It’s official. Microsoft’s Chris_Pratley reports:
Steven Sinofsky announced during his wrap-up Q&A this morning that Office 12 apps (OneNote included) will support “Save as PDF” natively.
Excellent! This upgrade is sounding better and better all the time. I got my invitation to join the beta program the other day, and I’m really looking forward to it.
I installed Office 2003 Service Pack 2 and the latest junk e-mail filters for Outlook. The process was painless. And the anti-phishing features are interesting.
Details about bug fixes are in this KB article. After a five-minute search I can’t find any documentation of how the new anti-phishing features work. But these are my observations:
The forced conversion to plain text also renders a lot of spam unreadable, which is good. So-called online drugstores that try to disguise their content by burying the message text in a bunch of pseudo HTML just turn into so much gibberish.
What if the junk/phishing filters catch a legitimate message by mistake? No problem. Drag it back into the Inbox or any other folder and it’s displayed in its original format, complete with clickable links.
This is a simple but very effective fix. If you use Outlook 2003, go get it!
Update: Thanks to Rick in the comments for finding this link to Microsoft’s brand-new Help topic: Block or unblock links in suspicious phishing messages. In addition to the features I noted above, there’s a new link-blocking behavior that applies to messages that contain suspicious links but aren’t moved to the Junk E-mail folder. Here’s a screen from the Help topic:
Unlike the spam filtering, this classification isn’t retroactive; it applies only to new messages as they’re received. So I won’t be able to see it in action (and show it to you) until I receive a new, suspicious phishing attempt that doesn’t get classified as spam. We’ll see how long that takes.
If you subscribe to Microsoft Update, this should show up automatically in the next few days, but you can download it here:
The most interesting change is the addition of a new Phishing Protection feature to the Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter. If you have Office 2003 SP2 and the latest Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter Update, this feature will be turned on by default. I’ll get a screen shot and more details after I’ve had a chance to look at it.
No, that’s not the projected population of Guantanamo Bay in 2008. It’s the new maximum capacity of a worksheet in Microsoft Excel 12. The word comes from David Gainer, Group Program Manager for the Excel team at Microsoft, in his new blog:
Probably the most common question the Excel team gets from our customers is “when are you going to add more rows/more columns/more rows and more columns”. There are many different scenarios behind these requests. Some customers want to be able to analyze more data than Excel has rows, some customers want to track more daily information than Excel has columns, and other customers want to perform matrix math on large matrices of thousands of elements. There are plenty of other scenarios too. Well, the answer to the question is “in Excel 12.” Specifically, the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That’s 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV.
I shudder to think what the screen shots will look like when we get to work on Special Edition Using Office 12.
(via Excel Watch)
Internet Explorer has a very cool feature. When you find a page you like, you can click File, Send, Link by E-mail to open a new e-mail message with your link included as an attachment and as text.
Unfortunately, someone forgot to send the memo to the folks who designed Outlook. In their zeal to block dangerous attachments (a campaign that has been amazingly effective), they added shortcuts ending with the .URL extension to the list of unsafe attachments. That means when you try to send a link from Internet Explorer using any version of Outlook since Outlook 2000 SP3, you get an error message instead of a usable message.
The solution? Take your pick of three workarounds:
Joe Wilcox was at the PDC and had these post-show thoughts:
Much of the [Office] stuff Microsoft showed off seemed very insubstantial, like works in progress. Early works in progress. The forms stuff demoed well, yet felt very surface area. Maybe the breakout sessions got down to business (I simply couldn’t go to them all). But I talked to some other people checking out the Office breakouts and most had more questions than answers.
Maybe the Office folks are holding back–and that would be pretty reasonable this far from launch–but I don’t think so. Office gave out no code at the show, not even rough, preliminary stuff. Unlike the Windows team. Sure Windows Vista is rough, but developers for the platform have early code. If Office System also is a development platform and developers are supposed to be preparing now for Office 12 release, where’s the code?
Joe, that’s the way the Office team has been for as long as I can remember. The Windows team puts out lots of beta releases. After Windows Vista Build 5219, which was handed out to PDC attendees, they should release Beta 2 to a very wide audience, with monthly builds for technical beta testers and several release candidates. Knowledgeable product people are all over the beta newsgroups to answer questions in most areas.
This is the pattern the Windows team has followed on previous betas as well. If you’re a technical tester, you better have a high-speed connection, because you’ll be downloading lots and lots of bits.
By contrast, Office usually drops two betas, period. Interim builds are practically unheard of, and the level of information sharing in the beta newsgroups is similarly sparse. Testers talk to one another, but they don’t get much feedback from the product team.
