Office Live Store Manager in Beta September 18, 2007
Posted by iawalsh in : Microsoft Office News , add a comment
James Senior over on Technet introduces Office Live Store Manager, which is currently in private beta with several small business customers.
He highlights that ”The store manager portion of Office Live enables this small business to have an online store tightly incorporated within their website with the minimum of fuss.”
James gives an example of Office Live Store Manager helped Larouex Gourmet Foods, makers of fine tasting food products in Washington State. He visited their online store where they have some sauces and meats available to buy.
Before Office Live they used Paypal and had some complicated ASP pages to get around the problem of selling online. The promise of Office Live Store Manager is to offer a one-stop-shop for all online activities for small business.
Visit James’ blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/james/archive/2007/09/17/office-live-store-manager-private-beta.aspx
Sparklines - Word-sized Graphs March 27, 2007
Posted by iawalsh in : Microsoft Office News, downloads , add a commentThe sparkline concept has been invented by Edward Tufte, the renowned expert for innovative information design. He states that at the heart of the concept are “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”: A sparkline depicts data in miniaturized graphs, such as bars, lines, whiskers and pie charts. A typical application is to depict the history of a value by means of a sparkline which is placed right in front of the current value within a report (e.g. the last months or years of product sales). Readers then have context information (e.g. about a trend or cyclical ups-and-downs in sales) to interpret the current data.
Probably the most remarkable innovation are functions for Excel that generate cell-adherent sparklines automatically and update them dynamically. In Excel XP and 2003 functions like “=Sparkline(cellrange)” generate a sparkline directly in a cell of a worksheet. The word-sized graphs automatically update whenever the underlying data has changed. Hence, information-rich, dynamic controlling instruments are easily designed in Microsoft Excel.
Bissantz SparkMaker 3.0 is free with unlimited functionality for private and academic users while all other users may test it during a 30-day trial period before a valid license has to be obtained. For more details and a downloadable version of SparkMaker 3.0 please visit: http://www.bissantz.com/sparklines/sparkmaker.asp
Add-in Express - The First Visual Designer and Component Set March 27, 2007
Posted by iawalsh in : Microsoft Office News , add a commentIt gives VSTO developers a solution allowing them to do far less coding and debugging than they have to do now. Being completely based on the VSTO run-time, Add-in Express 2007 extends the VSTO programming model with several time-saving visual designers and components.
Using the designers Office developers customize the Ribbon UI for their Office 2007 plug-ins, add elements to Ribbon tabs, the Quick Access Toolbar and Office Menu and validate the resulting Ribbon XML in no time. The traditional Office 2003 GUI is supported by the Add-in Express designers as well.
Add-in Express provides special components for creating custom task panes, application-level keyboard shortcuts, custom .NET controls, advanced regions, extended Outlook customization, etc. It completely supports application-level add-ins for Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio and InfoPath, and works for Visual Basic .NET and C#.
Using Paint to take Great Screenshots November 20, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : How do I ?, Formatting, Writing, Style, Microsoft Office News, Cool Tricks, Tips , add a comment
There are many great products for taking screenshots out there. Snagit is the one I’d recommend most.
However, if you’re on a tight budget, you may have to make do with Paint, which comes pre-installed with Windows.
Paint is a very under-rated product and comes with more features that you’d probably expect. If you learn to use it properly, it will probably save you having to buy a specialist product.
So, what I’m going to do is show you how to take nice, clean screenshots with Paint.
How to take a standard screenshot
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Open the page, image or website that you want to take the screenshot of.
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Press the PrtSc key on your keyboard.
On my laptop, this is above the letter F10. On my desktop, it’s between the keys and the number pad. This takes a screenshot (like a photograph) of the entire desktop.
Later we will look at how to screenshot floating windows, where you have many items floating above each other on the screen at the same time, such as pop-up windows. -
Open Paint. Use Ctrl + V to paste in the screenshot.
Let’s say that you only want the logo and not the entire page. To do this, use the Select tool.
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Select the area you want to extract from the image, i.e. the logo.
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Press Ctrl + C to copy the logo to the Clipboard.
You now have a large image with a hole in it where you’re logo used to be. What we want to do next is remove this image, copy the logo back into Paint, and do some tidying up. -
Press Ctrl + A (to select the work area in Paint) and press Delete. This wipes the screen clean.
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Press Ctrl + V to paste the logo back into Paint.
The next step is to tidy up the image. -
Use the Select tool again and drag a thin box along the edge of the logo.
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Press Delete to remove the area you selected with the box.
You can repeat this step to tidy up the image. -
Use the Select tool to select the image.
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Press Ctrl + C to copy the image and then paste it into Word or whatever program wants to use it.
How To Write Headings November 20, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : How do I ?, Formatting, Writing, Style, Templates, Recommended, Microsoft Office News, Cool Tricks, Tips , add a comment
The earliest memory I have of writing is producing a very long and serious essay on Hamlet. I managed to write eight pages. The teacher wanted 2000 words – minimum. So, we all churned out hundreds and hundreds of words. Did anyone read it? Probably not.
Maybe you wrote something like it too. Do you remember what it looked like? Think back. Long, heavy, dense paragraphs, all written in long-hand. Easy to read? My essays (maybe yours were better) never used a single heading. Large slabs of text. Starting with the introduction (Hamlet was the son of…) it galloped headlong towards the end (…which is why he died!).
In academic writing, particularly ‘creative writing’, you can get away with such things. What’s important is that you get your feelings and thoughts down on paper.
Business writing is very different.
Unlike academic writing, in the business world you have a very attentive audience, some of whom have paid money to buy your products! They expect you to tell them how it works, which only seems reasonable.
