Microsoft Office

BY MELISSA NEWMAN

EVERY YEAR, AMID the excitement of Halloween-related fun, conversations commonly turn toward scary and unnerving talk of the mysterious world of paranormal and supernatural phenomena.Unlike the entertaining “safe scares” that Halloween brings, for those who encounter “real paranormal phenomena,” the encounters can be truly terrifying and even life-changing. And while these otherworldly phenomena have been a part of the human experience since the dawn of humankind – and, incidentally, is where Halloween originates – not even western society’s modern-day cynical culture of scientific analysis could dismiss and suppress the existence of these elusive phenomena. On the contrary, whether you are a believer or a hardened skeptic, an avalanche of experiences involving paranormal and supernatural phenomena continues to be reported worldwide.

According to several polls and surveys conducted around the world, belief in the paranormal and supernatural is at an all time high and shows no evidence of decline. In the U.S. alone, a recent Gallop poll showed that 75% of Americans have some sort of paranormal belief; a Harris poll showed that half of Americans believe in ghosts; a CBS poll showed that one in five Americans have seen or physically encountered a ghost; and still another survey taken from more than 400 college students with the highest GPAs found seniors and grad students more likely to believe in the paranormal then their “uneducated” freshman counterparts. Paranormal beliefs include such phenomena as extraterrestrial and UFO close encounters, all types of psychic phenomena, miracles and demonic possession, ghosts and poltergeists, witchcraft and metaphysics, and encounters with extraordinary life forms, including Bigfoot and the notorious chupacabra.

HALLOWEEN ORIGINS

Whether one is a believer or a skeptic, Halloween in the U.S. might be the one time of the year that both stand united in simply having a good time in the shadow of such reported phenomena. The origins of Halloween itself lay in supernatural beliefs and an ancient Celtic festival that dates back some 2,000 years. Originally called Samhain (pronounced sow-in), the festival originated amidst the region now known as the United Kingdom and celebrated the one night each year that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became indistinguishable. On this night, the Celts believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to Earth for good or for bad and allowed Druid priests to additionally interact with them for the wellbeing of them all.

Over the course of hundreds of years, early Christianity would attempt to suppress and replace the Celtic festival with All Saints’ Day, which was celebrated on November 1, a holy day of obligation to honor saints and martyrs in the Christian faith. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. But even the powerful influence of the church was unable to squelch the supernatural festival, and Halloween endured and flourished over the centuries to become the sensationalistic celebration it is today in the U.S.

While Halloween is still mostly an American commercial phenomenon, little by little every year, evidence that the spooky holiday is being embraced globally is being seen more and more. UNICEF itself has a special “Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF” program aimed to empower kids, not just in the U.S., but in other countries as well, by trick-or-treating for donations to help their counter-parts in need all over the world. The reluctance to embrace Halloween in other countries has been primarily due to the seriousness that the supernatural and paranormal is taken in other cultures. While the western world can make light of beliefs, both religious and metaphysical, other old-world cultures are very sensitive to and deeply immersed in their beliefs and find such playfulness like the Amercanized version of Halloween to be considered as taboo and, in some cultures, even sacrilegious.

Enjoy your Halloween!

During today’s Professional Development Conference keynote, Ray Ozzie made an exciting announcement about a new way to view, edit, and collaborate with Excel. If you weren’t able to watch the keynote, feel free to check out the following links: PDC Keynote Video, Official MS Press Release, and Channel 9 Video.

In case you’re in a hurry, here’s the bottom line:

We are taking Excel Services, which many of you are already familiar with, and extending it beyond just viewing spreadsheets to authoring, editing and real-time collaboration in the browser!
You will be able to do light-weight editing including formula authoring, formatting and additional Excel features from within any browser: IE, FireFox, and Safari (it is just HTML and AJAX!)
The Excel web application will be available in two channels: as a consumer service offered via Office Live and as a business offering via either hosted subscription or volume licensing.
Any spreadsheets you author or edit online will be compatible with the Excel desktop client.

In part:

As part of the next release of Office, we’re announcing that Microsoft will deliver Office Web applications - lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote - through a browser. With these new applications, people can use a browser to create, edit, and collaborate on Office documents. What’s great is that this provides a consistent Office experience when and where our customers want it, regardless of whether they are accessing their Office documents through the PC, phone, or browser.

