Jag var på ett AddSkills-seminarium om Microsoft Office 2010 idag, och bestämde mig för att anteckna litet om det som skiljer Office 2007 från Office 2010. Read it and weep learn!

Tips: kolla in dessa fina MS-guider – på engelska – om det nya i Office 2010.

Tips 2: i går (2010-09-07) publicerade Microsoft ett gäng nya guider om hur man lättast går över från MS Office 2003 till v2010. De finns här, på engelska.

As Lifehacker has this excellent post up on the subject, I won’t bore you with my droolings, but will mention that Soluto is a nice way to shorten the time it takes for your Windows-based computer to boot.

Once you’ve installed the software and rebooted your PC, Soluto springs into action, tracking every single process that runs during the boot process, and then allows you to easily drill down into the list of processes to see exact times for each one.

To make it easier for the layman to understand what processes can be removed, the applications are grouped into “No-brainer” or “Potentially removable” groups.According to our conversations with Roee Adler from Soluto, the software will always be free for end-users. [...] Soluto’s servers in order to analyze your system, but they assured us that it was limited strictly to data about the processes, drivers, and system components, and no personal information is transmitted or kept anywhere.

Here’s a film from the company that makes Soluto, which explains all visually.

You know what a pain it is to reinstall your favourite software following a computer change/reinstallation? Finding the apps, downloading them, installing them – unchecking that damned Google Toolbar – and then doing it again for the next time? Might be time to check this out as Windows 7 is out and it’s reinstall time for a lot of us.

I really like Ninite¹ for this.

All you do, is visit their site, check the boxes for the apps you want, click the “Get installer” button and download the small exe-file. Run that file on an Internet-connected computer, and the apps are now downloaded, installed without crapware such as the Google Toolbar and the likes, and you’re off.

Almost all of the apps – except for Microsoft Office, of course – are freeware, and as I’ve used this site during the beta phase I’ve seen more and more apps getting included.

Brilliant, and totally free.

By the way, if you’re an admin, check this page for their info on the coming premium fixes, which are however at the time of writing this available for all.

1. Formerly known as Volery, they re-launched yesterday with a new name and site.

The pros

• It’s fast. I think MS pondered how to make the suite work faster. True, getting MS Office speedier usually is one of the last things Microsoft concentrates on before shipping MS Office, but this time it’s out-of-the-box good so far.

• By clicking the Office button in any of the Office apps, you used to see the only drop-down menu that was left after MS introduced the ribbon in MS Office 2007, but now that’s gone as well; instead there’s something that MS has named Microsoft Office Backstage, which takes up the entire screen. It basically gathers everything you can do to output what you’ve created/opened in MS Office. Smart. Here’s a little film I’ve shot that shows Microsoft Office Backstage; do note that Print Preview is now meshed into Backstage instead of opening a separate window. That and the printing options are designed well. I also love how Backstage lets you link URLs and web-sites to a document, from the Info category, really nifty! Here’s Backstage:

• Paste Preview. This also flows through most of the MS Office 2010 applications. If you copy something, then either click the arrow below the paste button or just paste the contents somewhere and then press Ctrl on your keyboard, you’ll get to see a gallery containing different paste options; it’s also application specific, so while in MS Excel 2010 you will see options like Paste Formulas, Paste Formulas & Number Formatting and Transpose, it looks like this in MS Word:

By holding the mouse pointer over any item you get to see the item previewed live, i.e. before clicking. I’ve recorded this little film that shows the two different methods.

• Insert screenshot. In almost every MS Office 2010 application there is now, under the Insert menu, the option to take a screenshot and automatically have it inserted in your current work; you can do this either by picking a screen-shot from a gallery – which consists of previews of full-size screen-shots of every window you have open in Windows – or by capturing a region. Here’s a shot of this:

• Office File Validation. This is essentially a great security-enhancer. If you try to open a file in an MS Office format older than 2007, it gets checked to see that it conforms to the new standards; if not, it’s opened in Protected View, a sandboxed environment and – according to Microsoft – “Even if the file is malicious, it can’t get out of the sandbox and do harm to your computer or data.”¹

Another plus is that Microsoft Office 2010 will warn you every time you open a file you’ve downloaded from the Internet, and you are forced to click an Edit-button if you want to make changes, like here:

• OpenType typography! What’s this, then?

