I’m looking forward to next Tuesday nights meeting of the Oregon Computer Consultants Association.  The subject is going to be using open source software on your desktop as a replacement for Windows, whether personal use, business use or both.

I’m so fed up with computer problems that I’ve actually considered buying a Mac, but I have a hard time believing that it would help me in the long run, and it certainly wouldn’t be economical.

I want to move to an open source environment where every problem has a solution – but just may not have been invented yet.  There already seem to be open source applications out there that do everything I could possibly want, and I’m hoping that this presentation will give me an up-to-date overview for 2008.

Here’s the Meetup group details
Here’s the OCCA website

and here are the full details of the meeting:

When:
August 26, 2008
6:00 – 7:00 Dinner/Networking
7:00 – 9:00 Meeting/Presentation

Where:
Rheinlander German Restaurant
5035 NE Sandy Blvd
Portland OR 97213

What:
Open Source Software On The Desktop

You’ve heard and read the Linux hype, you may even be running Firefox, but what’s the 4-1-1 on Linux and Open Source Software? Is it ready for the desktop? or the laptop? for Business? for Grandma?

This presentation will address those questions and more:

• What is Open Source Software? What is Linux? and why should I care?
• Are there any ready-to-use open source applications?
• How can I make money if the software is free?
• and more!

This presentation will be “only mildly technical” and audience questions and answers are welcome. Linux and open source applications will be demonstrated live.

Jesse Black, Yellow Crayon Computer Services Jesse Black is Chief Technologist at Yellow Crayon LLC, a Portland-area computer services firm serving individuals and small businesses. He is also co-host of TVLinux, the long-running community television series which promotes Linux and other open source applications. Jesse has used both Linux and Microsoft Windows on a daily basis for several years.

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.

When I attempted to cancel, the dialog box simply opened again, forcing me to enter the zip code. When I read the secondary dialog box more closely, it actually says “some applications will respond to canceling this box by immediately reposting it”.

Apparently, “some applications” would include Microsoft Outlook 2007, so anyone running a computer without an active dialup modem, (umm – like most people these days) will see this message.

It’s pretty funny to me that they would create a custom error message warning us of the potential problem I may have by canceling the action, as opposed to just fixing it.

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.

I’m not sure what they’ve done to eliminate automated queries, (and in fact to me it looks like they they didn’t do anything), but it appears to be fixed, although it operates just a little bit differently.
Tthe big difference? You now have to put a “+” sign in front of the link: or linkdomain: command and it’s now working again…

+linkdomain:domain.com or +link:domain.com

Nice! (or “big deal!” depending on the mood you’re in…

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…

It was in the index alright, but only one page for the domain name, which was 301 redirected at the root. When I did a site search in Live, I was greeted with just one page, and when I hit the “cached page” this is what I saw:

So domainname.com had a 301 redirect on it to domainname.com/directory/, but instad of following the 301, the MS Live bot just completely ignored the server directive, and cached the server page. How dumb is that? Is this just common knowledge among SEO’s that I somehow missed?

I’m not here to debate the wisdom of redirecting the main page in the first place, but my point is that if the site owner decides to, for whatever reason, the bots should follow, and the majority (Google, Yahoo, Ask etc.) do just fine.

How to solve this dilemma? Well I’ll have to get to that in another post, (because I’ll have to figure it out) but for now I have a question…

Why does Microsoft bot not follow 301′s? Is it an inherent technical inability to do so, or is it actually a conscious decision? It REALLY seems stupid to me…

*Update next morning -

I’m out of town all week, working from a laptop / cell phone connection, and things are painfully slow, but here’s that I’ve found out so far…

1. This is not a new problem, and others have seen it before, going back all the way to 2004.
2. In 2005 someone else noticed it, but nobody even responded.
3. Nearly 2 years later,  it was still unresolved, and now, 3 years later it’s still not.

I wish I would’ve known this before I changed my permalinks last week, since now ALL 250+ of my blog pages will likely drop completely out of MSN / Live / Microsoft, or whatever we’re supposed to call them….

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.

Within minutes, I wrote a post about them moving the status flags (incredibly stupid) but within hours the next item popped up and so I started to keep a list.

Over the past couple of months, the list has been growing and growing, and I finally decided to post my dirty dozen this morning, after determining that I will never actually take the time to post screenshots. Feel free to add to the list!

1. Flags moved
I wrote a blog post about this already, but it REALLY bothers me. After going for years with my “flag status” appearing in the top left pane of my window, Microsoft has decided to move it to the right side by default, and the ability to relocate it is “broken”. This is stupid. Fix it Microsoft.

2. Program overhaul – One Note
I’ve used office One Note 2003 for quite awhile now, for keeping track of client projects and information. It’s quite useful for me as a project manager, because it’s simple, and I really didn’t have to think much about learning to use it.

