Well … I finally took the plunge. About two weeks, I finally installed Microsoft Office 2007. Not that I scared to take the plunge, or that I was being "old school" and not willing to change; because I've been looking forward to checking it out for a while. It just wasn't time for me until now - I had other priorities that needed more of my attention (no big deal - love you, though.)

But now that the time has come, my first impressions are extremely good. The new interface looks so good, but it's so different - particularly the new ribbon bar. However, the bottom line is that I was able to take care of my tasks without much of a learning curve and just as fast as I would have with Office 2003. Not only is it comfortable, but it's a joy to use - even my wife likes to use it. As a software developer, it is hard to make software enjoyable to the user; in my opinion, Microsoft Office 2007 has accomplished that.

There's a lot of great new stuff that I'm looking forward to learning about. However, I will not submit a post on every single new feature offered (plenty of other sites already do that very well). Instead, I will continue to focus on the features that enhance the document process. One thing I've noticed is that there's a lot of features in Office 2007 that can be found in Office 2003; however, the improvement and placement of them make these features more accessible and easier to use - you will definitely hear more about these in the future.

Another new experience that I've already taken advantage of is using Microsoft Office OneNote. I already know that OneNote will single handedly change the way I organize all aspects of life. Everything on my desk, in my portfolio, and everywhere else I have important info will be reduced to my laptop. This will make my information easier to pull, and I'll be able to keep much more information much more effectively. 

I look forward to continuing to share my Office 2007 joy with you in the months to come. In the meantime, I encourage you to take the plunge and see for yourself.

While using Google Spreadsheets for updating a small file I use for the site, I ran across a huge software bug. I couldn't believe that it actually happened. Of course, I reported it to Google right away. Here's what I wrote:

"... The last time I was working on this spreadsheet, I did a lot of formatting (colors, numbering, etc.)  When I opened the same file today, all of my formatting was gone; as if I never did any of it. The data was retained, but not in the format I had it in."

I have all the confidence in the world that this will be fixed soon, as well as any other major bugs that are in the queue. This is just a public service reminder from me that Google Spreadsheets is still in Beta, and that it should not be used for any data you hold dear to your heart ... yet.

A couple of weeks back, I received my invite to test Google Spreadsheets and have since maintained a few files that I use for personal reasons. And as promised in my previous post about it, it's time to start letting you know my thoughts on it. You can probably tell by my tone that my first impression is leaning towards unfavorable, but not totally.

Now don't get me wrong, it would be unfair to expect a lot of advanced and intermediate features from this product, I know that. I also know that it'll get better with time and more feedback. In the meantime, there are just a few simple things that I think would enhance my experience with it and would encourage me to use it more.

• Charts. How can you not have the ability to create a chart in your first release? I realize it's not that simple, but there's a whole slue of online graphing components that would easily accommodate this. It would be in there best interest to have this added sooner than later.
• Auto-Fill. If you can't get us a handle on the bottom right of the cell that we can grab to auto-fill a formula, that's fine; but there has to be a better way than copying and pasting cells.
• Click & Drag Cells. It's just nice to be able to highlight a range of cells and click & drag them wherever I want. If I'm working with a large spreadsheet with several sections, copy/paste just isn't fast enough for me.
• Format Painter. I miss my Format Painter. I use it all the time, seriously. Google needs to provide a way to copy/paste just the formatting of a cell.

I agree that these things are petty. Yes, Microsoft has spoiled me; but it is what it is and I make no apologies for it. The hard truth is that little things like this have become a part of my user experience and what makes me productive.

As I eluded to before, making your "day-to-day job easier" is what helps you master your productivity. And though I think being able to share a Google spreadsheet online (a lot!), it is harder to use than Microsoft Excel and a lot of other products like it. An "even easier to use" Microsoft Excel 2007 will only make this worse.

"They killed the File menu, along with all the other menus. They added a giant, weird circular target up in the corner. They actually use part of the title bar as a menu sometimes. They even changed the default font in all the apps. What's amazing is not just that it works, but that it works so well"

It looks like Google is jockeying for position to make a "go" at Microsoft Office. First, they acquire the online word processing application called Writely in March 2006, then they roll out Google Calendar shortly after that. Now they've introduced Google Spreadsheets in what they call Limited Test, which means that you can sign up to test the beta when it becomes available.

In addition to signing up for a limited test, there's a small tour available to check out some of the features; but it's still too soon to see how it compares to Microsoft Excel. However, I would imagine that the advanced features would be limited but that the basics are good enough for most people. I've signed up, so I'll let you know how I like it as soon as I can.

