I quickly discovered that having a completely mobile device with full Internet connectivity, ability to natively open and use Microsoft documents, and to synch between my main laptop computer without much second thought was a valuable place to be working.

The problem of late though has been not seeing much improvement with my Windows Mobile experience. Sure, I could enjoy the new features of Windows Mobile 6 if a upgraded my phone to the latest model, but is there anything really major that’s new there? Plus, similar to my earlier thoughts about cell phones, I’m not one that needs to invest in the cost of upgrading or changing mine very regularly. I’ve been using my PPC-6700 now for over three years.

How do I compare all the new features and status icon components that are now all the rage with the iPhone 3G and the Google Android phone? Is Microsoft doing anything to compete?

It looks like they could be:

• Windows Mobile development is going nowhere when Apple’s iPhone OS and Google’s Android are going everywhere. Smartphones are the future of computing. Either Microsoft really is in a sorry state, or there’s a super-secret project that will supersede Windows Mobile.
• Months ago, I heard rumors that Zune poster boy J Allard had moved on to some secret project. Right away, I thought Microsoft phone. Sometime later, his title got an upgrade to chief experience officer and chief technology officer of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division. Zune and Xbox 360 user experiences are great following upgrades, by the way. Could J be scheming with Danger and Tellme folks about a Microsoft phone? Sure.
• Microsoft already is working on an applications store code-named Skymarket, which would rival similar operations from Apple, Google and Research In Motion. That’s a dish best served up by one chef, Microsoft, rather than restaurant franchises. End-to-end software plus hardware plus services would be the way to go, like Xbox Live and the game console.
• Recent Zune device price cuts and music store freebees could be preparation for a Microsoft phone. The device operating system should draw lineage from Danger and Zune rather than Windows Mobile. A Microsoft go-to-market strategy would first target existing Microsoft customers—and Zune users would be good ones, particularly if their purchased and subscribed content were transferable.

That’s the information that’s in front of us regarding the potential for a new Microsoft phone. Will it be more than just Microsoft powered? Could it be new functionality that’s going to be part of their Azure mesh network? I’d say it has to be, otherwise we probably would have heard even more about it for now.

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Image: Microsoft and Yahoo logo mix

I just saw a post from Inquisitr saying the discussions between Microsoft and Yahoo may be back on again.

The Inquisitr article linked to this story in the TimeOnline website that discussed the details of the discussions being presented from the two parties.

The external investors would also have the right to appoint three of Yahoo’s 11 board directors. The talks with Yahoo involve Microsoft obtaining a 10-year operating agreement to manage the search business. It would also receive a two-year call option to buy the search business for $20 billion. That would leave Yahoo to run its own e-mail, messaging, and content services.

I continue to think the Microsoft and Yahoo merger would be good for both companies. I’ve mentioned my opinion on whether or not it should happen a few different times on the site.

• Is Yahoo Regretting Saying No to Microsoft
• Microsoft Interested in a New Yahoo Board
• Google and Yahoo Announcing Partnership
• All Not Happy In Yahoo-Land

This new development puts a new twist on the previous discussions. Microsoft stating that they’re specifically and perhaps only interested in the Yahoo search business. This does go against my thoughts to the benefits of this merger going through. I think there’s plenty of other valuable assets that Microsoft should be interested in of Yahoo’s.

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Image: Screen shot from Word 2007 Options panel

I’m still engulfed in learning more than I’d ever thought I would about mail merges and other functionality. Part of that learning has been combing through all the different checkboxes and settings that are available in the Word 2007 options panel.

A quick review of the "Layout Options" group uncovers a huge list of settings that are just checkboxes to check on or off a variety of settings. The "Layout Options" panel is initially collapsed so the expanse of potential options are hidden from the user.

After expanding the panel I was overwhelmed with everything that could be triggered on or off. I then began to wonder if there’s any type of logical grouping or additional information that could have been shared with this information to provide examples of what exactly it is each of these things do. I’d also think that there probably could have been some additional grouping of these settings into logical categories within the "layout" section.

Did the developers get lazy with this section? Did they run out of time? Do they just not care?

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Image: Screen capture from Microsoft Word 2007

I’ve been spending lots of time working on some mail merge documents for a client lately. One of the tasks we’ve accomplished is to embed a logo into the header of the document that changes based on another mail merge field that’s pulled into the document.

Everything works great except for one problem, the image always comes up as a broken image link with the red-x displayed where the image should be.The user has to do the following steps to make it work:

1. Double-click on the header to open it for editing
2. CTRL+A to select everything in the header
3. F9 to force refresh the fields

After the user does this the correct image displays as expected and the mail merge finishes up beautifully. The only problem is that the user has to perform this manual step each time and increasing the manual steps for a user to complete is never helpful or encouraged whenever it should be possible to eliminate those steps.

Image: Screen capture from Microsoft Word 2007

I know in the configuration of the INCLUDEPICTURE field that there’s the checkbox for "Data not stored with document" which we have checked.

Note: There’s a whole different issue about why the Insert form above isn’t located anywhere near the "Mailings" tab in the UI Ribbon. We won’t go into that though.

The problem again is that I can’t figure out a way to force refresh these fields.

A friend pointed me to this blog entry for Word 2003 Header and Footer Field Refresh for Multiple Section Documents. I thought was going to give me what I was looking for but it doesn’t seem to be working for me.

I’ve entered the code in as expected but it’s still not working. Anyone have any ideas? I’ve sent a shout out to a couple of folks that work for Microsoft in their Office and Word groups, but haven’t heard anything yet.