  Microsoft are finally including support for so-called OpenType typography, which means that a) fonts will behave different than before by using ligatures, kerning metrics, stylistic sets, and other features, and b) people who are interested in typography won’t be half as vexed as before. In MS Office 2010, you’ll find all of the new typographic options through Fonts: Advanced.

  A new font, Gabriola, is introduced with Microsoft Office 2010 as well as Windows 7. This is a very good PR font that allows the use of the OpenType stylistics, e.g. the cool twirls seen in the screen-shot below, which you could not do in previous versions of MS Office:

Of course, the stylistics only work with fonts that support the OpenType typography and contain the technology required to make letters dance on page.

• Sparklines in Excel 2010. In Excel 2007, Microsoft introduced conditional formatting that allowed charts to display within cells, without a user having to Insert: Chart. In Excel 2010, Microsoft introduces Sparklines, that display like the pic below:

• Slicers in Excel 2010. Anybody who’s ever made a pivot table knows it’s a pain to filter results after you’ve created your pivot table; Slicers help you do this really nicely on-the-fly.

I’ll quote Paul Thurrott on how Slicers work²:

Slicers appear as separate objects on the spreadsheet and then can be moved around and resized like charts and graphs. Slicers are live–so as data changes in the underlying PivotTable, the Slicers are updated as well–and interactive, meaning that you can select filter fields on the fly.

• Accessibility checker. Finally, Microsoft have included a way to “scan for information in your document that people with disabilities could have difficulties reading”, according to MS Word 2010. Problem is, when I opened a very simple, text-only .docx document that I created using Word 2007 and tried to check it, MS Word 2010 said “Problem running the accessibility checker. Cannot check the current file type for accessibility issues.” Eh, say no go. When I – only disabilities including asthma and some allergies – cannot even use the service, there’s disability issues, alright. I’ve used the Send-A-Smile button for this, and of course dispatched a frown.

• Microsoft Web Applications 2010

  Yep, the Microsoft Office suite is finally coming to the web. It’s said to work flawlessly both on Firefox and Safari, but we’ll see about that. I wouldn’t want to be the system admin that upgrades Firefox/Office 2010 and unleashes the wrath of my users… Also, the web versions do not contain the full functionality of the desktop version of the Office 2010 suite.

  The biggest pro with this is that users will be able to work together on Word documents simultaneously. On the other hand, Zoho, ThinkFree and others have been doing this for quite some time with their online apps.

  A video from Microsoft on the web apps:

• Image editing: background removing. Wee! Now you can easily insert a picture in Office 2010, and by a couple of clicks remove the background so that only what’s in the foreground of the picture ends up in your file. Presto. Nice, Microsoft.

• Video editing in PowerPoint 2010. Apart from the new option to embed videos through web sites (just paste the embed code after you click through Insert: Video: Video through online site), we now have video editing! Woo! Only simple editing, but it’s point and click, actually:

• Office Mobile 2010

  Microsoft introduce Office Mobile 2010, that allows you to – through installation of SharePoint server technology – view Office files that are online; these will be rendered by the SharePoint server, and of course the pro with this is that you’ll always be able to see the very latest versions of the files. I’ve no idea if some type of push-technology will be incorporated³, that would be able to let you know when content has been changed. Very little is said about Office Mobile 2010 so far. This video says little but shows a tad of the interface on some smartphone.

  

  Here’s a bit from a Microsoft sales pitch on the matter:

• 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office 2010 are available. If you’re using big files containing huge amounts of data, e.g. gigabyte-sized Excel spreadsheets, you’ll fare much better using the 64-bit version of MS Office 2010.

