Category: Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office 2013 Inside Out is now available for purchase

As of today, Amazon says Microsoft Office Inside Out: 2013 Edition is ready to ship. Woo hoo!

If you preordered the book, you’ll receive it automatically. If you didn’t preorder, you can purchase it now for $31.20.

The DRM-free Kindle edition is a couple dollars less from Amazon ($29.64). But here’s a pro tip: If you buy the print edition, you get a DRM-free PDF copy at no cost, and you can upgrade to to DRM-free ebook editions in EPUB and MOBI (Kindle-compatible) formats for a few dollars.

Disclosure: When you buy through the affiliate links on this page, I make a few extra bucks, for which my family thanks you.

Pre-order Office 2013 Inside Out

We’ve finished reviewing the final page proofs of Microsoft® Office Inside Out: 2013 Edition and the book is off to the printer. Our team did an amazing job, and if you use Office 2013 (either as a perpetual license, a volume license, or part of an Office 365 subscription), I’m confident you’ll find some good and useful stuff here.

It’s available for pre-order from Amazon now, for $29.00, which is 47% off the full retail price. And when you get the paperback you get the e-book version for free, in your choice of PDF, Kindle, EPUB, or other standard, DRM-free formats.

Amazon.com pre-order

Microsoft® Office Inside Out: 2013 Edition

The book has full coverage of the five core applications in Office 2013: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote, with additional material on Access, Publisher, and Lync. We also explain the difference between Office 2013 and Office 365 and help you decide which edition is the right one for you.

Disclosure: I make a small commission when you purchase through the Amazon affiliate links on this page.

Why the wait? Here’s why.

In today’s e-mail newsletter from Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post, he notes that Windows Vista and Office 2007 have released to manufacturing and asks a legitimate question:

Neither of those products will be in stores until next year. Vista will make its retail debut Jan. 30, while Office doesn’t have a date more specific than “early 2007.” (I’d love to know what Microsoft will be doing with this theoretically finished release between now and then: Rewriting help files? Redesigning the box? Picking out ads?)

Here’s the legitimate answer:

Part of the delay is pure logistics. Getting disks pressed, documentation printed, boxes shrink-wrapped, and everything on retail shelves takes time. PC makers need time as well to verify that the final bits work with their hardware and utilities.

But the most important gating factor is waiting for third parties to get drivers and applications ready. Releasing a new Windows version involves a large ecosystem of devices, applications, and utilities. Many of the companies responsible for those products don’t want to release beta versions of their products.

As Microsoft’s Barry Goffe, Director of Windows Client Product Management, told me earlier this month: “Once we RTM, it takes a while for OEMs to write their drivers, build their PCs, and so on. A bunch of [device manufacturers] have deprioritized their driver work because they’re betting we’re going to keep slipping. The best way for them to bump up the priority will be for us to ship. It’s a little dose of reality for these guys.”

Office 2007, Windows Vista (nearly) ready for download

I’ve read reports from two Microsoft bloggers (Maria Johansson from the Asia Pacific region and Daniel Melanchthon from Germany) that TechNet and MSDN subscribers can download the final released copies of Office 2007 and Windows Vista, complete with product keys, this week. The official dates are today, November 12, for Office 2007, and Friday, November 17, for Vista.

In fact, Maria’s post says that Office 2007 should be available for download, but I’m not seeing it when I log on to my TechNet Plus account.

(… Update 2:30PM Pacific: It’s there now.)

Of course, the RTM bits for both products are already circulating around various BitTorrent networks, with reports of one crack that exploits a weakness in the beta activation code that should be blocked within a matter of days. And so the arms race officially begins.

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The Office 2007 UI Bible

Patrick Schmid has done a public service for anyone just getting started with Office 2007. He began at Jensen Harris’s superb Office User Interface Blog 

The title is not very exciting, and could easily be mistaken to be a blog by an Office user. I personally like to think of it as the “Office UI Bible” or the “Ribbon UI Bible”. Jensen’s blog is the definite resource and word on the new Ribbon UI. Jensen is the program manager in charge of the Office UI team.

