Tag: Office

Office 2010 Beta Available for Download

November 18, 2009 by Jason

The first fully-fledged Beta Build of Office 2010 is now available for download to subscribers of Microsoft’s developer and IT professional portals. The Redmond company managed to live up to its promise to offer Office 2010 Beta by the end of November 2009, with public availability of the bits expected any day now, possibly as soon as tomorrow, November 18th. At the time of this article the latest development milestone of the next iteration of the Office System was only up for grabs via MSDN and TechNet, with the website set up to offer public downloads continuing to note that the bits would be served “soon.”

Microsoft has so far dodged all questions related to the official deadline for the availability of Office 2010 public downloads. However, the software giant did indicate that the latest leaked Build of the productivity suite differed from the bits that the general public would be able to get their hands on. In mid-November, Office 2010 Beta Build 14.0.4514.1009 was leaked to the web, although the illegal release didn’t really start growing in popularity until the past week when it became clear that the official version was just around the corner. Read More»

Top 10 – September 2009 Popular Tips

October 01, 2009 by Jason

1. Windows 7 RTM Enterprise 90-Day Evaluation

2. Make FireFox 3 Times Fast

3. DirectX 11 Resources for Windows 7 and Vista

4. Windows 7 Upgrade Performance

5. Windows 7 Windows XP Mode RC Hotfix for Shared Folder Performance

6. Automatic Windows 7 Installs

7. Office 2010 Build 14.0.4417.1000

8. Windows 7 HomeGroup

9. DirectX with Windows 7 Support

10. Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Up Next

and other popular tips

Six tips for greening your PC

September 30, 2009 by Jason

When you consider that computers now consume about 10 percent of the electricity generated in North America and that a great many PCs still end up in landfills, leaching deadly chemicals, it makes sense to adopt more eco-friendly computing options.

John Hiddema, technical consultant for Nerds on Site, is one of the many people making a conscious effort to go green. He recycles, buys organic produce, uses cleaning products less harmful to the environment, owns energy-efficient appliances, and has configured his
PC to use less energy. He’s also going green on the job. Some of the work he does for clients’ computer systems can be done remotely from his home office, drastically reducing his need for a car.

Here are some tips for making your technology use more eco-friendly.

1. Manage power consumption

Did you know that approximately 40 percent of the energy used for home electronics is consumed while these devices are turned off or idling? Techies refer to computers and related gadgets that draw power while not in use as vampire load. Turn off and unplug everything when you’re not using it. Even simpler: shut down everything and then turn off the power bar. Read More»

Office 2010 Build 14.0.4417.1000

September 01, 2009 by Jason

A new development milestone of the next iteration of the Office System has been leaked and made available for download in the wild. Microsoft is currently making its way to the first Beta of office 2011, a release slated to be available to all users as a public testing build.

However, the Redmond-based company managed to keep a tight lid on all details associated with the development process of Office 2010 since the delivery of the Technical Preview build in July 2010. Still, the silence must not be mistaken for inactivity, as the leaked Office 2010 Build 4417 comes to prove.

Both the 32-bit and the 64-bit flavors of Office 2010 Build 4417 have been leaked and are now up for grabs from various third-party sources. And while torrent trackers and warez websites are serving the bits illegally, Microsoft continues to be mute on the development of Office 2010.

Still, the productivity suite is undoubtedly advancing. According to Wzor, Office 2010 Build 14.0.4417.1000 is labeled as a Beta release, and no longer just a Technical Preview.

Technical Preview testers of Office 2010 have been able to grab the bits for the first development milestone of Office 2010 since July 13, 2009. The Office 2010 Technical Preview is a limited testing program, as opposite to the beta. Read More»

How do I enable or disable DEP for Office applications?

August 13, 2009 by Jason

This tips helps you enable or disable Data Execution Prevention (DEP) for Office applications.

To enable or disable DEP automatically, click the Fix it button or link. Click Run in the File Download dialog box, and then follow the steps in the Fix it wizard.

Note this wizard may be in English only; however, the automatic fix also works for other language versions of Windows.

