bruceb news

Microsoft Office 365 has been tremendously successful so far, certainly from a sales perspective (millions of subscriptions, although the exact number is kept under wraps), but more importantly it’s also been successful from a technical perspective. There has been no downtime for the last few months. My clients are ecstatic that I can set passwords not to expire. Smaller businesses are being migrated from the older Microsoft Online Services platform; my clients’ experiences have not been completely smooth but no data has been lost and support for minor glitches has been readily available. Life on Office 365 is good.

So although I’m going to describe a technical issue, it’s a fairly insignificant one that has affected less than a dozen people in my personal experience. […] continued

A few weeks ago Microsoft released a OneNote app optimized for iPads.

Long-time readers know about my fondness for OneNote, the program you’ve never heard of that’s included with every copy of Microsoft Office 2010, right alongside Word and Excel and Powerpoint. Here’s more information to get you oriented. To repeat: “The concept is simple: OneNote collects information on the fly from any source you can imagine, and helps you find it again later when you need it. That’s any information. OneNote can hold your grocery list as easily as your research or trial preparation.”

OneNote is designed for its notebooks to be stored online in Microsoft’s Skydrive service. […] continued

The ribbons in Office 2007 and 2010 normally look like the picture above, with a row of icons and buttons under the headings across the top (Home / Favorites / Insert / Page Layout, etc.).

It’s disconcerting when the icons and buttons disappear. They reappear when you click one of the headings, then slide out of view again.

The answer is over at Small City Law Firm Tech, which should be on the reading list of anyone who uses Microsoft Office. Here’s Vivian’s description of what happens when the ribbon disappears after a particularly heavy bout of Random Clicking™:

The Office Ribbon hidden looks like this, all shrunken and icon-less:

And if you wonder how yours got to looking that way, you likely did one of two things:

• You either inadvertently clicked the Minimize Ribbon button (or pressed Ctrl F1)

Or

• You double-clicked on the active Ribbon Tab (headings), which has the same effect.

[…] continued

Microsoft released a particularly large crop of patches and updates on Tuesday. Your computer probably restarted on Tuesday or Wednesday night.

If you’re a subscriber to the Bruceb Remote Management service, your computer is also installing additional Microsoft updates that were released at the same time as the critical updates sent through Microsoft’s Automatic Updates system.

Java version 6 update 30 will be arriving on all your computers soon, too. If you install it manually, please make sure to avoid the noxious Ask Toolbar being pushed along with it!

If your computer is even a little wobbly on Thursday or Friday, restart it. […] continued

A few days ago Microsoft launched Answer Desk with little fanfare – no press release, just a new web site (www.answerdesk.com) offering live technical support for Windows and Office, plus PC tuneups, virus removal, and software training – 24×7, 365 days/year.

It might be your new best friend, it might disappear without a trace. Either way, it illustrates some interesting things about your changing relationship to technology and the evolving role of an IT consultant.

What is Microsoft Answer Desk?

When you start a session from the Answer Desk web site, Microsoft will connect you with an “Answer Tech” for free basic troubleshooting and diagnosis. […] continued

Microsoft will deliver five run-of-the-mill security updates for Windows and Office tonight, in the regular monthly Patch Tuesday release. There’s more information about this month’s updates in Microsoft’s security bulletin here.

Close programs and save any work in progress at the end of the day. Your computer will probably restart tonight.

Also on Tuesday, Adobe is releasing updates for all recent versions of Adobe Acrobat and Reader, for Windows and Mac. Reportedly the updates address a number of issues but we won’t know until Wednesday whether they fix the bugs introduced in the Acrobat 9.4.5 update.

The primary issue addressed by the Acrobat update stems from a hacked Dutch certificate authority. […] continued

Office 2007 introduced ribbons to replace menus in Word, Excel, and most of the other programs, much to the consternation of old-timers. Since then, Microsoft has adopted ribbons for almost all of its software; the sweeping redesign of the Office programs was completed when Outlook got its ribbon in 2010.

The ribbons in each of the Office 2010 programs are customizable. You can add buttons for all the commands that you reach for all the time – the ones you assume everyone else also uses constantly. (They don’t. You’d be amazed.)

Before you go too far, take a look at some free customized ribbons from Microsoft. […] continued

Adobe has created a web-based tool for converting PDFs to Word documents. It’s so inexpensive that you might find a reason to sign up.

Adobe ExportPDF has a single function: visit https://www.acrobat.com/exportpdf and upload a PDF; the web service will convert it into a Word .DOCX file that you can download to your computer, with anywhere from good to very good OCR results. In the best case, you’ll have almost complete fidelity for formatting and page layout. In the worst case – bad scans or pages with handwriting or smudges or any of the usual things that cause OCR errors – you’ll get back a mess, just as if you had done the OCR yourself. […] continued

Lynda.com is a learning and training site with video tutorials to teach software skills. It has courses at all levels, from novice to expert, and it covers a wide variety of programs and subjects with something for almost everyone, from photography hobbyists to business and graphics professionals.

I’m frequently asked where to find help or how to get started with a program. Lynda.com is going to be one of my answers to that question for many programs.

It’s particularly good with deep and complicated business and professional software. There are extensive libraries of videos about notoriously difficult Adobe programs, for example. […] continued

Previously:
Office 365 Part 1 – Overview
Office 365 Part 2 – The Evolution Of Exchange Online

Sharepoint Online sets up an online portal that a business can use for a number of different things:

• Documents can be stored online with rich controls for sharing files with colleagues and clients. It’s also easy to track versions of documents and search for information.
• If documents are stored online, they can be reviewed or edited by opening and saving them directly in installed Office programs.
• Online documents can also be reviewed or edited in the online Office Web Apps if that’s more convenient or you’re at a computer that does not have Office installed.

[…] continued