go ahead, mac my day

in case you were wondering what to get me for Christmas ...

2009-11-21T20:15:00Z

In case you were wondering what to get me for Christmas, or a wedding gift, or for any other reason, I'll point you to this original Apple 1 for sale.

Office:Mac for college students

2009-11-21T06:21:00Z

In today's edition of good deals for Office:Mac, this is one for college students. College students can get more than 70% off of Office:Mac 2008 Business Edition. Woo!

the 700-mile hallway

2009-11-20T07:09:00Z

One characteristic of MacBU is that we're a distributed team. I work in Mountain View, California. Part of the team is in Redmond, Washington; another part is in Dublin, Ireland; and another part in Beijing, China. Between the two American sites, we refer to it as "the 700-mile hallway".

One thing that I really like about MacBU is a strong commitment to being a distributed team. While the team in each geography has its own culture, that culture is part of the overall MacBU culture. To ensure that our MacBU culture is strong and doesn't break down, we communicate a lot, and we get together frequently. I come up to Redmond to talk with my UX counterparts here, I do video chats with the team in Beijing, I comment on the Facebook status my team members in Dublin.

This morning, I traversed that 700-mile hallway, coming to Redmond for a bunch of meetings with my fellow members of the UX team. This morning, I sat down with the other researchers and our designers and talked about our next steps and our shared goals. This afternoon, the whole UX team came together to talk about our future. Tomorrow, before I go home, I'll meet with my manager, as well as some colleagues on other teams in Microsoft.

In early December, I'll traverse that 700-mile hallway again, this time accompanied by the rest of my teammates in California, and the rest of the technical team is coming from their sites too. It's a great opportunity to get everyone together at once, to have those serendipitous hallway conversations that are so important, to break out into smaller groups, to talk in person with people I only get to see via video chat, to drink margaritas with a different crowd than the usual.

Japanese deal for Office:Mac

2009-11-19T16:38:00Z

Microsoft Japan is offering a deal for Office:Mac too; full details are here.

congratulations to the Office for Windows team

2009-11-18T21:13:00Z

It's a big day for my colleagues on the Office for Windows team: at PDC 2009, we announced that Office 2010 is now in public beta.

For your reading pleasure, here's some links with additional details:

The official press release has an interview with Kurt DelBene, the SVP of the Office Business Productivity Group: Microsoft Office 2010 Reaches Beta, Bringing Productivity Gains to the PC, Phone, and Browser.
The Office 2010 Engineering blog: Announcing Office 2010 Beta Availability has plenty of details about the new version of Office.
The Outlook team blog: Announcing Microsoft Office 2010 Beta, which gives some details about new features found in Outlook 2010. (Including support for multiple Exchange supports, which Entourage users will know we've had for ages. ;)
The PowerPoint team blog: Announcing PowerPoint 2010 Beta Availability has a nice bulleted list (of course!) with information about new features.
On Twitter, you can follow @office, and there's an #officebeta hashtag too.
And, of course, Office is on Facebook, too, complete with a quiz to determine which Office app you are. (I'm Excel, in case you're curious. I'm wearing a green shirt today, so I suppose that's fitting.)

Before anyone asks ... the as-yet-unnamed next version of Office:Mac will hit store shelves in time for your holiday buying pleasure next year. I don't yet have beta plans to share, nor can I share specific features or screenshots yet. The second that I get the go-ahead to talk more about it, I'll do so.

the holiday shopping season is upon us

2009-11-18T06:54:00Z

The holiday shopping season is upon us. To help you in your shopping quest, we're knocking down the price of Office:Mac: $50 off Business Edition, $40 off the Business Edition upgrade, and $20 off Home and Student.

my Twitter philosophy

2009-11-16T22:13:00Z

Yes, I'm on Twitter.