Note if you are not on the computer that has the problem, save the Fix it solution to a flash drive or a CD and then run it on the computer that has the problem.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Read More»

Google Apps Sync Kills Outlook Search

June 26, 2009 by Jason

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, introduced at the start of the past week, manages to handicap the Redmond company’s email client, delivered as a part of the Office System. Essentially, the installation of Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook manages to kill the email client’s ability to search its own data. The tool from the Mountain View-based search giant is designed to bridge Outlook 2003 SP3 and 2007 SP2 (or SP1) with Google Apps. However, it appears that Google failed to perform sufficient testing of the utility, as Microsoft came across a bug that no longer allowed users of Outlook to search through their data.

“The installation of the Google Apps Sync plugin disables Outlook’s ability to search any and all of your Outlook data,” stated Dev Balasubramanian, Outlook product manager. “When a Google Apps user installs the sync plugin for Outlook, the plugin modifies a registry key which disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing and providing search functionality for all Outlook data, not just the Outlook data being synchronized from GMail. Because Outlook search relies upon the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions are broken as a result.” Read More»

Open XML Compatibility Pack

June 24, 2009 by Jason

Downloads of the Open XML Compatibility Pack have passed the 100 million mark, Microsoft revealed. The Redmond-based company is offering the Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats for users of Office releases prior to Office 2007 in order to enable them to not only open, but also edit, and even save documents, workbooks, and presentations in Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 file formats, namely the Open XML ISO standards. The software giant indicated that the number of Open XML Compatibility Pack downloads was illustrative of the increase in adoption of the OOXML standards introduced with the advent of the Office 2007 System.

“The compatibility pack is a manual download. It is not pushed through any update channels. In order for an end user to obtain it, they must visit the Microsoft download center, select one of the 35 available languages, and download the 26MB installer. To say it differently, more than 100 million people have had cause to seek out and download the compatibility pack for Open XML; likely due to their encountering a document stored in one of the formats,” explained Gray Knowlton, Microsoft Office Group Product Manager. Read More»

Stick with standard Office file formats

June 18, 2009 by Jason

You can minimize file-compatibility issues by standardizing on the most common file formats. By default, OpenOffice.org saves files in Open Document Format (ODF). Microsoft’s by-the-book support for ODF, unfortunately, breaks some spreadsheet files, according to a recent ZDNet blog post.

OpenOffice reads and writes Office 2007’s default .docx and .xlsx XML file formats. But the older .doc and .xls formats are still the ones most often used. I suggest that you make the classic Office formats your defaults in OpenOffice. To set .doc as the document default, for example, open any OpenOffice program and do the following:

Step 1. Choose Tools, Options;

Step 2. Select General under Load/Save;

Step 3. Click Text Document under Document type in the Default file format and ODF settings section; Read More»

Security Compliance Management Toolkit v2.0

March 09, 2009 by Jason

The Security Compliance Management Toolkit series builds on previous Solution Accelerators to provide you with expanded best practices and additional automation tools to help configure and deploy security settings for the following operating systems and applications: Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP Professional SP3, and 2007 Microsoft Office SP1.

After deploying the security settings, you can verify the accuracy of the setting policies and monitor policy changes by applying one or more of 26 Configuration Packs using the desired configuration management (DCM) feature of Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP1. This series includes the following toolkits:

Useful Windows 7 Enhancements

February 24, 2009 by Jason

1. Protect your MP3 files

Along with many good new features, the Windows 7 beta also includes a nasty bug. Its version of Windows Media Player 12 will automatically add missing metadata, including album art, and this can overwrite the first few seconds of the file. Oops. Installing an update may fix this (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961367) but it would probably be a very good idea to back up your MP3 files, too.

2. Customise UAC

Windows Vista’s User Account Control was a good idea in practice, but poor implementation put many people off – it raised far too many alerts. Fortunately Windows 7 displays less warnings by default, and lets you further fine-tune UAC to suit your preferred balance between security and a pop-up free life (Start > Control Panel > Change User Account Control Settings).
Read More»