This week, Microsoft announced the launch of “Live Mesh” which is going to be their answer to the ultimate computer-nirvana goal of accessing everything you have, from anywhere you may be.

Your files, email, pictures, documents, music, and basically your whole life, can be instantly accessible from anywhere you happen to be, as long as you have an internet connection.

Last night I was working ofn a few things on my wifes laptop while we were watching a TV show, and like always, I didn’t “put everything away” and I left a Notepad document open with a few notes, and a few browser windows.

This morning when I got up, I went to the laptop to “get my stuff” and found that Microsoft had seized control overnight and rebooted my computer.

This morning it looks like Microsoft is offering 44.6 billion dollars to buy Yahoo. Holy Cow. That’s a far cry from the usual things I see when I browse my morning Twitter feed.

Actually, I’ve been wondering what’s taken them so long, since it’s clear they’re not going to get decent market share any other way.

I found something else to hate about office 2007 recently as I attempted to add a contact to Outlook, this time on a newly configured laptop.

Like I usually would, I right clicked on the e-mail address of the person who sent me the message, and chose “Add to Contacts”. I added the necessary information, and immediately upon attempting to save, I was greeted with this dialog box asking me to insert the area code of my location, which I had no use for.

In previous versions of MS Office, it was possible to modify your “save attachment as” dialog box with folders that you prefer, but in Office 2007, that option appeared to be gone thanks to this blog post I now know how to do it in the current version of Office.

Sorry, here’s another quick thing that sucks about Office 2007, this time in Outlook. (There are so many things to hate in Office 2007 that I’ve added now added MS Office to my blog as it’s own subcategory of Microsoft for future rants.)

A client emails me back their end of month report - right click the attachment, choose “save as” and I get “Cannot Save The Attachment”

Do you suppose many of the problems users have been experiencing with Office 2007 will be fixed now, with the release of the Office 2007 Service Pack 1 ? Call me a skeptic, but i’m not gettign my hopes up.

I am, however, downloading it as we speak, because at this point I’ll try just about ANYTHING to fix some of the things I hate about Office 2007

Live Search is finally showing backlink counts and locations again. In March of 2007, Microsoft announced that they were no longer able to support backlink checks through their search platform.

The reason (they said) was because they noticed too many automated queries, and they claimed that they would be “doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible…” but they never seemed to get around to it until now.

As I feared, I’m now in my hotel trying to download 26 megs of mail on my (far too slow) Verizon Wireless Broadband service. Before I left, I forgot to limit my file attachment size for download.

Once it’s finally done, I’ll do the following in Outlook 2007 to make sure I don’t get hung up like this again:

I’ve been a Microsoft Action Pack subscriber for years, and I was dismayed to hear that they were going to be requiring any proficiency test for 2008. Not because I was afraid I couldn’t pass it (which I couldn’t without studying) but because it was a huge inconvenience and time sucker.

Am I the only person that didn’t know this? I just “accidentally” discovered that an entire website wasn’t ranked for ANYTHING in MSN. They had #1 ranking for the primary phrase in Google and Yahoo, yet could not be found anywhere in the top 200 results on MSN. After scrolling through 5 pages of SERPS, I guessed that it just wasn’t in the index, but I was wrong…

As a user of Microsoft Office for nearly 15 years now, (wow) I’ve become quite familiar with the pain of upgrading from one version to another, but this one really has a lot to hate.

Something came over me this summer, and I finally installed my MS Action Pack version of Office 2007, which of course updated my Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint.