Oren’s Weblog

Well, after almost an entire day in my office working with the new Microsoft software, I can report some successes and some problems.

Obviously, the blog posting from Word works (obvious because you’re reading these posts), though I haven’t yet gotten Word to recognize my categories, and it doesn’t seem to know about tagging posts.

The Outline function in Word seems much improved from previous versions, which is making it easy to work on the outline for my ECAR research bulletin.

On the other hand, IE 7 crashes every time I try to open a PDF file link, which has made it much more difficult to work on my ECAR research bulletin (grumble grumble…that’s what you get for trying new beta software on a project that matters that you’re already behind the deadline on).

I managed to successfully import my bookmarks from Firefox into IE (once I actually located where the Firefox bookmarks were). IE, however, seems to have put them in a different order than they were in Firefox – that’s confusing. I wish I could use Foxmarks with IE – seems like it’d be possible for somebody to write that as an extension. IE 7 also doesn’t seem to have the equivalent of the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox – it has a sidebar that you can open your favorites in. Since I don’t want to keep a sidebar open all the time, that just means my heavily used bookmarks are one more click away.

When I imported my bookmarks from Firefox it added them to the already existing IE favorites, most of which were years out of date. I couldn’t figure out how to efficiently edit and manage the favorites from within IE – it would only let me delete one bookmark at a time, for instance. Once I opened up the Favorites folder, however, I could manage the bookmarks and folders just like any other Windows folder.

Interesting note about blogging from Word – so I publish the post to the blog server. Then should I save the document in Word? What good would that do? Will Word know if I try to republish an document with edits, like Ecto does? Seems unlikely, but I’ll try it out at some point.

There’s lots of new software on its way to coming out for Windows – new versions of Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and, of course, the looming new version of Windows itself, Vista. I’ve decided it’s time to try out some of the new stuff for myself. Since I’ve been mostly a Mac user over the past couple of years, I’ve been at least somewhat out of touch with what’s happening on Windows, so this should be an interesting exercise.

Our local Microsoft rep got me set up on the beta program (thanks, Frank!), so I’ll have access to the latest and (hopefully) greatest releases.

It turns out that in order to take advantage of all the new eye-candy advanced graphics features in Vista I had to order a new system with a dedicated graphics card and lots of memory (my current office Windows system is several years old), so I can’t test Vista just yet.

In the meantime, though, I’ve installed the beta release of Office and IE 7. I’ll be trying to use them for several real-world tasks and reporting on how they work for me.

The first thing I notice is that the new Outlook doesn’t work for me. I don’t mean it’s poorly designed or has bad UI – it just never finishes opening my Inbox on the UW Imap server. I should ‘fess up at this point – I’ve totally bought into the Google Mail paradigm of keeping most everything in my Inbox and finding things through searching, with the predictable result of ending up with an inbox that’s got more than 10,000 messages in it at this point. So perhaps it’s no wonder that Outlook chokes on my mail – but I can’t be the only person working this way. Perhaps I don’t have enough memory on my computer for Outlook to handle it – this box only has 512 MB of RAM (a megabyte just ain’t what it use to be).

The next thing I notice is that the Word user interface looks very different than previous versions. Lots of other folks have written about the tabbed “Ribbon” interface, so I won’t attempt to describe it here – but I was sure shocked by the lack of a File menu – it takes a lot of chutzpah to do away with what is probably the most basic navigational mechanism common to GUIs since the original Mac was introduced (I thought it went back to the Xerox Star, but I can’t find any evidence of that). Time will tell if this is new interface style is a good idea, but I’m sure it will confuse lots of people at first.

The new Word supports blog posting, using the MetaWebLog and Atom publishing protocols, so I’m trying that out for the first time with this post. It was fairly easy to configure Word to publish to my Movable Type blog – assuming that this post actually works.

I’m working on writing a Research Bulletin for ECAR, so I’ll be trying to use the new Word for that – we’ll see how it goes. More later!