Niklas' blog

Want to know what type of file is hiding behind a weird file-extension? Check this site and quickly find out.

A bunch of pictures of from a PS3 game is found here. Am I waiting? Hell yes, despite [avatar:http://niklasblog.com/bilder/avatars/rade.gif]Rade[/avatar] purchasing an Xbox 360!

Here’s an interesting look at a Linux sysadmin’s toolbox, with a bunch of good tips on tools to use.

This is a very interesting page where you can let the top MS Office-honchos show you the great news of MS Office 2007, which of course is the coming version of Office 2007. I’ve written about many of these features before, in the days when Office 2007 was still known as Office 12, all corners were sharp and the graphics-engine wasn’t maxed out the way it is now, and now – things are looking good, and it’s obvious that Microsoft has been studying MS Office-users with great care, to know what to enhance in MS Office.

The video is a little more than 13 minutes long and features some very user-friendly scenarios (complete with Enya-styled, irritating background music – come on, Microsoft! You’re the biggest company in the world, and cannot afford more than this Richard Clayderman-ish twinkling? Hire my guitar skills! Or use Robert Fripp more, please!) where the MS Office-programs are involved. The most interesting thing to know is: when you click something, the interesting stuff pops up in the ribbon. That’s old news for those of us who know Office 2007 better than most, but is quite breathtaking for normal users to see. Whenever I show this when holding classes in MS Excel, people are quite stunned, even if most don’t know how to take it in. It’s overwhelming once you see it first, as MS Office has never been this re-vamped before, and it’s all worth it. On the other hand, if Microsoft wouldn’t renew itself, it would lose horribly to OpenOffice.

Clicking on something and having only the relevant content popping up in the ribbon, is called “contextual tabs”. Everything is a lot more graphic now. Instead of digging through countless menus, boxes and searching for it, you will have galleries. Yep, just like it sounds, you get loads of graphic alternatives instead of having to click until you’re fed up. I’ll give you an example.

Imagine you’re working in Word with much text. You insert a picture, and you want to make it look great next to the text. In any version prior to Word 2007, you would have to right-click the picture, choose “format picture”, pick the Layout-tab, mark the way the picture should behave to the text, say you want it to the left-hand side of the text? Pick that, click OK – and then you’d see the result. If you want to see what the picture would look like on the right-hand side of the text? Redo. Yuck.

In Word 2007, you click the picture and then click a tab-option to see a gallery. By simply holding the mouse-pointer over the options, you see them displayed in your document without even selecting anything. That’s efficiency.