Tag: MS

Office and Vista Beta experience

In the past the beat experiences have been free, and quite good :-), sign up now, you’ve got nothing to lose!!!!

The new generation of Microsoft Windows© and Office© is about to be launched. Get in on the act right from the start and follow the new products as they go through to the finals. As a member of the Vista and Office Beta Experience you will benefit from valuable resources, specialist knowledge and additional bonus material. In addition, your subscription will include regular issues of the Beta Experience Newsletter containing specialist knowledge all about Windows Vista and Office “12″.

Learn Visual Studio

Microsoft are offering up quite a lot of decent resource for.net developers/or cross over developers. The Visual Studio Learning home page has a lot of links to virtual labs each aimed at different parts of VS. There are even a few books that can be downloaded for free! (sroll the learning home page or, just the VB ones) I think I’ll print out a chapter at a time! Credit where it’s due well done MS

Streamline your Excel toolbars

Microsoft hold the average user has 4 or more toolbars displayed at any one time. This represents quite a lot of the screen “real-estate”. This is especially pertinent with the advent of “wide screen” type set ups popular on many laptops. A colleague of mine has about 25 rows on display, that’s on a 17″ screen! (well, “wide screen”).

I believe is that many uses pull up a menu bars and end up keeping the whole thing, for just a few of the buttons. But its easy to streamline your toolbars in excel.

Position your mouse somewhere on a toolbar (it’s best if you go for a place where there are no buttons). Right clicking will bring up a context menu, at the very bottom of which is a “Customise” option Click it!
Next click the “Commands” tab, from here you can pick all of you favourite buttons, and simply drag them all on to ONE tool bar. Better than that, you can even drag them on to the Menu bar (which it’s self is a toolbar).
If you can’t find the button you’re looking for, try clicking on the “Toolbars” tab, then checking the tool bar which holds the button you’re after. This displays the toolbar, and you can now drag and drop the button direct from the toolbars on the screen.

Now that’s better, I’ve got my screen back!!!!

New is good, but what about improvements?

New ideas capture peoples imagine, no doubt about it. But this struck a chord when I re-visited J-Walks old blog.

As you might expect, you’ll find lots of predictable comments and jokes by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. But there are a few interesting comments. For example:

Someone need to start OVER and rethink what a word processor needs to do. Basics like multi level numbering are impossible to teach users how to do. These apps are truly dinosaurs and we need a new killer app word processor suitable for writing books, html and pdf documentation including table of contents, indexes, appendices and normal stuff you find in documents.

John was quoting from a slap dash post.

I don’t know if John agreed with this or if he was pointing it out as a rubbish comment,  John? (well someone in Tucson is reading this blog!)
Anyway, I kinda agree. Not totally, I’m sure you can teach people to do multi level numbering, but yeah have you ever used words index or table of contents functions in anger?

When Binder [1 2] still shipped with office it never really worked, but was a great idea. And that’s the thing. MS dropped Binder, why? – because “usability tests”, shown no one used it. Of course no one did. It did nothing but crash ever time you looked at the ruddy thing, but hell I still tried to. You see an 80 page Word documents sucks! It sucks, it sucks, case closed. Ok, ok.

What’s my point? I’m not sure, partly that I wish MS would properly correct and improve the existing feature of their products, and I guess Office 12 is trying to some extent to do this. Oh, it’s 01:30 am I’m listen to BGM and I have another Paragon model to run before I can leave work, I guess I’m a bit grumpy!

XLL update

David Gainer was kind enough to answer the mulit thread .xll question

Excel 97 does not support multi-threading. I can see what I wrote was confusing. What I meant was that if you had some XLLs that you have been using for some versions that you want to participate in mult-threaded calc, you can recompile them after adding the flag and they will work you don’t need to update anything to use the Excel12 API. Is that clearer?

If you’ve not seen Dave’s blog check it out, Dave keeps it updated and replys to many of the comments, very good work!