the chapter 24 and 25 we have a practical case study: PETRAS Report Tool .NET which interacts with a SQL Server database and with some predefined native Excel templates.

Q: One of the often bemoaned issues with VSTO is that most of the sample code is presented in C#. Happily PED used VB, can we expect this to continue?

A: Yes, PED will still be supporting VB for the foreseeable future. It's remarkable that Microsoft has such a strong focus on C#, especially if they want professional VBA developers to port themselves to the .NET platform.

Q: Following on from the previous question, what language type do you prefer and why, would you strongly recommend one over the other when targeting Office?

A: In general I would like to avoid discussions about which language to use and so forth.
Today we can meet clients' requirements for Office solutions with a toolbox that includes a various number of tools, VBA, classic VB, VB.NET and VSTO. In some situations the choice is dictated by the customers or by their desktop environment. In other cases we can select tool(s) to be used on our own.
But if we only discuss the question from a strictly technically perspective then .NET is in favour as it offers a modern IDE.

Q: When can we expect PED to hit the shelves?

A: The book is scheduled to be available in May 2009. (See it at Safari here)

Q: And finally, do you have any plans for a second international VSTO conference in the Phone Box, and will the beer still be free!!!!

A: Actually we will have the release party for the second edition of PED in the Phone Box at XL-Dennis Street. And believe it or not the second VSTO conference will also be held there and at the same time! In addition to the free beer we will also give away unknown bugs in Excel for free too!

Thanks Dennis, I'm sure the second edition will be a success!

For those too impatience or too excited to wait for PED2, why not hop over to Dennis's blog in the mean time, it's loaded with Excel and .NET posts covering a multitude to subjects.

A day and a half behind schedule, here's a long (10mins!) video of how to write and "deploy" as VSTO addin for Excel 2007. It was, to be honest, a nightmare to do, as my PC is about 100 years old! I promise that as soon as the funds allow I will get a new one - at least now I have a legitimate reason for the spend!
The sound and the image get out of sync about half way through, for which I apologise, but I've already spent enough time on it, and people should be able to keep up, there's nothing to difficult about it. Editing in Widows Movie Maker is rubbish!

Anyway, here it is!

MIE Sample VSTO Timer Addin.zip project to go with it, should anyone be interested

I'm glad that's done!!!
Note to self, don't do end to end videos!

You can customise the shape of your user forms, and it's Kewl! All the kids in my house are doing it! Look at this stupid form shape I was able to make!

Why on earth would you want to do it I hear you ask?! That's a very good question! When I started this I thought it was really not very useful at all. I'm still thinking that, but maybe there might be a few practical uses for it. I'm thinking tool tips and popup type things. I have covered using captionless user forms (and worksheets!), and even popup forms previously. I was never happy with the way the captionless forms looked in VBA, they look ok in VB6 but in VBA they has a wafty boarder.

Of course if you want to move over to VSTO you can even make a user form in the shape of John Walkenbach's upper half! Is that the sound of ringing tills I can hear!

MIE Custom Form Shapes.xls

Release.zip (Excel 2007 only + .Net 3/3.5)

Here is the BETA version of my Colour Manager, and tool for creating colour pallets in Excel:

It's a VB6 com addin, the only thing you really need to know is that you load a picture on the left and then click that picture to get the colour at that point. You can then click a pallet square to place it where that square is. Click the send to workbook button to send it to the active workbook.

However I have also made a video to show how to use it. Bosh!

Here is the file!

UPDATED FILE HERE:
MIE Colour Manager Beta 0.3.0.zip

Enjoy, feedback more than welcome.

When Take That first came on the seen Robby Williams was a young sexy super stud, loved by all, women wanted to be with him, men wanted to be him (ok, maybe the analogies not perfect). Now he's a slightly overweight widero who chases flying saucers.

And so C#. When it came out (easy!) developers flocked to it, hailing it's development speed over C++, and hoisting it's strongly typed compile time error detection pants up the flag pole of integrity. Now, with C# 4 around the corner, those panties have slid down the pole a bit, as MS have seen fit to invite a bloshy Dynamic Runtime Library sorry, Dynamic Language Runtime (- what every it's called!) to the party.