If there was one thing I dislike about one note 2003, it was that if you had multiple projects open at any given time, there was no way to sort them, you simply had to close the ones you didn’t want to appear at all times.

Well now I’m longing for the days of One Note 2003, because not only is there STILL no way to sort them, but it forces you to display all of your projects in tabs across the screen at any given time. No longer can I only have the eight to 10 projects open that I wish to have, I’m forced to keep all of my projects open at all times, even if I haven’t touched or looked at any of them for months.

Microsoft One note used to make me more productive – and now it’s just like having a hundred sticky notes all over your monitor and you can’t find anything.

Over the time it’s taken me to write this article, I’ve now gotten used to this, and figured out that there is a fairly efficient way of getting to every file on the left side. Still, this was an incredible pain in the neck and served no real purpose that I can tell other than to confuse the user.

3. Changing my Time Zone
Day three I woke up to find a message on my screen “Change calendar time zone”
Here’s what it said -

A change has occurred from (GMT -08:00) Pacific time (US and Canada) to (GMT -08:00) Pacific time (US and Canada)
Updating personal folders from (GMT -08:00) Pacific time (US and Canada) to (GMT -08:00) Pacific time (US and Canada)

What? Oh well…
Since I have a 5 user license, I have seen that on all three PC’S, too.

4. Slower and more sluggish than you think
Although it was to be expected, office 2007 is slower, way slower, and uses much more of my RAM, nearly double Outlook version 2003.

I have a dual core Intel chip and four gigs of RAM, but am usually operating Camtasia, Dragon Naturally Speaking, and Outlook, as well as several browser windows.

Office 2007 sluggishness is even less tolerable than version 2003…. sigh.

I think a good rule of thumb would be not to buy any version of any Microsoft software that comes out after you buy your computer, without anticipating a big performance hit.

5. Copy/paste into e-mail is odd and frequently colors are incorrect.

I frequently have to copy FTP paths out of my WSftp software into e-mail. For some reason, typing “http:/” and then pasting the entire FTP path /domain.com/folder/folder/filename.etc now suddenly leaves a space between the first two slashes after the : which makes the link inoperable. Agggh – fixing this repeatedly is absurd.

Also, are there different clipboards? I use Ctrl-C more frequently than right click and paste, but I interchange often, sometimes right in the same few seconds. They’ve always been the same thing before, but now I frequently find myself attempting to paste one thing that I just copied, but Ctrl-V pastes something from a few minutes earlier.

I’ve actually gotten stuck to the point of having to use only “right click copy” and “right-click paste” just to be able to send an e-mail. I haven’t taken the time to troubleshoot and replicate, but it happens every day.

6. Cannot look up contact?
In the past, I could right click on the e-mail address of someone in a mail message, and choose Lookup – Outlook contact. When I attempt to do that now, I’m greeted with a message saying that is not possible. It says – “cannot perform the requested operation. The command selected is not valid for this recipient”.

Then I choose, “Show Help” and I get another message:

This error usually occurs when you attempt to view the calendar for a user who has one or more of the following issues:
Is not part of your domain.
Is not listed in the LDAP.
Is not a member of your Exchange Server.
Has not granted you the necessary permissions to view their calendar.
To avoid this error message, use the Open Calendar command only if the user is using Exchange Server. If the user uses Exchange Server and you still encounter an error message, ask the user for the appropriate permissions to view their calendar. If they are not part of your network, you will probably not gain access to their calendar.
For more information see the Microsoft knowledge base article and gives a link.

THEN – Clicking on the link gives this -
The Knowledge Base (KB) Article You Requested Is Currently Not Available
The article you are looking for is currently not available. Please try one of the following options for assistance: Suport Home, Customer Service and other MS links. UNREAL.

You’ll notice that the error message I get says
“…when you attempt to view the CALENDAR for a user…” which is not what I chose.

But all I did was choose to “view CONTACT” in my own sincgle user Outlook! sigh.

7. Mystery Mail Arrival
Mail does not consistently show up in my inbox automatically after a send and receive.

I hit send and receive, can see I’m “receiving numbers 1 through however many emails”, then it says “send/receive complete” but all the new messageare not in the inbox that I can see. No kidding.

I have to actually click a different mail folder, wait for the contents to render on the right, then click back on the “inbox”, on the left side, and “voila” there it is.

I’m sure this is “not a Microsoft problem” and there “must be something wrong with my computer” but it sure is coincidental that it started the very moment I upgraded to Office 2007, and continues to this day.

8. Word 2007 can’t remember?
Microsoft Word refuses to save occasionally, citing “not enough memory available” error. This is crap.