In case you don't know, Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 is now available to download. This is a great opportunity to try it out for free and check out all the new features - and there's certainly a lot of them. Sure, there's still bugs to be fixed, but I promise it won't bite. Here's the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/

In addition to the download link, you'll want to check out this two posts from Jensen Harris that contain other links that will help us make a smooth transition.

Some of the Best Beta 2 Resources
Where Did That Feature Go?

Stay tuned for other news and resources about Office 2007 ... this thing is going to take the world by storm!

Well ... not all of your annoyances, but at least some of your technical annoyances. O'Reilly Media, Inc., a leader in technical and computer book documentation (great books, I have several!) has published a series of books called the Annoyances books in which they present a wide range of things that annoy you about computer, software, the web, etc. and explain how to overcome them.

Today, I stubbled across the blog site that O'Reilly has put together that covers a lot of these topics called Annoyances Central, which include annoyances in Microsoft Office. One of the latest posts shows you what to do when Microsoft Word's Find feature can't spell.

I've added this to my blogroll (on the right) and will share with you content from it that I find helpful.

Google Trends is a brand new tool that gives you the chance to compare anything you want. For example, according to Google, I found out that the West coast is much more popular than the East coast. I simply typed "east coast, west coast" and it returned a trend graph showing actual stats from the Google search engine in a timeline, along with dates of important events related to the search criteria.

In the Micro Persuasion weblog, Steve Rebel list 25 things he learned from Google Trends - one of them being which Microsoft Office application was the most popular. I knew the answer already (I'm sure you do, too); but it was still interesting to see the numbers that support it.

Very cool tool. Google has done it again!

Ten years ago, who knew that there would be an office suite package that you can use on your web browser. But of course back then, the internet was used mainly to search for information - and still is. And though Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox, and others have made terrific advances in expanding their capabilities - web browsers are still very limited in its ability to create feature rich applications that you can create for your desktop ... or are they?

New technologies (like ASP.NET) and the use of advanced techniques (like AJAX) have made it possible to create web applications that actually behave like desktop applications, which has paved the way for all kinds of possibilities on web that were not imaginable before ... like web-based office suites.

I'm not talking about just online calendars and contact managers - there's a whole gob of those; I'm talking about web applications that provide the ability to create letters, spreadsheets, newsletters, brochures, etc. like you can in Microsoft Office. Googling the keyword "microsoft office alternatives web-based" will give a bunch of websites where you can research.

The one that I like the most so far is gOffice, that promises Microsoft Word import/export features in the near future; but for now, I love being able to produce the high quality PDFs from it. It also has a spreadsheet and desktop publishing programs that do the same, with other features coming soon. Other web applications, like ajaxWrite and Writely, only give you word processing capabilities. The fact the all of these offerings are FREE isn't bad, either.

But are web-based office suites good enough to replace old reliable desktop applications like Microsoft Office?" It's too soon to tell; but in order for them to a major player, there are still a lot of web browser limitations to overcome in order to provide anywhere near the amount of features that you'll find in Microsoft Office 2007. All the same, I applaud the progress we've made in creating feature rich web applications; and it'll be interesting to see how they can go in the future.

It's been a little under a month since I launched the new BetterDocuments site, and so far it's been an enjoyable, trouble-free experience. I have a long way from where I want to be; but having a weblog site has proved to be an effective medium for me to accomplish what I've set out to do.

The "trouble-free" part of my experience is mostly due to the blog software that I selected to build my site. I wanted something low-cost (free is always good), easy to install, with a lot of features, and built on the .NET framework (being a .NET programmer myself.) After a week long search, I was very pleased to find every single that I was looking for in DasBlog, built by newtelligence.

I was able to submit a post after about 15 minutes of installation and configuration; and even though it comes with 16 site templates (themes) ready to go, I created my own theme in about a day's work - which I strongly recommend. Maintaining this site has been incredibly easy. DasBlog is very well put together technically using C#, storing all data in XML so that you don't need a database. I was also able add additional functionality of my own, all thanks to good documentation.

I wish to thank Scott Hanselman and Omar Shahine for their continued work on a great weblog engine. You also find other tips, add-ons, and kudos by searching for "dasblog" in Google. Needless to say, I am now a big fan of DasBlog, so much so that I'm going to use it for all of my blogsites ... including new personal site (coming soon!)