A lot of my time is spent editing other people’s work. One of the quickest ways to get started, or at least get into the document, is to introduce strong headings. These add shape and confidence to the document. Suddenly it has structure. A framework begins to emerge.
Why Write Headings?
Knowing how to write clear, informative headings will make a great difference to your documents. Headings are like sign-posts. They tell the reader where to go. They call out and say, “This paragraph is about Writing Blogs” while the next says, “this paragraph is about Business Blogging.” Without them the document is reduced to a rant. It goes on and on without direction. You, the reader, can’t find anything. Looking at the document makes you negative. Not a good start!
Usability.gov touches on this point, “Once the information is chunked appropriately, write headings that are descriptive of the information. On the Web, page headings become links out of context on a previous page - like the table of contents of a printed booklet. Therefore, headings should clearly explain to users what page they are about to link to.”
Short informative headings help readers focus. They summarize text into ‘bite-size’ sentences. As the name implies a heading is the ‘head’ of the text you’re about to introduce.
Writing Effective Headings
Try to distill your headings into snappy 3-5 word sentences. Use positive language. Get to the point. Avoid using jargon, puns, archaic words, complex phrases, and other such affectations.
To write an effective heading:
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Examine the section you want to summarize.
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Identify the key topic. Every section (and paragraph) should have one key topic. Don’t mix ideas. You’ll confuse the reader and probably yourself in the process.
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Write a single sentence that describes the section. Keep it very simple.
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Revise the sentences and add an action verb.
For example, note the difference between Printing Duplex Reports, Saving XML Files To Shared Networks, Creating and Archiving Backups instead of Reports, Files, and Backups. While the former is informative and descriptive, the latter is dry and curt.
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Emphasize actions with nouns. Write Printing Digital Forms rather than Printing.
Are Headlines Important?
Research from Eyetrack III shows that readers scan documents rather than read word by word, , especially when reading online. In general, readers start with the first heading (or summary) and then, if interested, scan the other headings on the page. If their interest is piqued, they’ll go back and read more text.
Eyetrack III add that “People typically scan down a list of headlines, and often don’t view entire headlines. If the first words engage them, they seem likely to read on. On average, a headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention.”
It’s not just the headlines that they scan, rather it’s the first few words in the headline that matter.
“For headlines — especially longer ones — it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to capture eyes.”
Content is judged literally in the blink of an eye.
You can read more at: http://poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/blurbs.htm
What does structured editing mean? November 17, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : Microsoft Office News , add a commentTerrific article from the MS Office team on structured editing:
“I know it often means different things to different people. So far, I’ve talked about what content controls are, and locking (which is a big part of structuring a document, as I use the term), but over this and the next post, I’m going to try to clarify what I mean by it, and how all of the parts of content controls fit together to make it easier/better in Word 2007.
In the first post, I showed the example of how you can literally type anywhere on the page. Cool – but if you’re creating a document where you don’t want the look to accidentally change, it’s also more than a little terrifying. Let me give you a real-life example:”
Jump over here to bring yourself up to speed on structed editing - and really impress your friends!
Is Microsoft Office Live A Twisted Form of Hell? November 14, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : Microsoft Office News , add a comment
Before you sign up for a free Microsoft Office Live account, you might want to read these folks experience:
“the number of things that simply don’t work or work in a counter-intuitive way is astonishing. It’s like people who have never created or managed a web site are designing it.”
http://www.codeproject.com/lounge.asp?msg=1755090#xx1755090xx
XML Notepad 2006 - Free Download November 14, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : Misc, Microsoft Office News , add a comment
- Tree View synchronized with Node Text View for quick editing of node names and values.
- Incremental search (Ctrl+I) in both tree and text views, so as you type it navigates to matching nodes.
- Cut/copy/paste with full namespace support.
- Drag/drop support for easy manipulation of the tree, even across different instances of XML Notepad and from the file system.
- Infinite undo/redo for all edit operations.
- In place popup multi-line editing of large text node values.
- Configurable fonts and colors via the options dialog.
- Full find/replace dialog with support for regex and XPath.
- Instant XML schema validation while you edit with errors and warnings shown in the task list window.
- Inplace HTML viewer for processing xml-stylesheet processing instructions.
- Built-in XML Diff tool
Download at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=72D6AA49-787D-4118-BA5F-4F30FE913628&displaylang=en
Vista Cracked by Pirates before release November 14, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : Microsoft Office News , add a commentAs soon as it’s released, it gets cracked.
“With Windows Vista and Office 2007 only just going Gold, and not even available to Microsoft beta testers, developers or volume licence subscribers, the first cracked versions have already hit the pirate boards”
http://apcmag.com/node/4560
Microsoft to be Mkt Leader in Gaming Console November 14, 2006
Posted by iawalsh in : Microsoft Office News , add a commentSteve Ballmer, CEO at Microsoft discusses how Microsoft will provide tools “to build exciting new web experiences and at the same time with MSN and Windows Live, it is trying to build direct experiences.”
His response when asked how developers plugin in to the experience that Microsoft will bring via Live?
“We announced SpaceLamp, which provides 3D maps, pictures and photos of the world and those can now not only be viewed on our website, they can also be linked-in to applications coming from the kinds of developers we are talking to.”
Regarding the future role of MS Office, he added that they, ” hooked Microsoft Office into a wide variety of what’s call them Office Business Interactions. How do I find information on my corporate network, how do I communicate with other people real time inside the corporation, how do I analyze business information, how do I participate in business workflows in Office 2007 for the business enables all of that.”
Read what else Ballmer had to say:
http://news.moneycontrol.com/india/news/business/steveballmermicrosoft/