Recently in Microsoft Category

Microsoft announced Office 2010 pricing at CES. Office Home and Business includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook. There’s no upgrade pricing at the moment, but the Product Key Card version will retail for $199.

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Microsoft has now released documentation for the Office binary formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) in addition to kicking off the project for an open source binary to Open XML converter (.doc to .docx)   The threw in WMF for good measure.

The translator is great for anyone going to Open XML or those who want to work on XML-based documents.  It’s also cool to see what’s actually in the binary file format.

I recently found myself with a couple hundred vCards I needed in Outlook 2007.  Sadly, Outlook wants you to either import them individually or Save and Close each one.  Thankfully, there's a workaround.  I'm doing this with Vista and Office 2007.  I don't have my XP/2003 setup in front of me right now, so I can't test it.  But here's what you do:

1) Open Windows Contacts

2) Click Import

3) Select vCard (VCF file)

4) Select all the contacts to import, then click Open.  Let it do its thing.  OK.  So, now they're in Windows Contacts, and Outlook know how to import contacts from here.

5) Switch to Outlook.

6) Choose File, then Import and Export.

7) Choose "Import Internet Mail and Addresses", then click OK

8) Select Outlook Express...or Windows Mail.  Uncheck Import Mail.

9) Click Next.

10) Decide how you want to handle duplicates, then click Finish.

Voila!

Im a little late in this one, but I realized it’s a little harder to create OpenXML documents (like Word 2007) that I thought. While it’s still really easy to parse the actual XML code, you then have to ZIP it all with the right “stories” etc. Yuck!

Technorati Tags: office, xml

I missed this awhile back I think (it was actually about one year ago). Jensen Harris has a great post on customizing the Ribbon.

Technorati Tags: office, xml

IEBlog : IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine

Many of you have asked how to run IE6 and IE7 in a side by side environment. As Chris Wilson blogged about early this year, it’s unfortunately not so easy to do. There are workarounds, but they are unsupported and don’t necessarily work the same way as IE6 or IE7 would work when installed properly. As Chris said, the best way to use multiple versions of IE on one machine is via virtualization. Microsoft has recently made Virtual PC 2004 a free download; we’ve taken advantage of that by releasing a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development. The image is time bombed and will no longer function after April 1, 2007. We hope to continue to provide these images in the future as a service to web developers. I’m still not sure I’m thrilled with upgrading to IE on my primary box, but it might be the best of all worlds.

Step by step: Configure the 2007 Office system for a hard disk image

TechNet has a good article on how to use the OCT for Office 2007 install.  This takes the place of the Custom Installation Wizard found in previous Office Resource Kits (ORK).

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.

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.