I post whatever comes to mind there. It's a mix of personal and professional. I tweeted when I broke my foot, I tweeted when the latest Office:Mac updates came out. I tweet when I'm looking for participants in my usability studies, I tweet when I'm making cookies. If you're looking for just MacBU news, then I'm not the girl to follow. If you're just wondering what's going on in my personal life, you'll need to find another outlet for that -- I recommend the telephone, or maybe drinks at MWSF.

I don't really care who follows me, or how many followers I have. Whenever I see that I've got a new follower, I do check to see who they are and what they're talking about. If a new follower has a protected stream, then I don't follow them because I can't make an informed decision about whether I'm interested in their content. If I see that someone's stream is mainly comprised of retweets or links, then I don't bother following them either. I like Twitter for its conversation, for how it lets me peer into others' lives. Retweets and links don't give me that. And sometimes I just look at the content and decide that it's not of interest to me. None of this is intended as a value judgment on the tweeter, it's just that I don't have the bandwidth to follow everyone, and I'm perfectly okay with that. By extension, this means that I'm perfectly okay with following someone and them not following me back. I don't view Twitter as requiring quid pro quo. If they don't find my content as useful/meaningful/interesting/whatever, then I don't mind.

I also don't view Twitter as something that I need to keep up with. If I miss tweets, I'm okay with that. I do read all of my replies and direct messages, but I view most tweets as ephemeral and non-essential. If I'm behind on something, Twitter is the first to go. I like Twitter, but my day job and my real life always take precedence.

I respond when I'm asked a question (regardless of who it's from), and I even on occasion do a Twitter search to see what kind of comments are being made about the apps I work on. If I can help folks out, I'll do it. That's not always containable on Twitter, though, and sometimes I'm forced to punt to tech support or another forum because I don't know the answer or because it's too in-depth for Twitter's 140 characters.

I think that there's some coolness to Twitter, and we'll see how that evolves over time. For now, I'm happy with what I'm doing and how I'm interacting with others.

Q&A: Hiding horizontal date bars in Entourage:Mac

2009-11-16T06:23:00Z

I noticed a question on Twitter:

Trying out Microsoft Entourage... Not too bad but I hate the horizontal date bars separating my messages. Any way to hide those?

It's easy to hide those. At the top of the list of your mail items, click on the "arrange by" tab. Then unselect "show in groups". You can do the same by going to the View menu, selecting "arrange by", and then unselecting "show in groups".

Q&A: Why can't I update Office:Mac 2008?

2009-11-14T16:39:00Z

A question has been coming in via email, and I've noticed it in my referrals to my post about Office:Mac 2008 12.2.3:

Why can't I update Office 2008 to 12.2.3?

There are a few reasons why you might not be able to update Office 2008. They include:

You just installed Office 2008 and are installing updates in sequence. On occasion, a temp file created during the update doesn't get deleted, and so a subsequent update fails. Reboot and try again.
You have moved the Office 2008 folder out of the Applications folder. If you've done that, move it back, and try the update again.
You have manually deleted something from the Office 2008 folder. I'm sorry to say, but you'll need to uninstall Office and then reinstall it. When you reinstall it, make sure that you do a custom installation, and only choose the pieces that you want.
You have run an application like Monolingual or Xslimmer to regain some space back on your hard drive. While I understand the desire to get space back (especially since I just looked at the available space on my work laptop and realised that I only have 20 GB free!), these apps aren't the right way to go about it. You're going to have to uninstall and reinstall Office, and do that custom installation to save the space that you're concerned about.

Try those first. If those don't solve your problem, then I recommend that you call tech support. With your legal purchase of Office 2008, you get two free calls to tech support. To get the right phone number for your region, go to our support page.

