You’ve only got a few hours left to get that cheap Microsoft Office 2007 for A$75… all you need is a student at an Australian university.
On the other hand, employees of companies that are in Microsoft’s Home Use Program can get it any time, for around A$40. Worth checking with your local IT people.
After reading Jeff Atwood’s terrific post about saving bandwidth on web sites I’ve moved the Geekrant RSS feeds over to Feedburner, using Steve Smith’s mavellous WordPress Feedburner plugin, which works in WP 2.0x and 1.5x.
I also turned on HTTP compression, which in WordPress is as easy as clicking a checkbox. It not only saves you bandwidth, but users get your pages served quicker, since the bottleneck is bound to be their bandwidth, not their browser’s ability to decompress.
We’ll see how it goes. Bandwidth has been growing recently: January 2.8Gb; February 2.7Gb; March 3.4Gb. It’s not at ludicrous levels, but if it keeps climbing, I’ll end up paying more for the hosting. Hopefully this will help bring it back down.
Update 8:40pm. First thing I notice is that when reading the feed from within the Feedburner site, it doesn’t treat relative paths to images properly. I guess I’ll have to put absolute paths, ‘cos at the moment in the previous post it’s trying to load http://feeds.feedburner.com/files/2007/mediagate-mg35.jpg instead of http://www.geekrant.org/files/2007/mediagate-mg35.jpg. I wonder how it treats relative links?
So, hands-up who is using a version of Office pre-2007 (or OpenOffice or an alternative) and has received a new format Office Open XML document (eg docx) from anybody?
I haven’t (I primarily use Office 2003). Subsequently (like most people I’m guessing) I haven’t gone and installed the updates to be able to read/write the formats. (Or have they arrived on my machine and I haven’t even noticed?)
Novell has released an OpenOffice translator for the format, which hopefully will help the documents (when they eventually start getting used by Real People) be spread around between software suites.
Some are naturally suspicious of Microsoft, suggesting Office Open XML is just another way of fighting back against the OpenDocument formats. But I don’t think one could deny that MS Office was due for an overhaul in its formats; the older ones are a bloated (in more ways than one), proprietary mess.
How is it that otherwise competent people still don’t know how to use style sheets in Word? How long’s Word had styles? Well over a decade.
You load up some document to do some work on it, and some idiot has created a zillion different styles, by virtue of editing the entire document manually (and therefore inconsistently) and Word happily making every little variation a separate style.
Half the headings have numbering, half don’t, the default paragraph type after a heading has a bullet, the bullets are mis-aligned, some bright spark has decided a standard text paragraph isn’t “Normal” but has its own special name, and the whole thing’s a mess.
I remember a few years ago I painstakingly set up a document with about 15 styles, to cover any eventuality expected, then wrote tons of text for it, and passed it to someone else for review. It came back with all the styles removed. All the text was just formatted independently, and had been changed around to be inconsistent. To this day I don’t know how he did that. Grrr.
And even last week a document came my way that had a ludicrous number of styles in it. Possibly 200 or more. You had to scroll through the list for ages to find what you wanted.
Oh, some people can’t use the Language features, either. I know it’s common for Aussies to accidentally set their documents to US English and then wonder why it complains about “colour”, but the other day someone sent me a document which had half its text set to French (even though it was in English).
A couple of MySql queries to count up your 2006 blog stats (as I did on my personal blog).
select count(*) from wp_posts
where
post_status = ‘publish’
and wp_posts.post_date >= ‘2006-01-01’
select wp_posts.ID, count(*) as wpc, wp_posts.post_title, wp_posts.post_date from wp_comments, wp_posts
where
wp_comments.comment_approved = ‘1’
and wp_comments.comment_post_ID = wp_posts.ID
and wp_posts.post_date >= ‘2006-01-01’
group by comment_post_ID
order by wpc desc
There’s a Zero-Day attack targeting MS-Word. This is the work-around:
Do not open or save Word files that you receive from untrusted sources or that you receive unexpectedly from trusted sources. This vulnerability could be exploited when a user opens a specially crafted Word file.
Don’t open Word files, not even in the Word viewer.
Nice.
I think I’ll just keep using Open Office.
Office 2007 has also been completed, and the compatibility pack is now available to allow earlier versions (back to 2000) to read the new file formats.
Though as Office Watch points out, while the Word one works well in both directions, it appears that the Excel and Powerpoint don’t have full conversion, just viewers.
What a copout. If they can do it for Word, they can do it for the others. Mind you given the plethora of information about the new formats I wouldn’t be surprised if a third party writes a proper conversion tool to fill the gap.
Am I the only one that continually gets a warning about newer format of PDF files, even though every time it comes up I tell it “Do not show this message again” ?
I know I’m a version behind on Acrobat. Version 6 is the corporate version. I’ve never known it to matter, and I’m happy with what I’ve got. Please stop bugging me to upgrade.
Using Outlook, but your signatures are going a bit funny? Turns out it keeps multiple copies of them, in RTF, HTML and TXT format, and sometimes they get out of sync. They’re in Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures — if you check what’s there and delete any old ones, you should be okay after that. (Thanks Dave)
I gave PDF Creator a go last week. It’s pretty good for a freebie, quite easy to use, and has some configuration and so on.
Trying it with Word documents it did seem to have problems with some fonts/styles though (generally for users other than me looking at the PDFs), so it’s worth being wary if you rely on accurate PDF-rendition. In my case, the (alas not free) Acrobat works better.
Ultimately I suspect for “industrial-strength” PDF-creation it’s best to stick to the genuine-but-expensive Acrobat Standard or Pro. The cheaper (or free) alternatives are pretty good, but don’t quite seem to cut it when the going gets tough.
Mind you if you’re not prepared to pay for Acrobat (AU$400+ for standard… pah, their time will come) I don’t see a compelling reason to get a cheaper one when PDF Creator is free.
Let me make this clear: When I paste, I want the text to match the document it’s going into. This is why I’d prefer Paste Special / Plain Text to be the default.
So why does Paste Special / Plain Text keep disappearing out of my corporate copy of Outlook 2003? If I’m stuck with rich formatted emails, I damn well want whatever I paste into them to match the text.
But every app wants to bring its own format across. Even Visual Studio for heaven’s sake. I end up having to paste it into Notepad, then copy/paste to the destination.
Very annoying.
There are a couple of ways of making plain text pasting the default: you can define a macro in Word or here’s a crankily-named Outlook macro. If you’re aiming to get it everywhere, it looks like you’ll require a program: either Cliptext or PureText would appear to do it (in slightly different ways).
Here’s what it looks like. Click it to see it bigger.
Not bad, but looks very simple compared to Excel. This could be a good or a bad thing. Does a lot of Excel-like things. This kind of comparison is inevitable, as most users are familiar with it.
Doesn’t feel as refined as Writely. Right-click not harnessed.
Linked to your Gmail/Google logon, of course.
Exports a reasonably clean HTML table. (Certainly better than any released versions of Excel/Office.)
Watch out if you lose your connection:
My immediate reaction is this could be useful for some things — like Writely, if you want to be able to edit from anywhere connected, and/or share the document realtime with others.
But like Scoble, I can’t see it replacing “offline” apps for individual users just yet. Hosted apps within a corporation however, that could (eventually) be another matter, especially as the technology matures.
See also: Josh and I look at Writely.