The cons

• Outlook 2010 will render HTML e-mails by using Word 2010; this might sound like little to gripe about, but there are a lot of web-savvy people out there who hate the notion of this. Basically, it means Microsoft – who have pushed their desire to move further towards open standards – are yet again going against the grain. This picture shows the problem easily:

This site is dedicated to fixing this issue, with more than 25,000 tweets supporting it.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more.

• What happened to Microsoft Office Mobile Device?

• Office 2010 only gives its all if you’re running Windows 7, which is Microsoft’s coming operating system which will be released on 2009-10-22; for instance, this is what the Windows 7 Jumplist can look like when right-clicking the Outlook button in the task bar.

Click as you might, there is nothing like that in previous versions of Windows; not that they support Jumplists, anyway…

Also, Windows 7 brings DirectWrite:

Many of today’s applications need to support high-quality text rendering, resolution-independent outline fonts, and full Unicode text and layout support. DirectWrite, a new DirectX component, provides these features and more [...] DirectWrite also provides low-level glyph rendering APIs for developers who want to perform their own layout and Unicode-to-glyph processing.⁴

In plain English, this enables users of Windows 7 to display fonts more clearly than users of previous versions of Windows.

Final words

So, what do I make of it?

Well, to individual users of Microsoft Office 2007 I’d say don’t upgrade unless you need the tweaks mentioned above, and to corporate users I’d say if you really need what the new SharePoint-based (e.g. live chatting through the apps using Office Communicator) and the mobile features bring to the table, go forth.

Even though pricing has not been established at the point of this going to post, there will be five different editions available:

All in all, there are a lot of cosmetic changes involved that I haven’t mentioned as they’re quite tiny. Still, I do love how Microsoft have created good-looking icon images for improvement of the ribbon (mostly in MS Outlook 2010), but also elsewhere, e.g. in MS Word 2010, where sifting through the gallery of templates is concerned. I also like how MS Excel now default auto-saves files; imagine you’re editing a saved spreadsheet in Excel, you quit Excel and answer “Don’t Save” on whether you’d like to, you start up Excel again and hit the Backstage, where you see your recent files; there you’ll find the one you didn’t save, titelled “[file name] (when I closed without saving)“. Nice. There’s also a new Mini Translator built-into MS Office 2010. MS Word 2010 contains a new Navigation Pane that kills the previous experience by being really straight-forward; it also allows you to search and find words and phrases very easily.

Little things like that are really nice. And, as first mentioned, Office 2010 is really fast. I’ve tried it both on an Asus Eee 1000H netbook and a HP Compaq desktop computer, and I’m a very happy camper. Visually, I feel as though Microsoft has cleaned up the user interface on MS Office 2010 in comparison with MS Office 2007. It’s the little things, and I’m really looking forward to see what will be changed as MS Office 2010 is subject to change, new features, removal of features et.c. Exciting!

Microsoft technical preview sales pitch on the main apps:

Word 2010

Excel 2010

PowerPoint 2010

1. As told here.
2. Culled from here.
3. And if so, most likely only for users of smartphones running Windows Mobile.
4. Culled from pages 34-35 of Windows 7 Developer Guide.

As I haven’t written anything geeky in a while, I think it’s time!

The above image shows Chart Advisor, which is an add-in for use in MS Excel 2007. From the company page about the magic:

Chart Advisor is a prototype that provides an alternate approach for creating charts in Excel 2007. This add-in uses an advanced rules engine to scan your data and, based on predefined rules, displays charts according to score. Top scoring charts are available for you to preview, tweak, and insert into your Excel worksheet.

Microsoft have got a video up there, but screw that, this add-in is great in theory – but doesn’t really work in practice. I even used the sample data that Microsoft recommend using here; the Chart Advisor suggest one type of chart but, I cannot even use region names as placeholders; true, this is a prototype, but come on! Little can be learned through trying to use the Chart Advisor oneself. I’ve even created a couple of rudimentary tables of data and tried to use those, but Chart Advisor just says “Chart Advisor could not find an appropriate chart for the data currently selected.” Yuck.

