Office 13 is going to actually be called Office 14, since there are some people who assign some negative significance to the number 13 (see Triskaidekaphobia).  Since this is clearly a significant concern in the world of computing, it seems natural to me that other areas of Microsoft's platform should work harder to avoid this unlucky ...

Earlier this week, the OpenXML document format was standardized by the ISO/IEC, with a huge 86% of voting countries favoring the format (news here, among other places).  While this is interesting and a win for anyone using Microsoft Office document formats (who isn't?), it's also a bit disappointing that those who opposed the format's ...

I've been living with Outlook 2007 since it shipped, and it's been pretty painful, but my life is in it so I'm stuck with it.  I've posted some Outlook tips in the past about how to deal with it not shutting down properly, and that has grown into a fairly sizable post with dozens of comments (and #1 for the search term outlook did not shut ...

I get a lot of email, like many people in our industry.  A lot of it is SPAM, but it's rare that any of that makes it to my inbox between SpamBayes and server-side anti-spam stuff running at ORCSWeb (the best hosting company around, IMHO).  Nonetheless, I tend to get inundated even with real email that requires my attention, and ...

Outlook 2007 has a number of issues with performance, one of which relates to downloads taking a very long time with POP3 email accounts.  Microsoft has recently published a KB article that should fix some scenarios where this occurs, specifically on Windows Vista, which may be caused by network hardware device(s) that do not support a ...

Here’s an exciting announcement related to the upcoming launch events for Windows Vista and Office 2007: Receive your FREE copy of Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and Microsoft Office Groove 2007* when you attend a Windows Vista, 2007 Microsoft Office system, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 launch event near you! At a ...

Last week I wrote about some fun I was having with Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts in Excel.  Well, yesterday I got around to recording a screencast video of how to create Pivot Chart reports using Reporting Services, Excel, and SoftArtisans Officewriter.  You can view it here: Using Reporting Services to Create Excel Pivot Chart Reports ...

I’ve been playing around with trying to analyze some performance data that spans numerous periods over time as well as multiple channels.  Using SQL I’m able to get some results that look something like this: Channel | Period | Activity A | 1/2006 | 1342 B | 1/2006 | 3433 A | 2/2006 | 1543 B | 2/2006 | 3785 However, going from ...

From Online Media Daily: Google Unveils Spreadsheet App by Shankar Gupta, Wednesday, Jun 7, 2006 6:00 AM ET IN A MOVE THAT GIVES consumers another reason to use Google for more than just Web searches, the company Tuesday released a spreadsheet program into a closed beta test. The new Google application ...

Office 2007 won’t include Save As PDF by default, but you can still get it as a free download.  More information here – I’ll save the analysis for others. http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06/02/613702.aspx