----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher McMillan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2002 7:21 AM
Subject: Office 11 Beta On Its Way
Good Morning:
FYI!!
Office Beta 11 is on its way for private beta testing!!
1. Office 11 Beta News
2. Security Exposures Continue
3. Top Tip: Bullets in Spreadsheets
4. New Woody's MVPs
5. Top Tip Toppled: Outlook Autoresponse Firing Blanks
6. OpenOffice Inroads
7. Keep WOW Alive and Free
Sincerely,
Christopher McMillan
----- Original Message -----
From: "Woody's Office Watch" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2002 1:05 AM
Subject: Woody's OFFICE Watch #7.27 - SCOOP! Office 11 timetable
--==>> WOW -- WOODY's OFFICE WATCH <<==--
Weekly advice and commiseration from
Woody Leonhard, Certified Office Victim
18 June 2002 Vol 7 No 27
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as are all the Woody's Watches. To subscribe with the same
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1. Office 11 Beta News
2. Security Exposures Continue
3. Top Tip: Bullets in Spreadsheets
4. New Woody's MVPs
5. Top Tip Toppled: Outlook Autoresponse Firing Blanks
6. OpenOffice Inroads
7. Keep WOW Alive and Free
" Congratulations on the new WOODY's TRAVELLERS Watch
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" More practical info from the house of Woody - just what I
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It's free, will help you save money and enjoy your business
and leisure travel. Click on this link
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WOW or visit http://woodyswatch.com/travel
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1. OFFICE 11 BETA NEWS
It's official.
Microsoft plans on releasing the "Preview Beta" of Office
11 between September and November, 2002. It will follow up
with a "Broad Reach Beta" between January and March of next
year.
There's a lot of obfuscating terminology floating around
here, so let me try to translate.
The "Preview Beta" is only the test version of Office 11
that matters. If you're involved in the "Preview Beta" and
you discover a significant bug, chances are good that
Microsoft will fix the bug before the next version of
Office ships. The "Preview Beta" doesn't go out until well
after everything important is frozen: in very rare cases,
"Preview Beta" participants might be able to post a comment
such as, "Hey, why don't you add a button to this dialog
box", and if enough people jump on the bandwagon the button
might be added. But there's no way that a dead-on
insightful comment such as, "Jeeez, Revision Tracking
sucks, start all over again, folks" will even be
acknowledged.
The "Broad Reach Beta" is what we used to call the
"Marketing Beta". It's really a marketing thang - Microsoft
releases a "Beta" version of Office so key customers will
feel that they're on the inside. In fact, once the
Marketing Beta hits, only show-stopper bugs (that is, bugs
that cause Office to hang, or result in lost data) are even
considered. It's the "Feel Good Beta" version.
You might also note that I've reverted to calling this next
version "Office 11", which is the name I started using last
December
(http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v6-n54
). The people on the Office development team are
vacillating on the name, too: Office.NET is out because
it's copyrighted. NGO/Next Generation Office fell out of
favor a couple of months ago. Now it's Office 11 again. No
doubt we'll have one or more new monikers before the
product ships in the second quarter of next year. Office
03, anybody?
I've talked about the ho-hum new features that everyone
expects in the next version of Office (subscription
services, rent-a-box, and so on), but it looks like MS may
have a few surprises up its sleeve. Foremost among them:
something called "Structured Documents". Is it possible
that MS is finally (finally!) scrapping that piece-of-junk
implementation of hidden section marks that's laughingly
called "Master Documents"? Man, I hope so.
One thing we know for sure. There won't be any significant
improvements to Visual Basic for Applications. Microsoft is
on record saying that VBA is an orphan - OK, OK, let me
rephrase that. Microsoft is on record saying that VBA will
be supported in Office 11 and Office 12, and VBA programs
will work along side their more capable .NET brethren in
those two versions. On the plus side, you VBA programmers
won't be forced to learn the .NET shtick for a few more
years. On the minus side, there's no way in
developers-developers-developers hell that Microsoft is
going to put any effort at all into improving Office VBA.
It also leaves open (in my mind, at least) the huge
question of macro security - .NET is secure; VBA ain't; and
a wad of chewing gum and hank of baling wire won't change
that one little bit.
Anyway, you heard it here first: Office 11 beta in
September, with the unwashed masses working on preview
copies in January. I expect shrinkwrapped boxes will be on
store shelves early in the second quarter of 2003.
So for most of you it means most of a year before the next
Office becomes a reality - plenty of time before you have
to make any sort of upgrade decision. However this
timeline will doubtless be of interest to anyone
considering switching to Office XP.
