Where’s Ed?

My favorite Webmoron points out that I’ve been, shall we say, missing in action for about a month. Well, at least someone noticed!

I’ve been in heads-down mode cranking out yet another book, this one an update to Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP with Woody Leonhard. Needless to say, I’ve been buried in Word, Excel, Outlook and the rest of the Microsoft Office 2003 suite. Oops, I meant system. The marketing gurus at MS have decided that this isn’t just a collection of programs, it’s now an integrated system whose parts all work together in mostly perfect harmony. Well, not quite. But as someone who’s been writing about Office for a decade, I have to say this upgrade is impressive.

I’ve been using Office 2003 on my main production system now for more than six months, most recently with Beta 2. If you’re already an Office XP user, you’ll have no trouble making the transition. And if you live in Outlook, this upgrade is an absolute slam dunk, if for no other reason than the I-can’t-believe-it-really-works-this-well junk mail filtering. When I woke up at 5am this morning (after a restful four hours’ sleep), Outlook had successfully intercepted 29 pieces of spam, allowing the 7 good messages to make it through. On average, I get more than 100 pieces of spam each day, and Outlook is blocking about 90% of it, typically.

Oh, and I’ve also landed a gig with Microsoft.com, producing a series of every-other-week columns for the Windows XP Expert Zone. You can check it out for yourself here.

So I’ve been just a little bit busy…

OK, Lloyd, the ball’s in your court…