Kevin Smith at Macworld

2009-11-13T23:26:00Z

The fangirl in me squeed when I saw the news that Kevin Smith will be joining me at Macworld 2010. Okay, maybe not joining me (although, sir, if you do know anything about administering Macs on Exchange, you can drop me an email and we can work something out ... ), but he's giving his own Q&A session on Thursday. My session better not conflict with that!

days where I love what I do

2009-11-12T20:09:00Z

Some days bring you better news than others. I just got two pieces of really good news. It means I've got a lot of work cut out for me in the upcoming months, but damn if it ain't cool. :D

Before you ask: sorry, can't tell you what it is right now, but I will share the second I can. I think it's fair to say that you'll view the news as very good, too, though.

how to customise contextual menus in Word:Mac

2009-11-11T16:02:00Z

I learned something new this week: you can customise the contextual menus in Word:Mac. Here's how:

In Word, go to the View menu, then select Customise Toolbars and Menus.
In the Toolbars and Menus tab, scroll down to the bottom of the list and select Shortcut menus. A little toolbar with buttons for Text, table, and draw will appear. Move this toolbar to the side a bit so that you can see the whole dialog.
Click on the Commands tab.
On the left is a list of all of the Categories of commands that you can choose. If you select a category, the right list will update to show you the commands in that category.
In the right list, find the command that you're looking for. Select it, drag it to the Text button in the little toolbar that you dragged off to the side in the second step, and then scroll through the list until you get to the contextual menu that you want to customise. Drop it where you want it to appear in that list.
Repeat with the other commands and locations that you want.
Click OK.
Check out your handiwork in your contextual menu!

Office:Mac 2008 12.2.3, Entourage for Web Services 13.0.3, Office 2004 11.5.6 available today

2009-11-10T19:44:00Z

Update Tuesday is here, and we've got lots of updates!

Office:Mac 2008 12.2.3 brings stability and security improvements across the suite. Excel gets some more improvements to pivot tables. Entourage has an updated junk mail filter. Document Connection has a bunch of updates, including a bunch of UI improvements and updates some keyboard shortcuts. Complete information about the update is available in the Office 2008 12.2.3 knowledge base article.

Entourage for Web Services 13.0.3 has stability and security improvements, as well as that spiffy new junk mail filter. If you're already using Entourage for Web Services, you should apply the Office 2008 12.2.3 update: it will also update EWS. If you're not already using Entourage for Web Services, then you'll just download the whole package of 13.0.3, and you'll be all set.

Office:Mac 2004 11.5.6 has security improvements across the suite. Complete information about the update is available in the Office 2004 11.5.6 knowledge base article.

Along with all of these updates, the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.1.3 supports the latest changes to the file format. More information about the update is available in its knowledge base article.

You can download the updates by going to the Help menu in any Office application and selecting "Check for Updates" (or by letting it check automatically, which is its default behaviour). If you prefer, you can manually download the updates from Mactopia.

Updated at 12:09pm on 11 November 2009 to correct the instructions for updating Entourage for Web Services.

Q&A: How do I move my Entourage settings to a new computer?

2009-11-09T15:39:00Z

I got a question via email this weekend:

I just got a new computer. How do I move my Entourage data to my new computer?

If you're an Exchange user and you don't have anything stored locally (rules, mailing list manager, mail stored in "On My Computer", etc), then all you need to do is install Office, point it at your Exchange server, and let it sync. But if you aren't an Exchange user, or if you do have stuff saved locally, then you'll need to move it over.

Assuming that you're not using your Mac's migration assistant [1], then the easiest way is as follows:

On your new Mac, install Office 2008, and then let it download the service packs. When you're done, you will be (as of this writing) at 12.2.1.
(Optional: If you're using Entourage for Web Services, download and install it after you've installed all of the Office 2008 service packs.
On your old Mac, go to ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities. There's probably a folder in there called Main Identity. If you have other folders in there, then open up Entourage on your old Mac to see which identity it's using; otherwise, grab this Main Identity folder and copy it to the same ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities folder on your new computer (using a USB key, or MobileMe syncing, or Windows Live Sync, or something else of your own devising).
Open Entourage, and bask in the glory of everything being there.

