Amazon has a research task pane that allows you to research and search from products from within Word or Excel and add product info into your document. Snazzy.
April 2006 Archives
Microsoft’s taken off the gloves by releasing Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition for free. VMware be warned! VMware has only released the VMware Player for free. The battle for virtualization is on! Exciting times with the free VMware Player, free VirtualPC Server, and Xen, Boot Camp, and Parallels.
Microsoft Windows Live ID sounds very suspiciously like .Net (now in the neutered form of Passport) all over again with a few changes. From Trevin Chow:
“The current plan is that Windows Live ID will support both self-issued and third-party managed [InfoCards] as a mechanism to authenticate users when accessing Windows Live services. Subsequently, Windows Live ID will also issue managed cards to enable users to use their Windows Live ID with third parties.”
I like the 3rd party aspect of it, and I think this gives it a much better chance of success, depending on how much “control” Microsoft keeps. With the growing popularity and prevalence of the Microsoft Live products and families, I suspect we’ll be using Windows Live ID a great deal.
Here’s an absolutely huge collection and assortment of Macs of all sorts, and yes, they’re all gainfully employed at….Microsoft! (The Microsoft BU Mac Lab)
Cool slideshow on YouTube.com with screenshots of Windows from 1.01 to Vista. You’ve come a long way, baby!
Jensen Harris breaks out information on the new “gallery filters” featured in Office 2007 (more information on the new gallery control can be found here). His example is the new, much more robust Equation tool. It’s a very cool way to handle groups of related items.
The gallery is a major component of the new Office 2007 UI. I love the graphical, touchy-feely, WYSIWYG approach for many tasks, and I love the fact it’s so “live.” It is a major shift from the current UI, and, like the task pane, will definitely require an adjustment to the way we work with Office and train end-users.
By going the all-XML approach, Microsoft has made it much easier to understand the structure of Word documents and how the various “stories” and elements interact. Brian Jones has an excellent post about the basics of the Word document structure and then goes further by showing how that structure translates into the Open XML format. Things are so much easier now, assuming good document production processes and good document formatting. It also looks like it’ll be easier to “fix” malformed documents. This will hopefully lead to a number of quality tools that are less expensive than solutions from Microsystems or Levit & James.
Yes, this is really old news, but here it is anyway.
Once Office 2007 is released, Corel will add support for Open XML to the next version of Wordperfect.
From Brian Jones: Open XML Formats
I really like todays free template from A PowerPoint Blog. Oriental 01 has nice, warm, wood tones that don’t overpower with grain textures or other distracting items. I know I’ll use it in a slide deck soon.