Still, I’ll have it installed as it can be automatically upgraded whenever Microsoft releases a new version. When working, I guess it’ll work as a nice step for people who would love some automatic, quick help on creating charts and don’t want to learn how to create pivot tables to quickly re-generate charts to show what they need.

Two days ago, Mia and I saw the premiere of “Crowned“, a reality-based TV-show pageant, where a bunch of teams, each consisting of a mother with her daughter, compete for money and fortunes. Carson Kressley is great fun as one of the hosts, and his humor and down-to-earthy nature is needed. I like to see the plastic mom-and-daughter-combos desintegrate as they are criticised for being plastic, which leads their façade to disintegrate. That’s when they display their true selves. That feels very American TV-show to me.

Three days ago I made a horrendous mistake. I installed a little piece of software on my Windows-based PC which infected said computer with SmitFraud. Pains, pains. I quickly got rid of it once I’d found SmitFraudFix, a freeware. simple-to-use program that I recommend. Thereafter, I switched antivirus-software from Clamwin to AVG Free.

Apart from infecting your Windows DNS/hosts settings, SmitFraud-based malware often cause Internet Explorer to run wild, install a variety of dangerous add-ons, direct you to haywire sites that promise to cure your ills – which they of course won’t – and threaten to kill your kittens. So, what to do? To save you, Michael Howard, a senior security program manager in the Secure Engineering group at Microsoft, has written a utility called DropMyRights, that allows you to run programs in a non-administrator context. He’s written a little tricker – yet more configurable – program called SetSAFER, that allows you to run programs in another context than the one your user account runs in. For instance, if your Windows account has administrator rights, you can do anything. And therefore, as Internet Explorer runs using your account, it has admin rights, too. Therefore, wouldn’t it be great to run Internet Explorer in a user context? Damn right. This can be applied to other web browsers or programs, e.g. Firefox, MSN Messenger and Skype, to prohibit your computer from getting turned into a zombie or worse.

Why has Prada made a raincoat in latex?

I do love bands that let people listen to their latest single in its entirety. Dirty Pretty Things’ “Tired Of England”, listen by pressing the button: . Or you could listen to Glasvegas’ wonderful single “Geraldine” by pressing this one: . Or you could renew your world of thinking by listening to Black Pus’ “In The Garden Of Brackish Pus”: .

I’m thinking of purchasing an Apple Mac Mini to run both Windows and OS X. This would enable me to get rid of my big, stationary PC and save space as it currently takes up quite some space.

Yesterday I went on a little road-trip. Here’s video from the north of Stockholm city; the place we drove into is called Fridhemsplan.

OS X

Yeah, it’s all about Leopard, dropping in October. My fave features:

64-bit: yeah, stability. 64 bits are way better than 32 in terms of speed and stability. One version even supports supports both 32-bit and 64-bit apps.

Stacks: a seemingly nice way to organise your dock. You gather files in your dock as stacks and as you click them, they spread out. You can configure a stack for containing your downloaded files. Every new file’s added on top, and the rest are ordered chronologically. It can be used as an application launcher.

Spotlight: it now searches through other Macs and servers.

Quick Look: allows you to really preview files without opening the applications. E.g. you can browse through a Pages presentation in the Finder; the only limitation to what can be “quick looked through” is on the developer’s side.

.mac: now serves as hub to allow you to always find your computers. This means your home computer only has to be connected through .mac in order for your work computer to find files and other stuffs on it; I wonder how transparent this really is. Will one be able to use Spotlight to search another computer? What about the security aspects? This sounds a bit like the volatility of Skype.

iChat: better audio, tabbed chats and effects. Taking the piss out of Microsoft equals good.

Dashboard: widgets will be comically easy to create from existing web pages/parts, thanks to a small tool, allowing the user to basically scissor out what’s important and let that little part update itself in the Dashboard. Excellent, moahaha. It’s demoed here.

Windows

WTF? Yeah.

