ActiveWin has up some pictures of the Microsoft company store . One of the nice benefits of working at Microsoft is being able to buy software at a nice discount. I was so in awe of the prices when I first went that I bought all this stuff I never...

Need to move a shape or a picture into an exact position but can't get it positioned just right using the mouse? Nudging lets you move something a tiny distance so you can get it positioned precisely the way you want. How to nudge a shape: ...

A preview of OneNote Service Pack 1 is out on the web . For those who haven't heard, OneNote is a cool new note-taking application released last year as part of Office 2003. Most service packs only contain bug fixes since companies don't like...

The only good programming joke I know: My other car is a cdr. As you may know, car and cdr are from LISP. People are getting pretty sick of hearing this one from me though. What's your favorite programming joke? Know of any good programming...

Mike Niedringhaus and I had a short thread yesterday about whether the PowerPoint Viewer really requires installation. I claimed in my previous post that it didn't. Mike insisted that you had to either install PowerPoint or install the Viewer. Turns...

The last version of Frontpage I used was Frontpage 2.0 back in... 1997? Lisa Wollin, a Microsoft programmer writer, nicely summed up some of my Frontpage complaints on her blog yesterday: When I write code, I want it to look the way I formatted...

Another question from Superman : Can I view notes while presenting in PowerPoint? Answer: If you have PowerPoint 2002 (a.k.a. PowerPoint XP) or PowerPoint 2003, you can use Presenter View . While all the audience sees if your...

Figuring out how PowerPoint plays movies and sounds can be perplexing to say the least. Andrew May has written two new MSDN articles on the subject: The first article talks about how PowerPoint plays your multimedia file. There are...

Why fill your autoshapes with just a boring single color when you can do so much more? In the picture below, The top rectangle has a traditional single-color fill. This is the default look that new autoshapes get. The middle rectangle...

Superman asked me yesterday: In PowerPoint, I have a bunch of slides and I want to apply one font to all their titles and another font to all their body text. How do I do this without having to edit all these slides one by one? The answer is...

Someone I know is considering moving up to the Seattle area and asked me about my Washington experience. Other friends of mine who are considering Microsoft actually ask me this a lot so I thought I'd write an entry about it. Here are some general...

Omar Shahine and Dan Crevier wrote some very interesting articles about the history of Entourage becoming a Mac Office application.

Microsoft released the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset yesterday under an open source license, though this is nothing crazy new since the company has released Rotor and even Windows source under its Shared Source program. Still, this...

If you have objects like shapes or pictures in your Word document, and then move the document text around, it may not be clear why your objects are repositioned the way they are. In Word, there are two primary ways objects can be positioned...

Google's Gmail was announced last week on April Fool's Day. It's free email with a gigabyte of storage. Throughout the day, I kept wondering, "Could this be an April Fool's joke?" Since they announced on April 1, I was essentially...

Dennis Cheung's rant about PC laptops reminded me of some battery problems I've been having with my iBook laptop. Essentially, I only get 20 minutes of battery life. When the laptop was new, I got a good 6 hours worth. Now, the battery indicator...

You're probably familiar with the three little buttons in the bottom-left corner of PowerPoint that let you switch views: [image] [Normal View] [Slide Sorter View] [Slide Show] Did you know you could press Ctrl or Shift while pressing...

A big focus of the PowerPoint team for the 2003 release was working on a brand new PowerPoint Viewer . The previous viewer had been written for the PowerPoint 97 release, and was missing a bunch of newer features, most notably: newer animations...