Check out the story here about a Lucille Hester who was accused of fraud after reading out her half brother’s supposed posthumous letter.  The letter said to be written by football star and former olympic sprinter, Bob Hayes, was read out on national...

OMG apparently there are reports of frozen water falling FROM THE SKY!! and landing ON THE GROUND!! London and Reading declare state of emergency, cancel all buses and trains. Nobody can get into work today so meetings start to get cancelled due to the...

I started the OfficeRocker blog to share our news as we built up to the launch of Office 2007.  I’ve tried to add perspective to any news I relay and stay true to this theme on the whole.  It has been amazing how well it took off too. ...

One of the challenges in retail is when customers buy a PC with Windows on it and think they also have Microsoft Office.  They get home all excited to write their first letter on Word and find to their dismay that it isn't installed.  From their...

Following on from my Office Live demo at the NCVO event, Tim Kimber sent me this today which is worth sharing I thought:   Microsoft Office Live Small Business has reached a pivotal milestone: In less than two years since its November 2006 commercial...

Last Tuesday I was running a workshop at the joint Microsoft and NCVO (National Council for Voluntary Organisations) on "getting the most from online communities". Mainly I wanted to show people what can be done either free of charge or for...

  The Microsoft Store launches today.  This is limited to the UK and Germany - not even the US have this yet. Have a look at http://www.microsoftstore.co.uk This is the first time Microsoft has made our products available to the customer to...

seems to be a good deal of chatter recently about our support for the modified version of Open XML that resulted from the rigorous ratification process.  The best summary of the story I found is over on Oliver Bell's blog here so I won't retype it...

Every day on the blogsphere (I hate that word) I see one topic of discussion come up a lot.  I have talked about it often too - how to make the transition to the new UI.  There is good debate to be had about why we needed to make this switch...

In case you missed the nearly unbelievable promotion we have running for uni students and teachers at www.theultimatesteal.co.uk you only have till Weds night this week to take advantage of it before it closes.  If you are a student, tell your friends...

Skydrive comes out of beta Beta is over for http://skydrive.live.com and the new version increases the storage by 4Gb to 5Gb! I use this to put my presentations in on the right column on the blog - easy to imbed the link with the icon Interoperability...

It is still worth pointing out to everyone that Office 2007 is designed to run on Windows XP sp2 and above.  So if you just live.com/yahoo/googled this, welcome and let me assure you.. You don't need to have Windows Vista to run it.  From a...

With the ballot resolution later this month, the temperature is high around the issues on Open XML.  On our side we believe that Open XML is solving a different problem to ODF and so we supported it through fast track.  IBM and others have decided...

Good interview on cnn with Bill Gates about how he says we need to "tweak" capitalism to work better for the poorest 2bn people in the world. another vid of him, bono and michael dell talk about the (RED) campaign .  A bit of an annoying...

Three stories about small businesses using Office Live to get their businesses up and running.  Algarvesol - how a couple made renting out their apartment in Algarve a lot more professional with an online site with Office Live . Sublime - an enterprising...

Good to see the Excel User Group site that is run by the new MVP for Excel, Nick Hodge . 

Ian has posted the answers to his Office quiz - some of them are not quite right IMHO :-)

Office Quiz I'm liking Ian Moulster's quiz on Office 2007 .  How many can you get - even I struggled with some of them.  He's going to publish the answers next week.. Progress of Office Open XML We are busy preparing for the Ballot Resolution...

nice little summary of OneNote powertoys that the guys in the OneNote testing team have written over on John Guin's blog.

The Burton Group , a respected AR firm targeting the enterprise technologist, has published “What’s up .doc—ODF, Open XML and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications” —a 35+ page examination of...

Did you see the flurry of interest in this issue with Office 2003 sp3? Essentially sp3 blocks certain *very* old file formats for security reasons and this understandably got some people annoyed.  The error which was not a bug was "You are attempting...

In a $1.2bn purchase, Microsoft is offering to acquire the Norwegian enterprise search company Fast Search and Transfer (FAST).  This is being reviewed as a very positive move by the industry analysts as it more or less completes our end to end search...

Professional life teaches you to make adjustments to your normal mode of working at times.  Sometimes you have to adapt your style and consciously do things differently.  If you've ever worked in a big blue chip, you will be familiar with this...

goodness knows its about time.  I get between 50 and 200 emails a day depending on what's going on.  It's dropped a lot since instant messaging really took off.  I thought I had tried every possible way of working with email and had arrived...

Hope you had a great Christmas and happy New Year.  I certainly did not work during the break so here is a collection of stuff that I thought was interesting in my inbox when I got back to work today. "A Santa without Excel is like a scrawny...