If, when you got your new Mac, you also bought a shiny new copy of Office 2008 and you were using Office 2004 on your old computer, then you've got a couple more things to do:

On your new Mac, install Office 2008, and then let it download the service packs. When you're done, you will be (as of this writing) at 12.2.1.
(Optional: If you're an Exchange user and you're on Exchange 2007 SP1 RU4 or later, you should use Entourage for Web Services. If you bought the new Office 2008 Business Edition, then it's on the second disc. Install this after you've updated Office 2008 to 12.2.1.)
On your old Mac, go to ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities. There's probably a file in there called Main Identity. If you have other folders in there, then open up Entourage on your old Mac to see which identity it's using; otherwise, grab this whole Main Identity folder and copy it to your new Mac's desktop somehow (using a USB key, or MobileMe syncing, or Windows Live Sync, or something else of your own devising). When I've done this in the past, I often rename the folder Main Identity from Office 2004 to reduce confusion later.
Open Entourage 2008. During the initial set-up process, select the option to import from an old identity, and select the Main Identity from Office 2004 folder that you've saved on your desktop. Depending on how big your database is, importing your data from your old Entourage 2004 to your new Entourage 2008 identity might take a few minutes.
After import, bask in the glory of the new version of Entourage, and delete the Main Identity from Office 2004 folder from your desktop.

[1] I have to admit that I never do this. I always reinstall everything. It's just part of the habit of buying a new computer: I partition the hard drive, reinstall the OS, move my user folder to the second partition of the hard drive, and then start installing apps and transferring my data.

my Mac as a media centre

2009-11-09T05:38:00Z

Someone recently asked me how I've got my home media centre set up. I wrote this up in response to them, but then figured that it could be shared more broadly.

I have a Mac Mini (the previous generation) running Snow Leopard (plain Snow Leopard, not Snow Leopard Server). It's hooked up via a DVI-to-HDMI cable to the television (since many TVs won't do 1080p over their VGA ports), and via its audio output to the stereo.

I have a ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer, which is roughly the same as the ReadyNAS Pro (except it shipped without disks and is missing a handful of enterprise features). It's hooked up via gigabit Ethernet to the home network. It runs Firefly, which allows iTunes and SlimServer streaming directly from the NAS. The Mini has the NAS share mounted via NFS, and the iTunes library lives on the NFS share. The ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer can survive a double-disk failure if you set it up that way before you start populating it with data. I've only got it set up to survive a single drive failure. The NAS also acts as a print server.

The Mini shares media to the Xbox 360 using Connect360. Time Machine is enabled on one of the household Macs, which uses the NAS. The NAS and Mini each have their own UPS.

The Mini runs a web server and mail server, and allows external access via SSH and SFTP. I've also got CVS and SVN servers set up, which allows collaboration with remote people on papers, code, and projects.

Most of the iTunes playback is done via the Mini, and all additions to the iTunes library are done on the Mini. I do Hulu playback via the Mini. I used to do Netflix on the Mini, but switched over to doing it on the Xbox. For movies that I have saved on the server, I usually play them back via the Xbox because the Xbox does better with some codecs than the Mini (so it saves fiddling with the Mini to figure out whether to playback via Quicktime, VLC, or something else).

My next steps with the home network are:

set up the Mini as the household iPhoto library — right now, pictures are scattered across multiple machines, and it's time to consolidate
get Time Machine running on the other household Macs (two new MacBooks), to back up to the NAS
update the router to wireless N (the current router bridges gigabit Ethernet to the wireless and the DSL connection)
consider Slimbox or other streaming audio to the bedroom

Using my Mini as a server has the benefit of being able to run a mirrored boot drive. DHCP configuration means that address assignment can tell me if I've got an unwelcome guest camped on my WPA2-secured wifi. If I were just using the NAS, I wouldn't be able to run these servers and see so much about what's happening on my network. Most NASes are barely capable of supporting file checksum, let alone everything else that I've got going on here.