PressPass: What does this announcement mean for Microsoft?

Capossela: We are on a path to deliver all our technology as “software plus services,” and today is an important milestone in this journey. For more than 10 years, millions of workers have benefited from Microsoft cloud-based services, including Hosted Exchange, Outlook Web Access and Live Meeting. Earlier this year, we announced Microsoft Online, which businesses such as Coca-Cola Enterprises, Blockbuster, and Energizer are using to access Exchange and SharePoint over the Web. Last month, more than 1 million people turned to Office Live Workspace for sharing and collaborating over the Internet.

Viewing a Word document in Word Web application.
Click for hi-res version

Today in Los Angeles, we raised the stakes with Office Web applications. With this development, people can benefit from Office as a service on their browser, as a downloadable application on their phone, and as software on their PCs. This is the kind of flexibility that our software plus services approach makes possible, and is helping us deliver the kind of innovation that businesses and consumers expect from Microsoft.

PressPass: How will the Office Web applications benefit customers?

Capossela: Customers’ requirements have changed, as have their expectations of technology. While Office is synonymous with desktop productivity, the idea of “desktop” has

changed from a PC-centric notion to one in which people are empowered on the PC, on the phone, and with a browser.

Our customers don’t use one device, but rather several. They want a seamless, synchronized experience across those devices to help them work smarter, faster, and better. Office Web applications will make that a reality.

Next generation of Windows Embedded Standard will offer a richer set of solutions for building smart, connected, service-oriented devices.

Microsoft Corp. announced plans for the next generation of Windows Embedded Standard, code-named “Quebec” to be built on Windows 7. Windows Embedded “Quebec” delivers powerful next-generation Microsoft technologies including Silverlight 2, Windows Presentation Foundation and interoperability with Visual Studio 2010. Alignment with Windows 7 features will give OEMs access to the skills and contributions of a global community of Windows developers familiar with Visual Studio. OEMs will be able to quickly develop applications and drivers for connected device scenarios requiring rich applications, services and end-user experiences connecting to Windows-based PCs, servers and Windows Web services.

Driving Connected Experiences With the Richest Set of Solutions

“Windows Embedded ‘Quebec’ will provide OEMs with the ability to further differentiate their devices by taking rich user experiences to the next level with exciting new input capabilities through multitouch, gesture support and user interface enhancements,” said Kevin Dallas, general manager of the Windows Embedded Business Unit at Microsoft. “It also will feature a rich set of componentized operating system technologies and specific features that let developers optimally size the operating system on their devices with only the drivers, services and applications they need.”

Built on Windows 7, Windows Embedded “Quebec” will offer developers a powerful, familiar and reliable experience that will include the following benefits:

• Rich user experience. The latest Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation tools deliver the next generation of media experiences and rich Internet applications for devices.

• Enhanced security and control. Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption and key management to protect data on embedded devices provide greater security. In addition, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 will provide defense from malicious Web sites and keep data private with improved security and InPrivate Browsing.

• Enhanced stability and improved performance. The new platform will offer enhanced stability and improved performance with investment in multicore architecture, including 64-bit processor support.

• Extended Web capabilities to the embedded device. Customers will have the ability to enable Web capabilities to their devices with Internet Explorer 8 accelerators and Windows Web services, benefitting from powerful, efficient Web applications, including offline capabilities.

From the Access Team Blog: Today’s guest writer is Liam Cavanagh from the Sync Framework and SQL Services team. They are doing some cool stuff that allows Access developers to store their app and data in the cloud using SQL Server Data Services. Liam is looking for people that want to beta test an upcoming release early next year. –Clint

Today at PDC we are announcing Codename “Huron”, a set of synchronization experiences built on top of the sync functionality in SQL Data Services’ cloud database and the Microsoft Sync Framework to provide business database sharing. Business database sharing offers a simple way to scale data to large numbers of users while not parting from the investment made in current technologies. It also enables users to subscribe and then edit the data locally in the format of their choice whether that is Office Access, SQL Server Express or SQL Server Compact and then push changes into SQL Data Services. The first end-to-end experience we will provide is for Office Access and will allow users to:

