First flight to Brisbane, Sydney Airport 17th June 2007. Up at 4.30am, at the airport at 5.45am. Up so early, even the cats were surprised. Actually one of the cats didn’t even bother to come out and visit as it was so early. Motor into Windor to present to 25-30 members of the Brisbug User Group.
There were some unanswered questions, which I will tackle here:
Office Publisher 2007, breaking links. Break Forward Link: this is the process of removing the linkage from the current Text Box to the next, and retaining the text. From my quick research, Publisher 2007 does not change the functionality compared to previous versions.
Changing the selection/highlight colour in Word/Excel. This is relatively easy: Microsoft Word, as other well written Windows programs, respect the setting “Selected Item” colour in the Display Control Panel. This allows you to change the background colour that shows highlighted items, including text. Also note that Word 2007 has a zoom to make it easier to see text on screen.
OEM Windows XP Service Pack 2, Media Center. Install issue related to CDs with poor wording for insert CD (near bottom of chat transcript from May 2006). Seems like its an issue that is related to the wording of the install screen, not an error with the installer.
Links: Office 2007 file opening with previous versions of Office: If you have a mixture of Office 2007 and older versions on your home network, this http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&DisplayLang=en is the link to the plugin.
Update: 28th June 2007: Office 2003 vs. 2007 menus: http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/archive/2007/06/27/office-2007-what-ever-happened-to-that-menu-option.aspx
Excel Finance function changes. The financial functions in Excel, apart from Nett Present Value and Compounding Interest, have sort of baffled me. From the help file:
Easy formula writing
The following improvements make formula writing much easier in Office Excel 2007.
Resizable formula bar The formula bar automatically resizes to accommodate long, complex formulas, which prevents the formulas from covering other data in your worksheet. You can also write longer formulas with more levels of nesting than you could in earlier versions of Excel.
Function AutoComplete With Function AutoComplete, you can quickly write the proper formula syntax. From easily detecting the functions that you want to use to getting help completing the formula arguments, you will be able to get formulas right the first time and every time.
Autocomplete assists with the writing of a formula. The most linked reference on the web for Financial function (now the how, more the why) is from here.
“Changing the selection/highlight colour in Word/Excel. This is relatively easy: Microsoft Word, as other well written Windows programs, respect the setting “Selected Item†colour in the Display Control Panel…”
Just an FYI: Excel does *not* respect this. I’ve set my Windows highlight-color to be RGB 10,28,236; Excel shows it as RGB 234,236,245 (near-white). I also set my highlighted text to be color RGB 255,255,255 (that would make white text on a dark blue background)… Excel keeps the text RGB 0,0,0. I actually did a screen dump of a selection in Excel, pasted in in Pain.Net, and used the dropper to get the colors used.
From what I understand, the only way to make Excel obey Windows settings is to select High Contrast as your Windows Desktop theme… which, imho, is a bit extreme for a single program that doesn’t behave.