What am I going on about? Well, MS have stated that they want to bring VB, and C# much closer, so that new features in either language (read C#) are deployed at the same time in both. Other stuff that's coming with the new release of .Net is the Dynamic Runtime. I'm no expert - in fact what I am is a Luddite on a soap box - but for this to work (with out having to write 10 million lines of code), C# has to have much of the features of VB, basically dynamic types. This is not necessarily a requirement at the developer code level, but required to make the language work with external object. This in turn means that .Net can work more directly with Office and all other components developed in other languages! - cool!. Hence why they can get rid of the dreaded PIA's.

Along with this MS are making other changes, like named arguments and not having to write ref missing 10 billion times to fill out all the optional parameters. Also in VSTO deployment is getting better too.

So the point? well 2 things really:
1. In both VB and especially C# it's getting easier to develop,... for Office.
2. C# and VB are getting even more alike, expect to see "with {}" some time soon. Why an organization would invest in developing 2 languages that both have the same strengths and weakness is for Stevie Bulmmer to debate, but I can't see the point can you?

As always, M.I.E will be the 5th or 6th to bring you slightly wrong information about the latest developments in the world of Office and .Net.

Some links worth reading if you want to find out more:
The Future of .NET Languages
Office client developer enhancements with VS 2010
VSTO news

A few months ago I highlighted my worries over Goggle Chrome. Now it seams that Google are turning on MS, and IE. As much as I dislike IE (7 + is ok) it's a bit worrying, because its not a huge leap of imagination to see how Firefox could be next. I don't like Chrome and it worries me that the people behind the main stays of the internet (powerful searching) have now entered in to the arena of the browser. I'm sure Google wont, but there is opportunity to bias it's web service in favour of it's own browser, and that would make them Microsoft, a case of hunted turning hunter if ever there was one!

The second thing that caught my eye in this weeks micro mart was a review of word processors. There where a few I've not seen before, which was interesting in itself. One I found really interesting, for two reasons was iWrite Pro. The first is the description of the UI:

It's all very reminiscent of word 2007, but is that a good idea? Word is confusing for people not used to it because it is hard to find the function you want and some people prefer the old style of menus used in previous versions. Iwrite Pro's ribbon is a different kettle of fish though and it's not nearly as irritating. This is because it is a simpler program with fewer functions and it's easier to find the one you need on the tabs.

here's a picture:

Well, what can you say? Fail?

But perhaps the more surprising aspect is that iWrite Pro can actually implement the ribbon UI, - OK perhaps the most surprising thing is that anyone would want to, but regardless doesn't this contravene the ridiculous ribbon Licensing agreement, and if they've rolled there own (which it looks like) and not signed with MS, then how long before MS come knocking?

I’ve been reading micro mart for years, its focus is hardware and OS stuff, but it also has other interesting bits and bobs, it’s a good bathroom read all round!
There were a couple of things in this week’s issue that stood out and I’d thought I’d share them here.
The first is independent OS’s. I’ve only just started to use Linux in anger, so the fact that there are even more OS’s out there throw me a bit. To be clear, what we are talking about here are OS that are not derived from OSX, Windows, Linux or Unix, they are built from the ground up. Having said that, it’s not quite true! For example, Syllable is based around Amgia OS, and Haiku is based on BeOS. But they are only based on these; the kernels are either rewritten from scratch, or extensions of the base functionality. As you might expect these are not all signing all dancing OS’s yet, but its surprising how stable some of them are for Alpha releases.

The one that stands out most is ReactOS. It’s basically a copy of Windows XP. Is is based around the wine API code, and aims to run all software that currently runs on windows XP – thus solving one of the main problems with none windows base OS’s – no game and limit software!
Don’t expect too much from React, it has a handful of developers and is an open source project at alpha level. I installed it on Virtual box OSE running in Ubuntu 8, from a mounted ISO on a HDD. I’m not fibbing here, it installed in about 30 seconds – ok it only had to format a 6gb virtual HDD, but still that’s bloody quick!!! What’s it like to use? Well it’s a bit unstable and is not pretty, but its somehow still impressive. If you have a VM, why not take a look, and watch this space!

