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I’ve stopped using Office Live Workspace for now. It’s a service with a lot of potential but a few areas that are rough around the edges. Although I encourage you to try OLW and the other new services, my sense is that most people won’t be ready to change their traditional methods of saving and working on files until these services are seamless.

Office Live Workplace is Microsoft’s free service for storing files online (primarily Office files – Word, Excel, Powerpoint – and Acrobat PDFs). There are two important reasons to use the service – the online files can be opened from any computer anywhere, and they can be shared easily. […] continued

If you’re sending a student off to college with a new laptop, Microsoft has a pretty good deal. A student with an email address at an educational institution (typically the email addresses end in .EDU) can buy a copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95 through this web site.

This suite includes far more software than the Home & Student Edition in the stores for $100-140. This is the suite with all the Office programs, including Outlook, Powerpoint, Publisher, OneNote, Access, and more.  Most students will only use Word and Powerpoint, of course, but it’s still a great price. […] continued

Microsoft Office Live Workspace is one of the more interesting ways to store documents online and share them easily. Access is obtained through your Windows Live ID, the password that is becoming increasingly important as Microsoft pulls the various Windows Live services together. Here’s some background on Office Live Workspace.

An update was released this week:

“The Office Live Update 1.2 installs (1) performance updates to make using Office Live Workspace with Microsoft Office programs faster, (2) the latest Office Live Add-in for Microsoft Office that enables you to access your workspaces directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and (3) the Multiple Document Upload Tool and (4) the Firefox add-in to allow users of the Firefox browser to use Office Live Workspace with Microsoft Office.”

Once the OLW software is installed, the files stored online can be opened from a web browser, or directly from Office programs – OLW is added to the menu in Office 2007, or on a new toolbar in Office 2003/XP. […] continued

On July 15, Microsoft will begin selling a product that many of you should consider for your next computer.

Microsoft Equipt includes Office 2007 Home and Student, Windows Live OneCare, and some Windows Live programs and services (Office Live Workspace for online storage of files, plus Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Mail). It will be sold as a seventy dollar per year subscription for up to three computers, and theoretically cannot be used on an office computer.

I wrote some extensive notes about this bundle when it entered beta testing. It’s cheaper than the earlier rumors suggested. Some people object to the subscription pricing but Microsoft has picked a good price point; this is only a couple of hundred dollars worth of software at best, but seventy bucks makes it really cheap to get started and you wouldn’t even arguably come out ahead for almost three years if you bought and installed everything separately. […] continued

[Originally posted November 26, 2007]

Thinking about a new computer – home, home office, small business? Let me give you some generalizations that will help you get started. (As always, gamers will be looking for faster processors and hard drives, more memory, and – particularly important – choosing from an array of high-end video cards. Notebook computers also require consideration of size and weight, which will trump some of the considerations below.)

• PROCESSOR Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors are significantly better than the other Intel and AMD processors. Within the Core 2 Duo line, at some point there’s a step up to a 4Mb L2 cache, another bit of technical wizardry that’s worth a hundred dollars or so.

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Adobe has launched an online suite of software and services, along with announcing the July release of Acrobat 9. It’s all interesting but I have a sense of overload already, and we’re still very early in the new age of online web services.

Acrobat.com is ready for you to begin using for free – an email address and a password opens up online file storage, convenient file sharing, an online word processor, web conferencing, and a PDF converter. I can only mention a few things in passing, but this article has a nice description of each of the features.

Adobe has designed a very appealing set of controls for its services, with lots of functions presented elegantly. […] continued

Microsoft Office 2007 features top-to-bottom rewrites of Word, Excel and Powerpoint, with ribbons replacing the familiar menus and toolbars. There is another change lurking under the hood that might affect you even if you don’t buy a new computer and start using the Office 2007 programs.

All three programs save files in new formats by default – .DOCX, .XLSX, and .PPTX. If you’re running Office 2003, a window will be displayed when you try to open a .DOCX or .XLSX email attachment for the first time, explaining that a free “compatibility pack” is required before you can open the file.

The “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats” is a 27.5Mb download that installs quickly and does not require a restart of your computer. […] continued

Microsoft is working on a package of software and online services that might be exactly right for students and home computer users.

Although Vista includes important features out of the box, it does not include Microsoft Office – Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. That’s surprising to many people. (Dell will preinstall Office if you remember to check the box, but all the other manufacturers leave it off to keep the computer sale price down.) I talk to a lot of people about why they have to make an unexpected trip to Costco or Office Depot to buy a copy of Office.

The computer manufacturer may include security software but all too often it’s a bloated suite from whatever vendor paid the most to be included, or it’s only a trial version. […] continued

There are many visions of our online future. Google and many others envision a world of cloud computing, where our programs and our data are both hosted online. Google Docs provides a word processor and spreadsheet, and online storage of files, all accessible from any computer anywhere. At the moment these services are mostly presented in an Internet browser but the technology is already appearing to let online programs run in their own windows like any other program, giving us access to programs that look elegant and can be accessed from anywhere. Google’s vision (and Microsoft’s nightmare) is a world where those programs run on any operating system, so you can have the same experience regardless of whether you’re running Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. […] continued

Did you know you can have multiple Outlook windows open? Try right-clicking on “Calendar” or “Contacts,” then clicking on Open in new window.

This will be very exciting for some of you. But wait! There’s more!

By default, Outlook opens into your Inbox. You can change the default folder by clicking in Outlook on Tools / Options / Other / Advanced Options.

But you can also create shortcuts for your desktop or Quick Launch bar that open directly into your calendar, contacts folder, or task list. Each one will open a new Outlook window automatically.

Try this out!

• Right-click on your desktop and click on New / Shortcut.

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