Patrick correctly calls it “a must-read for everyone interested in UI design, a should-read for everyone developing add-ins for Office and a recommended-read for everyone.”

The only problem is that Harris has written so much that the content can be overwhelming, and trying to follow it in chronological order isn’t really productive. So Patrick created a custom category index of the most important posts he found there.

The number of posts though has been so voluminous, for several months e.g. there was a new post daily, that it is difficult for someone just joining the Office 2007 frenzy to find the pieces he or she is interested in. With this post, I’ll attempt to provide an index to the most important posts on Jensen’s blog. Whenever I have a post that talks about a particular category, you can get to it by following the link behind the category title itself.

If anyone wants to do the same for this site, just let me know. 😉

Source: Patrick Schmid’s The Office UI Bible

The return of the Word macro virus

Well, here’s something I haven’t seen in a while: a Word macro virus.

An e-mail message appeared in my Junk Mail folder, purporting to be from someone in France who had been having some trouble transferring funds from one account to another and saw my e-mail address on a list of other addresses associated with the transaction, and blah blah blah. Typical scammer BS.

There was a Zip file (Transfer.zip) attached to the message, which contained a Word document. When I opened the document in Word 2007, I got this error:

That was followed by Enable Content and Trust Center buttons.

Of course, you should never run a macro in a Word document you don’t trust. And under the default settings for Word 2003 you couldn’t do that even if you said yes, because macros are only allowed if they’re signed with a digital certificate from a trusted root authority. In Word 2007, security is even tighter: macros are only allowed to run if they are in documents stored in trusted locations.

Instead of enabling this macro (do I look crazy?), I opened the Visual Basic Editor and looked at its code:

Ah, it’s trying to create an executable file in the root directory of the system drive and then run it. Presumably that big block of gibberish in the center is designed to create a buffer overflow, as described in this SANS bulletin, and it’s probably a variation of the Kukudro Trojan, which arrives in this form.

Moral? Don’t open attachments sent to you by strangers. In fact, even if it appears to be from someone you know, don’t open it unless you were expecting it and you are confident it is what it appears to be.

Setting expectations for Vista and Office ship dates

Bill Gates just gave a speech in South Africa. According to the AP report:

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Tuesday there was an 80 percent chance the company’s next-generation operating system, Vista, would be ready in January.

[…]

“We got to get this absolutely right,” Gates said. “If the feedback from the beta tests shows it is not ready for prime time, I’d be glad to delay it.”

[…]

Gates said he hoped the next version of Office would be ready in December.

Hope, as they say, is not a development plan.

Without seeing the exact transcript of BillG’s words, I can’t really say what he meant. But the formulation “would be ready” implies “released to manufacturing (RTM).” If so, then the January date for Windows Vista represents a delay of about two months based on the last announcement from Microsoft. That sounds about right to me.

The one thing I think you can say with confidence based on this report is that you won’t be able to buy Office 2007 or Windows Vista this year.

(via Microsoft News Tracker)

That sound you hear is my head hitting the desk

Microsoft delays Office 2007 again:

Microsoft said Thursday that it is making another slight delay to the planned arrival time for Office 2007, citing performance concerns with recent test versions.

The software maker now plans to finish the code for the revamped Office suite by the end of the year, with a mainstream launch in “early 2007.”

“Based on internal testing and the beta 2 feedback around product performance, we are revising our development schedule to deliver the 2007 system release by the end of year 2006, with broad general availability in early 2007,” a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail. “Feedback on quality and performance will ultimately determine the exact dates.”

And, of course, this means that Windows Vista is probably going to slip as well. Because Office is the one that’s in good shape.

Ship it when it’s ready, not a day earlier. It’s good to see that Microsoft would rather risk some embarrassment than hit the deadlines regardless of the product’s quality.