Safari: now available as beta for Windows, presenting mad rendering times. Should be interesting and will hopefully put more pressure on Microsoft. I loathe using IE7. What would be better, though, would be if Safari on Win XP actually worked, yeah. It loads, but doesn’t let me enter any text, anywhere. It doesn’t load apple.com properly. It doesn’t display any text on the menues. Blargh. I love it when Apple diss Microsoft but this is just laaame.

iPhone

They showed off a lot of developer stuff, AJAX, web services, and they basically want to say that you have to write a few lines of code to make the iPhone go McGyver.

Today, Plazes launched its new version of the software, also bringing stuff to the table that makes it really usable and web 2.0-y. You no longer need to install the app to use the system and can now let people know where you are going to be at a certain date². 1984 in a nutshell? Bring it to me.

TechCrunch has already written a good synopsis of what the new Plazes means, but I’ll expand on that.

Even though installing the software (known as Plazer, available both for Windows and OS X, although the OS X-version hangs every time I update where I’m at) is no longer necessary, it’s nice to have installed just to see your friends switch places; when they do, a box pops up above your system tray (Windows) and gives you the news. Nice! Now, if only my enemies would do the same.

Warning! Nerdy stuff ahead: I’m still wondering how come the box pops up three times as I update. Once to notify my new place (fair enough), once to say what I’m doing there (just irritating) and a third time…to please the tech gods? I hope it’s merely a sign that The Demon of Newly Upgraded Systems is cursing Plazes, and not that the system isn’t properly tested before launch.³ The developers have probably been under a lot of stress since launching the new version.

I like it, especially now that it’s no-app-required, letting people know where I’ve been in the past and where I’ll be. You’ll see this on my Plazes profile page. I like the idea of groups, but for this to be successful, I think a lot of users are needed. You can add a place to a group and then see them all together, e.g. this group I created for bunching music shops in Stockholm.

The real let-down with this is that I’d love to integrate Plazes with Upcoming, last.fm and Facebook events, but then again, they’re all pretty uptight about sharing their respective info. Say what? They want to prosper? Mash them up, please.

1. Technically speaking, “based on IP address, network IDs from routers and other information”, says TechCrunch.
2. Not within a certain time-frame, though, which I feel is bad.
3. The fact that my flash-badge still says I was somewhere “and hour ago” is probably just a little misspelling. As well as the link to the Mayor of Berlin’s supposed Plazes-page leading to a 404 error-page, which I mentioned in a comment in this post quite some time ago and isn’t corrected. Their web-page says the Plazer still isn’t available for installation, but it is – it automatically updates the old client. Call me whiny, but these scattered bugs and errors tell me the system may hold other little surprises in store.

And here’s why the US Department of Transport has now banned MS Office 2007 and Windows Vista. Turnaround’s a bitch, you habitual line-stepper.

Last but not least, let’s not forget that Microsoft apparently benefits from pirating their software. According to themselves. And that doesn’t stop MS from (at least indirectly) using pirated software themselves, e.g. this time.

Interestingly, a way to brute-force your way to a valid Windows Vista keygen is here, about the same time a cracked version of Windows Vista Ultimate made its way onto the Internet. Maybe now, Steve Ballmer’s claim that pirating has damaged sales of Windows Vista will be based on reality, and not the near-complete lack of drivers and applications for the OS.

I’m looking forward to hook up with Scrybe, an online organiser with extremely nice features, such as drag-and-drop, creating to-do-lists by pasting series of data from apps such as MS Excel and MS Project plus very nice ways to use data from web-pages and present it neatly. Check out the video preview.

Virtual Ubiquity seems to offer a really nice online word-processor; judging from the pretty pictures, it’s more influenced from the iLife-suite from Apple than MS Office.

Adobe Photoshop will be remade as an online tool. Either it will rock or it will suck the life out of web 2.0 totally; I’m hoping for extreme collaborative features, a lot of support for homebrewed plugins, filter, et.c. and a lot of non-IE-support.

WordPress is now out in a new version due to a nifty thing; a hacker placed “exploitable code” in the downloadable WordPress-package and presto, people had turned their blog into a box of doom. Not to worry, it’s all patched and tweaked now, but this is just another example of how client-side tech will 0wn your computer/network/life; when the code can be run through your web browser, where’s the security?