Apparently four gigs of memory is enough to do what I want using office 2003 without ever encountering this error, but Office 2007 has stretched the limits of my measly four gigs of ram?

This may be loosely related to #4 above, but the error is specific enough that I thought I would give it its own place on my list.

9. Ribbons of Shame
For over 15 years now, (wow) the world has been been used to standard command menus being across the top of the window in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word, and pretty much all software windows in general.

“File”, “Edit”, “view”, “tools” “help” etc. suddenly aren’t there any more in version 2007, and Microsoft has introduced what they are calling “Ribbons” as some sort of revolutionary way of bringing more options to users fingertips.

I suppose it’s possible that in a year or two I will appreciate these improvements, but for now, while I’m trying to get work done, it’s a big pain in the neck.

The inability to figure out how to do something simple, such as sorting columns in Excel, or Spellchecking in Word is infuriating and stupid.

When Windows XP changed everything about the control panel from Windows 98, they offered a “switch to classic view” that allowed busy people to remain productive without having to learn their new “warm and fuzzy user friendly interface”. I appreciated that and use it to this day (I wonder if that’s in Vista?)

No such option exists that I can find in Office 2007, and that really sucks bigtime, and has cost me a lot of time.

10. A link is not a program
Occasionally lately, clicking on a link in an e-mail leads to an error box popping up…

“Microsoft office outook”
General failure. The URL was “http://www.turbols.com/”. The system cannot find the file specified.

OK

There’s a link for “was this information helpful”, but all that did was thank me and disappear.

Dear Microsoft,
The reason you can not “find the program” is because it’s a link and not a program. It’s clearly a link, and my friend did indeed type it correctly.

I suspect this is a ploy to get me to use IE 7 as my default browser, but I’m not giving up Firefox to try, because it happens less than three times a week.

*** – Update 1/2008 – Here’s the fix for that issue if you’re using Firefox, and here’s the directions to fix if you’re using Internet Explorer

11. Cannot edit email signatures with .html
I wanted to use the feed burner headline animator for my signature, but Office 2007 longer lead you to your e-mail signatures with HTML directly from the program.

Instead, we’re forced to use a third-party HTML editor or manually edit the file with notepad, which is located in c:/Documents and Setting/Username/Application Data/Microsoft/Signatures

12. Default Microsoft Blue is not acceptable anymore.

I like to use royal blue text on all my html e-mail replies, and I have for years. There now seems to be a “richer color scheme” available to choose from, which is fine, but viewing “standard colors” does not show the normal shade of Microsoft blue that I’ve used for years.

On the one hand, I suppose it’s time for a change, but on the other hand, why have they suddenly decided that standard royal blue, as defined by every previous version of Windows is suddenly not good enough for 2007?

At least let me CHOOSE to use it if I want to!

Bonus –
Things I have always hated about Office that they still haven’t fixed.

1. Still cant sort your “favorite” mail folders alphabetically (sort by name)
2. Still can’t view a folder inside of another favorite folder
3. Still cannot jump to an alphabetized list of folders by typing more than one character. For example, typing ‘sm’ will jump to your S folders, and then to the M folders, instead of to the sm folders.

I’ve only been using office 2007 for a couple of months, and I’m sure I’ll come up with more, but would love to see comments on this post with thoughts from others…

UPDATES:

Here’s another one -

Outlook Won’t Allow Permanent Access to Files

I recently had to allow a program (Dragon Naturally Speaking) to access my files, and this warning kept popping up.

According to Microsoft “in general, you cannot prevent this from happening”. Nice.

They also say this – “You should not get this message if your synchronization software is a trusted add-in that can properly identify itself to Outlook as a safe program”

What does that mean? It means they pay a fee to Microsoft – a large one, no doubt.

While I’m not opposed to the warning, LET ME CHOOSE MORE THAN !) MINUTES! I needed access for hours, necessitating multiple clicks, every 10 minutes. And if I didn’t click? The progress stopped.

Here’s the “warning” and here’s where they’ve known about it since Office 2003

Here’s a supposed fix, too –

Update:  Summer 2009
Some company made an Office 2007 “add-on” that gives you back everything you’d grown to know and.. “tolerate”,  if not “love”  about the old Office menus that were in use from the 1990′s right up until 2007.

It’s called “Classic Menus”, and It’s become quite popular. so much so in fact, that they’re already working on the version for Office 2010.

Product sales page here -

*** Update 10/2009
UNDO (Ctrl-Z) does not work if you mark something as “Not Junk email while inside the junk email folder.

Instead, the action BEFORE that gets “undone”. In my case, that action was to UNdelete about 150 at once, after picking my way through them to choose deletion in the first place. Sigh… I’m sure 2010 will be fine though….

This ad was on during the Yankees Angels game last night, and could easily apply to MS Office too… Great ad