Maybe I’m wrong and this will all change on this cycle, but I certainly wouldn’t bet on it.
Earlier today, Microsoft gave a public preview of Office 12 at the PDC in Los Angeles. You can read a press release disguised as an interview with an Office product manager here. It includes a couple of screen shots and a fairly high-tech/low-hype explanation of the principles behind the redesign. I liked this:
The number one design goal was to make it easier for people to find and use the product features needed to get the results they wanted. As such, we set about rethinking the UI from the user’s perspective, which is “results-oriented,” rather than from the developer’s perspective, which tends to be “feature-oriented” or “command-oriented”
And from the perspective of someone who will be writing a book on this application, I really liked this:
No, we don’t have a “classic mode.” We surveyed customers to find out what would help people transition, and they told us they really wanted us to help them move forward, rather than doing any kind of classic mode. In addition to redesigning the UI, we’ve added a lot more functionality in Office “12.” Faced with the same challenge of making all this new functionality available in the old UI, we couldn’t keep the old command-oriented model and make it easier for users to find new features, so we decided to make a bolder move.
Michael Gartenberg made an initial comment that intrigued me:
I’m not sure I totally love the new Office “12” UI. There’s a lot to like about it in terms of how nice it looks and simplifies core functions but the whole design seems a little cluttered for a typical XGA resolution. It looks like to really use this stuff, you’ll need a pretty high res monitor.
That was my first reaction too, until I checked the properties of the screen shot I copied above and saw that it’s actually 1024 x 768!
I’m not going to write a whole bunch more about Office 12 until I actually get my hands on it. Any relationship between a fabulous demo and a great product is purely coincidental. But the reworking that’s gone into this revision is impressive, and I’m looking forward to working with it.
Mary Jo Foley has details about a new set of templates that just arrived for SharePoint Services, the collaboration technology built into Windows Server 2003:
On Tuesday, Microsoft quietly rolled out 30 free, downloadable applications that build on top of the company’s SharePoint Services collaboration/workflow technology that is built into Windows Server.
Among the plethora new applications are horizontal and vertical applets both. Schedule-management, consumer-financing, employee-training, event-management, travel-request, classroom-management, campaign-management and other similar types of offerings are available immediately.
I noticed the full collection had appeared on the Microsoft Downloads server yesterday. This one caught my eye, for instance:
The Competitive Intelligence (CI) Dashboard application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is designed to improve organization of CI-related materials, and communication about competitive issues among sales, public relations, marketing, product or service management, and executive personnel.
I’ve used SharePoint for a couple of years, and it’s been an indispensable tool for collaboriting with my co-authors, editors, and production folks in the process of putting together books for Microsoft Press. You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company either; even a group of two or three people can benefit from the features in SharePoint. It’s a huge improvement over the alternative most people use, which is to share files and lists via e-mail. (And Windows Small Business Server 2003, which is very affordable, includes all the SharePoint features you need.)
With templates like these, the process of creating a SharePoint site literally takes a few clicks. It’s worth checking out.
Yesterday, I explained how to change the five icons that appear in the Places Bar in Windows common dialog boxes. If you use Microsoft Office, you can do a few extra tricks.
First things first: Although the Open and Save As dialog boxes in Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on) look similar to those in other Windows programs, they actually come from a completely different DLL file. So when you customize the Windows common dialog boxes, the Office versions remain unchanged.
To tweak the Office versions, open any Office program (Word, for instance) and choose File, Open. Here are three ways you can change these dialog boxes:
In Office dialog boxes, you can have as many icons as you want (unlike the Windows versions, which limit you to five icons, in large size only).
In most Windows programs, when you choose Open or Save As from the File menu, you see a common dialog box that includes five icons in a vertical sidebar on the left side. The five choices are pretty logical, as you can see here:
Click any of those links on the left, and you see the contents of that folder in the window on the right, so you can open a file stored there or save a new file in that location.
But what if you never use the My Recent Documents folder? Why not customize the choices in the Places Bar? You can.
To change the five choices in the standard Windows XP Places Bar, use the Tweak UI Powertoy for Windows XP. Click the plus sign to the left of the Common Dialogs category in the left and select the Places Bar option. You can hide the Places Bar completely, or you can customize the five standard places.
Click Apply to see your changes and leave Tweak UI open. Click OK to save the changes and close Tweak UI. To remove your customizations, click Show default places.
In tomorrow’s tip, I’ll show you what you can do with the Places Bar in Microsoft Office programs.
Ed Bott 