Productivity Links

re: Productivity Links

Don — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:05:54 GMT

As a more recent converter to Mac my comments my be off course a little but:

1. Is it necessary to wait for the next revision of Office to get a universal binary? My impression is that performance of the Office app itself would go up significantly and would breath a lot of new life into this product making it well worth the effort.

What-ya-say, everyone else seems to be able to get their apps converted to universal binaries so I can't believe that Microsoft can't. (Is there a money thing here I'm missing?)

2. This one is a little off the subject but while I'm here - I am a native English (American) speaker living in Japan. For me OS X was a savior in that I could select English and OS along with almost all the apps I use, except Office, switched over to English as well.

Is it too much to ask for this kind of functionality from Microsoft as well?

Looking forward to good things from you all.

Don

re: Productivity Links

opensourcefan — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:36:57 GMT

Please elaborate on why this notebook view is such a good idea. I looked through the superficial stuff that came with the Office '04 uprade but I'm not convinced it's going to make my life easier.

In fact, it looks to me, like it totally locks me into some kind of MS-only formatting or lose whatever I'm working on.

I use TextEdit for 80% of my regular text processing. I only use Word when I need an advanced text processing feature like headers/footers, etc . It's all about compatibility.

(I also will sometimes run Appleworks in Classic and use that because it's far easier to set up macros in AW or CW then Word.)

re: Productivity Links

Schwieb — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 22:58:45 GMT

Hi Don,

Office 2004 was built on CFM technologies. In order to make a Universal Binary, we needed to move Office to Mach technologies first. We were already a year or so into that work in Office 12 when Apple announced the Intel transition. If we had dropped *everything* on Office 12, we'd still have had to repeat most of that year of work on Office 2004 and then we'd still have to add the Intel compatbility work on top of that. The net effect is that we really wouldn't have had Office 2004UB out a whole lot sooner than Office 12 will be (because of the need to duplicate so much work) and Office 12 will have newer features and support for WinOffice 2007 features like the new Open XML file formats.

re: Productivity Links

nadyne — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 05:53:14 GMT

osfan - I can't speak for anyone else, but here's what I do. I use the Notebook Layout view for the umpteen million recurring meetings that I attend. I have one file for each of the recurring meetings that I have. Then I use the tabs along the right side for each individual occurrence of the meeting. This makes it easy for me to keep all of my notes about one thing together. So I've got one file for my meetings with my manager, another one for the weekly Entourage meeting, etc. I also use it for the notes that I keep from my usability studies, ethnography, and other related research.

re: Productivity Links

chuckbo — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 06:06:19 GMT

I haven't read the book yet, but the Manager Tools podcast says very good things about David Allan's book Getting Things Done. You may have already run into that one. As an aside (and I don't know if you have any rules discouraging us from mentioning other companies' products), but I see that OmniGroup is preparing a new personal productivity program based on the concepts of that book.

chuck

re: Productivity Links

Rand — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 05:42:16 GMT

The 'Getting Things Done' (GTD) site at www.davidco.com has a very good manual about setting up Entourage to implement the GTD strategy. You can download it for $10 from http://www.davidco.com/store/catalog/Learning-Tools-and-Whitepapers-p-1-c-263.php .

I highly recommend David Allen's 'Getting Things Done' book. I've read a lot of books on productivity and getting organized, but this one is by far the best most practical.

Rand