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2. SECURITY EXPOSURES CONTINUE
By now you no doubt know that Microsoft distributed yet
another virus in one of its products - this time it was
Nimda, which MS released with the Korean version of Visual
Studio.NET. It's not a new story. The very first Word 97
macro virus was distributed by Microsoft, attached to a
marketing document posted on MS's Web site five years ago
(http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v2-n37
) - and MS no doubt circulated viruses long before then.
Don't get me started about the "prank macro" Concept.A
virus, the grand-daddy of 'em all...
Microsoft is publicizing a manual work-around for the
"Gopher" hole in Internet Explorer, a security exposure
that's "inherited" by Outlook. Details at
http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v7-n25
and the original posting from Online Solutions Oy in
Finland ("Oy" = "Company" or "Ltd" in Finnish) is at
http://www.solutions.fi/index.cgi/news_2002_06_05?lang=eng.
The workaround Microsoft lists at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS02-025.asp
involves making your own, manual tweaks to proxy server
settings - a procedure that's so convoluted and filled with
potential minefields that I wouldn't even recommend it to a
guru. Best to keep your fingers crossed that nobody wearing
a black hat figures out how to get this particular security
hole to work before Microsoft releases a patch.
Other than that bit of bad news, every security hole I
mentioned last week is still in full force. See
http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v7-n26
if you didn't take all the security measures I mentioned
last week. It's important.
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3. TOP TIP: BULLETS IN SPREADSHEETS
I admit to being a Word bigot. You don't even need to taunt
me. I'll proudly flog my shortcomings to anyone who will
listen.
I always get tongue-tied (or finger-tied) when I need to do
something in Excel that's a lead-pipe cinch in Word. Until
Excel 2002 came out with a new feature that lets you put
graphics in headers and footers, for example, I frequently
imported Excel spreadsheets into Word just so I could get
the printed pages' headers to look decent.
Another case in point: bullets. I use bullets all the time
in Word, and they're such a pain in Excel. Yes, you can
click Insert | Symbol and put a bullet anywhere you like in
a spreadsheet, but bulleting is so easy in Word that I
resent having to resort to manual methods. (At least,
bulleting in Word's easy when you turn off the stupid Word
autoformatting setting that converts all sorts of typed
text into bulleted paragraphs - Tools | AutoCorrect |
AutoFormat, uncheck the box marked Automatic bulleted
lists).
I recently discovered that you can set up Excel 97, 2000,
or 2002 to automatically apply a bullet to cells with a
specific style, and it's really quite simple. Here's how:
> Click inside a cell where you want a bullet
> Click Format | Style. Excel brings up the Style dialog
box, with the Style Name (probably "Normal") highlighted.
> Type the name of your new Style, the one that'll be
bulleted. Let's call it Bullet.
> Click Modify.
> Here's the tricky part: in the Category box, first click
Text, then click Custom. You have to click both of those
entries, in that order.
> Excel puts a @ sign in the Type box. Click in front of the @ sign.
> With the cursor in front of the @ sign, hold down the Alt
key on the keyboard and type 0149 (that's the key code
for a bullet in almost every font). Release the Alt key,
then type a space. The Type box should look like this:
. @
> Click OK twice and you're done. The cell you selected is
now formatted with the Bullet style. The contents of the
cell shows up with a bullet and a space in front of the
text.
Any time you want to put a bullet on any other cell, simply
select the cell, click Format | Style, pick Bullet from the
drop-down list, hit OK, and your bullet shows up, slick as
can be.
By the way, you can use other key codes: 0151 will give you
an em-dash, for example, 0187 will give you a right
double-chevron.
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4. NEW WOODY'S MVPS
The WOPR Lounge is absolutely humming with loads of old
friends (Hi, Eileen!) and new acquaintances dropping by
with questions and answers... all served up with a dose of
hard-nosed reality. Claude even has a new .NET forum. Drop
by http://wopr.com/lounge/ and post a question, lend a
hand, or just kick back and chew the fat.
The WOPR Lounge Lizards and Lizardettes, being duly
assembled and sworn in - sworn at, for that matter - have
met in secret session and would like to bestow our highest
honor upon a select few. Please join me in welcoming the
following new Woody's MVPs into the illustrious circle:
Francois Caron
Malcolm Acheson (known as unkamunka)
Hans Vogelaar (a.k.a. HansV)
Gary Swanson
StuartR
And Klaus.
Formal announcements will appear momentarily in the Lounge,
and official settings made.
Congratulations, and thanks, to all of you for helping
hundreds (nay, thousands!) of hapless Office users put
their arms around the beast.