I have rambled on a bit here so I will start a new post for the next thing!

P.S. please no comments saying why not just uses Linux and run Wine – if you need to ask that you need to think harder!

When Simon recently stole my post idea [:-)] with his “Best/Favourite Excel version” it got me thinking what spread sheet offered the best value. I quickly came to the conclusion answering that particular question would be, well a bit rubbish really, and that nobody else would care anyway. But I still wanted to make a post that somehow allowed me to highlight Murphy’s theft(iry).
With this goal firmly establish I got to thinking about the cost of developing Office solutions, which in turn lead me to the cost of owing Office period. After a bit of research (which was much harder than I thought it was going to be), I present the following (and look forward to Simon reposting this in a few months :)))))))))))))))!

So as you can see, the cost of Office is coming down!!! Good news. Office XP (office 2002) seems to be a bit out of line. The only costs I could find for XP where in GBP, so even when I converted to $ and took of 20% they still look a bit keen.
However thats not the whole story is it! Because as you will no doubt be saying to yourselves (well done you clever thing you), a 100 quid in 97 is not the same as 100 quid today, here’s the normalised data, and the news looks even better!

So in conclusion Office is now cheaper to own than ever before and the cost difference between Standard and Professional is smaller than ever before. Oh and Simon Murphy is a massive content theft*…

*not really, he’s ok actually.

There is no keyword in VB6 that allows you to set the default value of a class. Code like this for example will error out.

However it can be done, even if it’s a bit of a pain! Export the class and add the following code in note pad, as the first line under the function heading:

Attribute Name.VB_UserMemId = 0

The value must be 0, and the Attribute must be the name of the function, get, etc. you want to use as the default. The notepad file might look some thing like this!

Save the changes in notepad, in the IDE delete and re-import the class. The code will now work! Amazing! If you make any major changes to the class code you will have to redo the process, that’s the PITA bit!

Example Workbook: DefaultTest.xls

There are things I like about Google, there are things I don't. Recently I've tried there blog reader - I think it sucks. I have also been trying Chrome. well...

There are a few reasons.
Here's one, I don't like "no chrome", that sounds ifffy to me

But this worries me more, especially if your using Goggle docs for typing up your business plan!

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

more here...

It makes me wonder; if Henry Ford had been asked to design a boat, would he have taken a model T and put a giant hull around it? That’s what people have seemingly done with woffice. Ok so Blits are a bit different, and Google finally seems to be doing things that are a bit more inspired (Google forms = good!). Microsoft, having ploughed god knows how much into Office Live (no, I don’t know why it’s Live either, presumably I prerecord my self typing this?) and have now come up with, "Office Web Applications” (groan..). And in so doing have created nothing new or original what-so-ever, in fact all they have managed to do is to take an established product and dumb it down – wonderful.

So what should they be doing? A bloody lot more, that’s what. That counts for Google, Microsoft, and all the others. I don’t want a desktop app that I can use in a in a web browser. The clue’s in the name, its not called, “the spear bedroom at the back of the house”, or “the laptop on my knee in the lounge which is a bit hot”, or, “my 5 year old Parckard Bell on the pine effect chipboard PC desk over in the corner, which I got form PC world, but I don’t use now because its full of spy wear that I cant get off.” It’s called Office dam it; because I use it in a bloody office! If you want me to use an on-line app, then get it to do stuff that makes sense on line. Make an app that works like one-note or Google note book, but that ties it altogether and allows me to produce a rich text doc at the end of it. What about a database that lets me build a web-based front end (and back end) that I can use as a lite weight warehouse management system, or pay roll system. Surely there’s a market for a robust easy to customise online database product!!!!!

Make it integrate with Google maps in fact let me browse Google maps, copy that into my document and then give me a load of choices, browse shops in this area, look at pictures from here, search for information about the place. Find out about that country (link to wikipedia), that sort of thing.

Come on, stop reinventing the wheel, we want hover boards, and we want them now!!!!