Publish databases to the cloud along with reports, forms and objects
Subscribe to published data and automatically configure the local database for sync
Make online changes through SQL Data Services and propagate those changes to subscribed users once they connect
Enable scheduled and background synchronization of data changes through SQL Data Services and then on to other subscribed users
Backup and restore of database applications to the cloud
If you are interested in joining our early beta, please email DataLabs@Microsoft.com with “Huron beta” in the subject. For more information on Codename “Huron”, please visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/sync

Microsoft Sync Framework is a comprehensive synchronization platform that enables collaboration and offline access for applications, services and devices. It features technologies and tools that enable roaming, sharing, and taking data offline. Using Microsoft Sync Framework, developers can build sync ecosystems that integrate any application, with any data from any store using any protocol over any network.

A key aspect of the Microsoft Sync Framework is the ability to create custom synchronization providers. A provider is a software component that represents a replica for synchronization. A replica is a particular repository of information to be synchronized, such as a file system on a handheld device. When representing a data source, a provider enumerates changes from its replica. When representing a destination, a provider applies changes to its replica. If the data at the source and destination differ in type or schema, each provider performs any necessary mapping or transformation.

Home and Office Computer Users
Training materials from Microsoft Learning will help you use the enhanced intuitive design and improved features of the 2007 Microsoft Office system to get more out of the programs that you use every day. Find the resources—Microsoft E-Learning, classroom training, and books and training kits from Microsoft Press—that will help you start taking advantage of the new functionality in the 2007 Office system.

Microsoft E-Learning
If you learn best independently, Microsoft E-Learning courses provide a simple and effective way for you to learn at your own pace and on your own schedule. Take Microsoft E-Learning courses to improve your skills, prepare for a project, or earn certifications.

• View a list of Microsoft E-Learning courses on 2007 Office system applications in the Microsoft Learning Catalog

Books from Microsoft Press
Some of the biggest work challenges you face today—information overload, knowledge management, collaboration limitations, and localization issues—are directly addressed by new features in the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

• Find books from Microsoft Press

• View a list of Microsoft Press books about the 2007 Office system in the Microsoft Learning Catalog

Classroom training
Microsoft Certified Partners for Learning Solutions deliver Microsoft Learning training in a classroom environment. The training is facilitated by expert Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs).

• Locate a Learning Solutions partner near you

Microsoft Business Certification program
The Microsoft Business Certification program validates your job skills in using the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Microsoft Office SharePoint portal sites, and Windows Vista. Whether you want to stand out in the job market, improve and simplify your organization’s hiring processes, or empower your students to enter the workforce; the Microsoft Business Certification credential demonstrates that you have proven expertise that businesses will depend on.

• Learn more about the Microsoft Business Certification program

Free self-paced training courses for Office programs

It is easy to create a poll in Microsoft Office Outlook by including voting buttons in an e-mail message. When recipients respond to the poll, you can either automatically tabulate the results of the vote in Outlook or export the responses to a Microsoft Office Excel 2007 worksheet.

Add the voting buttons

Create a new e-mail message, or open a message that you want to reply to or forward.
In the message window, on the Options tab, in the Tracking group, click Use Voting Buttons.

Click one of the following:

Approve;Reject This option is best when you need an authorization for an action. For example, you can send an e-mail request to several recipients seeking their approval of a project proposal.
Yes;No When all you need is either a yes or a no, this is a good way to take a quick poll.
Yes;No;Maybe When you don’t want to limit the choices to yes and no, this voting option offers an alternative response.

Custom Click this command to create your own custom voting button names. For example, you can ask your colleagues to choose among three days of the week for a recurring weekly staff meeting.
When the Message Options dialog box appears, under Voting and Tracking options, select the Use voting buttons check box.

Select and delete the default button names, and then type the text that you want. Separate button names with semicolons.

Compose your message, and then click Send.

(more…)

Courtesy of Rieva: Like many of you, I get inspired hearing about other entrepreneurs and how they became successful. But there’s also a lot we can learn from the challenges our fellow business owners go through. Take a look at what Christopher Hazlett has been through

Hazlett faced every entrepreneur’s nightmare last year, as this New York Times article reports. When the stock market began wobbling last January, almost all of his big corporate clients walked out on their contracts — taking his Hoboken, N.J., software design firm, Integrate Consulting LLC, from six figures in projected revenues to nearly nothing in just two weeks.