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5. TOP TIP TOPPLED: OUTLOOK AUTORESPONSE FIRING BLANKS
Last week I wrote about creating automatic responses to all
email messages sent to a specific i.d. - in this case, I
wanted to send a "thank you" and acknowledgement to
everyone who wrote to [log in to unmask] . As noted
in the article, I turned off WordMail, created a new
template (which you can't do with WordMail active), saved
it, then created an Outlook 2002 rule that would send the
template out every time a message to
[log in to unmask] came in. (In fact, I only run
two rules in Outlook - the first one sends out the
autoresponse, and the second one files away messages sent
to [log in to unmask] in their own folder. Very
simple.)
I got several messages from WOWsers saying the
autoresponses they set up using the technique in last
week's WOW seemed to be working fine - in both Outlook 2000
and 2002 - except the responder was firing blanks! The
autoresponder would send out messages in response to
incoming email, but the body of the response had absolutely
nothing in it.
I tried a million different combinations, pushed and
pulled, checked the Knowledge Base a dozen different ways,
and fired off SOS messages to several Outlook-savvy
friends. Diane Poremsky put me on the right track. Here's
what I found.
There's a bug in Outlook. (So what else is new, eh?) in
order to make autoresponding rules work properly - to keep
them from firing blanks - you have to set Outlook up to use
automatic signatures when replying to messages. That makes
absolutely no sense, I know. But, at least on my production
machine, it works. When I click on Tools | Options | Mail
Format and pick anything but <None> in the box marked
Signatures for replies and forwards, the autoresponder
starts working just fine.
I don't *want* an automatic signature on all of my
autoresponder-generated messages, mind you, but I have to
have one. There's a trick with that, too: I set up an
automatic signature that contains a couple of spaces, and
nothing else. Outlook has an automatic signature that puts
a blank line at the end of the autoresponse message.
Outlook's happy. I'm happy. Everyone's happy. At least, in
a delayed gratification sort of way.
I apologize if you sent something to me at
[log in to unmask] and you got a blank message back
- but it ain't my fault, folks!
You'd think Microsoft would've solved a problem like this
years ago. Outlook rules are still really flakey, and I
don't see MS putting a whole lot of development resources
into fixing them. After all, if you have Exchange Server
running, it can handle all the heavy lifting. Maybe it's
another subtle way to nudge all of us into installing
Exchange Server, eh?
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6. OPENOFFICE INROADS
Microsoft claims that more than 60 million people have
licensed Office XP
(http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/Press/2002/May02/05-13OXPMomentum200
2PR.
asp
) - and it's being installed at double the rate of Office
2000. Amazing.
Mind, you have to take these boasts with the usual pillar
of salt. We've seen similar press releases back to the
days of Word v1 - Microsoft assumes such puffery will fool
some people so they drag it out each time. The number of
licenses sold may well include purchases by companies for
additional users of Office 2000 or before - not XP - since
they pay for each use of Office, regardless of version.
There's no doubt many people like Office XP, but there's
also no doubt that many others are hanging onto the devil
they know - and who can blame them?
Amazing, though, is the competition. After years of being
the only real game in town, we're finally seeing some
credible opposition to the Redmond Office Behemoth.
I'm getting a lot of mail like this message from WOWser
BrandonB: "As MSOffice gets increasingly buggy and
Microsoft continues to play with onerous licensing schemes
and software-rental plots, I think it's time to start
seriously looking at alternatives, and OpenOffice (which I
have only just begun to play with) is really impressing me.
I'm not going to uninstall Office XP (I still love
Outlook), but I think OpenOffice.org is going to be my
office software of choice from now on."
With WalMart selling Lindows machines for less than $600
(you need to add a monitor:
http://www.theinquirer.net/14060234.htm ), maybe your
future has a Red Hat in it.
I'm openly soliciting comments about OpenOffice and Office
alternatives, and I'll run the best of the bunch in WOW.
Care to tell me about your experiences? I don't want
pie-eyed "it's gotta be better because it ain't Bill's"
cant. Give me some meat - the good, the bad, and the ugly.
mailto:[log in to unmask]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
7. KEEP WOW ALIVE AND FREE
If you like the no-nonsense style you see in this
newsletter - the straight scoop, whether Microsoft likes it
or not, dished out in a way that won't put you to sleep -
get one of my books!
"Windows XP All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies", Hungry Minds
http://www.woodyswatch.com/l.asp?0764515489
"Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP" with Ed Bott, Que
http://www.woodyswatch.com/l.asp?0789725134
"Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2000" with Ed Bott, Que
http://www.woodyswatch.com/l.asp?0789718421
"Woody Leonhard Teaches Office 2000", Que
http://www.woodyswatch.com/l.asp?0789718715
ADMINISTRIVIA
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of WOW - or you want to read about how we protect your
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over to your very own personalized WOW page at
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Woody's OFFICE Watch
Copyright 2002 by Peter Deegan. All rights reserved. ISSN 1328-1674.
======================================================
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