As you probably know if you’ve been trying out Office 2007 beta 2 yourself, there’s an updated engine of Microsoft’s Windows Desktop Search engine available for use with the beta, which enables better search functionality in Outlook and OneNote. This engine has been working fine for me in Outlook (well, after the initialization in the beginning, and if I skip the facts that the data files take up more than 1GB of space on my laptop and apparently need to be maintained regularly at the cost of a …

Here’s great news — I had just wondered about it earlier today, and now there’s actually a quick way to get some feedback to Microsoft about the Office 2007 beta. This blog post explains it nicely, and here’s the download in case the MSDN blogs are inaccessible (which they sometimes seem to be). …

Can’t say if this is really specific to PowerPoint, but I just noticed that PowerPoint 2007 regularly uses the clipboard internally. I’ve been using ClipMate for a few years now, which is a really fantastic clipboard monitor/archiver tool with a lot of functionality around clipboard use. ClipMate also has a setting to produce a sound when the content of the clipboard changes, and that’s what made me notice that clipboard content was regularly changed while I was creating and editing slides in P …

I posted before about a few inconsistencies in the Office 2007 UI, and now I found that there’s not even a common UI document model underneath the various applications. I did some tests with PowerPoint, Word and Excel — what I want is really simple: I want to be able to open more than one document at once, and I want each document to appear in its own window. Of course each of those windows should have its own button in the task bar (it wouldn’t cross my mind to mention this specifically, but …

Go here to get it. Mind you, I don’t know if there are any restrictions — I had registered on a similar page a while ago, in the hope of being on the beta at some point. You have to login with your passport and enter a bit of additional information, but once you’ve done that, the download starts immediately. Have fun!

Now we’ve been told about the fantastic Ribbon for so long… somehow I expected to find it everywhere (and I actually like it, but that’s a different topic). Outlook doesn’t have it though — are there not enough menu entries and toolbar buttons in Outlook to warrant the Ribbon? Then again, one look at the Outlook Options dialog tells me that the UI improvement team skipped this application… it’s as ugly and confusing as ever. Outlook at least recognizes the theming setting I made in another …

So here’s Microsoft being themselves again… hundreds of people are complaining about the fact that Office 2007 can’t be activated right now, at least since this morning apparently. It’s nice that I can run “the software” 50 times without activation, but as “the software” includes all the single applications in the Office Professional package, this isn’t very much. After having a look at each app just once and getting Outlook to the point where it now synchronizes with my Exchange server, I’m …

I had a Subversion repository hosted on a Linux server that I wanted to migrate to a Windows server. I managed to do this, but it wasn’t all immediately intuitive, so I’m documenting the process here in case I need to do it again sometime, or someone else benefits from it. To begin with, I found the wonderful SVN 1-Click Setup, which promises to do the whole installation of SVN on Windows at the click of a button. I thought that would be a good thing and downloaded it (here).

The installation …