After spending four months searching for new clients in vain, Hazlett didn’t give up. Instead, he changed his focus — from making software for Fortune 100 companies to developing event-planning software for small and midsize organizations including businesses and churches. Although he just introduced his new product — smack in the midst of an economic meltdown — he’s still optimistic.

What can we learn from Hazlett?

First, don’t put your eggs in too few baskets. Hazlett admits he was uneasy about relying so heavily on large corporations as clients. That’s risky, even in the best of times. So when the economy turned ugly and big companies cut their costs, his company lost out.
Don’t be afraid to change course if you need to. One of your advantages as a very small business is being able to turn on a dime. Since corporate cost-cutting was what hurt Hazlett, he is now promoting his new product, Event Clipboard, as a way to help organizations save money. The reaction of beta testers has been positive, and he hopes to have 250 accounts by the end of 2009.
Don’t overspend. Hazlett never used outside financing, never took on debt, and never even had an office, so he was able to regroup rather than fold his business.

Stay positive. “I’m exuberant,” says Hazlett, who saw his business as having only two choices: “Change, or close my doors for good.” Which one would you choose?

How has your business or personal life changed since the Nation’s financial crisis?

Courtesy of Lorian: From a technical standpoint, becoming an online entrepreneur is pretty easy these days. Low-cost and user-friendly tools such as Store Manager make it easy to list your products on the Web, provide customers with a shopping cart, handle sales transactions, and manage other details.

But I think online store owners understand that running an e-commerce operation takes more than friendly and affordable technology. Setting up your store is just the start. Succeeding in an online business requires doing a number of other things well. Or conversely, avoiding some common mistakes.

In that spirit, I offer my top 10 blunders every online entrepreneur should avoid (in no particular order).

1. Selling too many products. If you sell funny hats online, don’t add MP3 players to your product lineup just because you purchased a wholesale lot. It will muddle your business focus and confuse your customers.

2. Doing no marketing. The “If-I-build-it-they-will-come” thinking just doesn’t work. You need to promote your online store. For starters, investigate online marketing tools such adManager keyword advertising and E-Mail Marketing.

3. Poor product display. Try not to bunch too much information or too many products on your pages. Messy, cluttered pages look unprofessional. Simple goes a long way.

4. Using fuzzy photos. No photos are better than bad photos. Make sure your product shots are sharp and clear. Get creative with your digital camera or hire a professional photographer. If you just need photos for illustrative purposes, you can get them pretty cheap from online stock photography services for as little as a buck a piece.

5. Failing to refresh your site periodically. Shoppers will lose interest in your site if you don’t add new items or at least change around the ones you feature. Also, mix it up by featuring special promotions. Give them reasons to come back.

6. Showing out-of-stock items. If one of your products is no longer available, even temporarily, remove it from your site or note it on your site that it is currently not available. You don’t want to tease customers or look like you can’t manage your inventory.

7. Making it hard to ask questions. You probably have a Contact Us page. But don’t make people search through your site to ask product questions. Have a customer service phone number or e-mail address conveniently displayed on product pages.

8. Hiding shipping fees and return policies. Online shoppers want to know delivery charges and return policies before they commit to a purchase. If you make these fees and policies hard to find, they’ll head off to another store.

9. Downplaying security and privacy. Not only is it important that you use a secure payment service, it’s important that you draw attention to it on your site. Likewise, you should provide a prominent link to your privacy policy to assure customers that their personal information isn’t shared. Learn more about how to do this.

10. Selling the wrong product. Not everything sells well on the Web. Inexpensive items that you can easily snag in most local stores are particularly a bad idea — especially when you add on the shipping costs.

If you’re eager for more tips, check out the article “5 holiday marketing mistakes to avoid.” With the big shopping season nearly upon us, it offers some timely advice for folks selling online.

Office Publisher 2007 has been redesigned to make it even easier to quickly create or open publications. You can create your own publications with the professionally designed Publisher templates, customize the templates as needed, and then change from one type of publication to another by clicking a single button.

Get Help with Publisher Tasks

Office Publisher 2007 contains a new task pane, Publisher Tasks, that includes tips for creating your publication and quick links to frequently used features, such as the color scheme section of the Format Publication task pane. Publisher Tasks articles provide step-by-step assistance to help you use Publisher to communicate with your clients and manage your outreach efforts more effectively.

Learn how to write effective marketing publications, customize a publication with your business branding colors and fonts, prepare a publication for your mailing list or e-mail list, track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and perform e-mail marketing.

For example, you can click Publisher Tasks and use the tips that you find to create a newsletter for your business.

Create a new publication
Start Publisher, and then click one of the publication types in the Publication Types list.

For example, click Newsletters.
In the Newsletters catalog, click the design that you want, choose any other options that you want, such as a color scheme or a business information set, and then click Create.

Note: For more information about publication options such as font schemes, and business information sets, see Create and change font schemes for a professional look and Create, change, or

To get helpful tips, click Publisher Tasks .

Note After you create or open a publication in Office Publisher 2007, it is listed in the Recent Publications list. The Recent Publications list includes the last nine publications that you opened in Office Publisher 2007.

Quickly create a different publication

Do you need to create several publications for the same business? You can create different publication types that use the same options and information — such as the same color scheme and business information set. You can also quickly change from one publication type to another.

For example, if you are creating a newsletter but you are interrupted to create a business card, you can click Change Template and then select Business Cards as the new publication type. The new business card contains your color and font schemes, your business information set, and any other appropriate information that you added to the newsletter publication.

Important If you convert a saved publication to a different publication type, be sure to save the new publication with a new file name, or you may overwrite your earlier publication.

Microsoft Announces Global Anti-Piracy Day to Highlight Collaborative Efforts to Protect Customers and Partners Around the World From Software Piracy and Counterfeiting

Microsoft Corp. today announced Global Anti-Piracy Day, a simultaneous launch of education initiatives and enforcement actions in 49 countries on six continents to combat the sophisticated, illegal trade of pirated and counterfeit software. The programs announced today include intellectual property awareness campaigns, engagements with partner businesses, educational forums, local law enforcement training, and new legal actions against alleged software counterfeiters and pirates.

Microsoft is taking these steps as part of its commitment to working with communities, national governments and local law enforcement agencies around the world to help protect its customers and partners and promote the value of intellectual property as a driver of innovation. An interactive map detailing specific legal actions and education efforts being announced today can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/antipiracy.

“Software piracy and counterfeiting is a sophisticated, global trade with a damaging impact on consumers, businesses and economies, and Microsoft is committed to working with others around the world to stay a step ahead of this illegal industry,” said David Finn, associate general counsel for Worldwide Anti-Piracy and Anti-Counterfeiting at Microsoft. “In partnership with national governments, local law enforcement agencies, and our customer and partner communities, Microsoft is driving anti-piracy efforts across countries and continents through an equally sophisticated system of business intelligence, forensics and education. Together, we are working to identify international connection points between software pirates and counterfeiters, to help stop them in their tracks and protect consumers and legitimate businesses from this illegal trade.”

“The global trade in fakes threatens consumers, businesses and the economy,” said Guy Sebban, secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce. “It will only be possible to halt counterfeiting and piracy on a global scale through this kind of collaboration between governments and the private sector — both to educate people about the value of intellectual property and to take action against trade in illicit products.”

Global Anti-Piracy Day provides a 24-hour snapshot of the range of education initiatives and legal actions that take place on an ongoing basis in local markets around the world. For example, Microsoft today announced that it had partnered with the American Chamber of Commerce in Brazil to launch a new blog to raise awareness among educators about the importance of teaching young people about innovation and the high cost of piracy. In Turkey, Microsoft announced it is providing the country’s Ministry of Justice with training sessions on cyber crimes and their impact and has launched a Get Genuine campaign to teach customers how to confirm that their Microsoft software is genuine. In addition, Microsoft commended the Chinese government for its recent sentencing of two illegal operators found guilty of manipulating the Microsoft Open License program and selling unlicensed software to unsuspecting customers. In Italy, Microsoft began an employee anti-piracy ambassador program to educate family and friends through informal social networks. And in the United States, Microsoft took action to protect its customers and partners by filing 20 civil lawsuits in federal court in nine states against resellers alleged to be selling computers with preloaded unlicensed and/or counterfeit Microsoft Windows XP Professional and multiple versions of Microsoft Office software.