Really looking for an elegant and simple solution to eliminate the manual refresh steps by users.

I posted this question about my INCLUDEPICTURE problem on the Microsoft Community forums.

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Some recently released emails from Microsoft highlight some passing of the responsibility buck with regards to changing specs for allowed machines to wear the "Vista Capable" tag.

It turns out that HP did everything they could to upgrade their systems and components for resell that were fitting of the original requirements for running Vista on machines. I’d guess those requirements, if they’d stuck with them, would have probably improved people’s perception of the new operating system because their systems could handle it. Instead, systems that used weaker Intel processors were still labeled as "Vista Cabable", but were crushed under the processing requirements and giving users less than happy results.

It’s kind of like saying my ‘96 Toyota Camry is Indianapolis 500 capable because it’s technically possible for me to circle around the track and possibly finish the race. My racing experience would be much more fun and entertaining if I were actually circling that track in a performance racecar instead don’t you think?

The characters involved in these email exchanges include Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin and Will Poole as well as HP’s Senior VP of Consumer PC’s Richard Walker and Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini. To see and read for yourself who said what to and about whom, you can read the full article, Top execs cast blame in Vista Capable ‘mess’ on the Seattle Tech Report.

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Image: Microsoft and Yahoo Corporate Brand Identities

My friend Dean commented recently that he bet Yahoo was wishing they had accepted Microsoft’s offer to buy the company not so long ago. When he made the comment, Yahoo stock was at $14.50.

I just looked today and Yahoo stock is at a whopping $8.95 according to Market Watch. Microsoft’s offer was $33/share when Yahoo and Jerry Yang said no to the offer and felt rebuffed that they would be offered so low a price and would never sell to a company the likes of Microsoft.

I still think Yahoo should sell to Microsoft. I then think that Microsoft should sell-off some of the properties but then try to merge and consolidate the strong brands and increase their market share and customer base on a variety of fronts.

There are a number of online services and products that Microsoft could do some interesting things with, not to mention the load of new customers that would come with the Yahoo services. I do think there would be a number of people that would bail on their Yahoo accounts if they were purchased by Microsoft.

The question remains though, will the Yahoo and Microsoft deal ever go through? I guess that’s the question of the hour. What do you think? Should Yahoo sell now? Should Microsoft offer again now or just let it keep going lower in price?

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Image: Screen capture of Microsoft Update website

I’m working through my weekly updates and scans on my system today and I came across a list of optional software updates that were available for a few of my Microsoft Office 2007 applications.

This is normally good news, but here’s my question. The Help information available in just about every Microsoft product is fairly close to useless. I think they’d be better served to just put an automatic Internet search for the keyword you clicked on in their Help system in the first place. I’m not sure if I’ve ever really gotten the answer I needed for a more than average computer use or software application question. I almost always now just do a Google search for the problem or error message I’m receiving.

That brings me back to the question at hand. Are all these Help file updates, which are just shy of 100MB in total file size, a drastic improvement on anything? Would it make it worth it to download and install the updates? Or, is it just a waste of space for something I’ll not use. I can almost guarantee that I could never really delete them off again if I decided they were still useless.

If someone at Microsoft is working in the Help department, I’d love to get your thoughts about why Microsoft Help files are so bad.

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Image: Screen capture of Excel 2007 interface by Jason Bean

Have you ever looked a website and thought, man I wish I could grab all that data in that table real quick and play around with it in Excel?

What? Tables? On a website? Used in HTML? That’s just wrong!

Hold on a sec! I’m not talking about using a table for layout control. I’m talking about a table actually being used to present tabular data in rows and columns. Yes. There is a real reason to do that.

The question then remains. How do you easily get that data?

I came across a tip today that I knew could be done, but I wasn’t aware of how you could do it in this way and format, which makes it pretty easy.

I usually would just select the text in the table using my mouse and copy and paste it into my Excel spreadsheet. But then I’d have to go in and reformat columns and disable hyperlinks and delete columns and other general formatting issues.

With this tool, I just open the page that holds the table of data and select what table it is I’m wanting to import into my spreadsheet.

Here are the steps you need:

1. Browse to the webpage that has the data you need to grab
2. Copy the URL of the page to your clipboard
3. Open a new workbook in Excel 2007 and navigate to the Data tab
4. Look for the Get External Data section (should be the first section on the left)
5. Select "From Web" in the toolbar

A window opens and lets you paste the URL of your webpage into the address bar and loads the web page into the window.

Note: It looks like the tool tries to open whatever page is set as your homepage initially. It was throwing script errors to me but I just clicked through the errors to keep moving forward.

Image: Screen capture by Jason Bean

You should see something similar to the graphic above. Each table on the page is highlighted with a yellow box and black arrow.

Select the table (the arrow changes to a checkmark) holding the data you want to import and click on "Import".

You’re then prompted to select the location you want to import the data into on your Excel spreadsheet.

Click OK and you’re ready to go.

Now you can manipulate and modify the data as much as you’d like in Excel.

Pretty cool eh?

Source: Microsoft Tips & Tricks Special Delivery Email

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The problem at hand then is that I wish Microsoft did a better job on the user-interface design of SQL Server Management Studio 2005. It doesn’t remember any of the settings to their query editor window.

When you open it it’s all jumbled up, so you spend some time getting things structured out and organized so it’s easier to manage and visually see in front of you.

Image: Screen grab from SQL Server Management Studio 2005

Then you close it and see how your query works and if you got everything you need. You discover you left out a couple of things or want to tweak one of your query filters. You open the Query Designer back open and you see this again.

Image: Screen grab from SQL Server Management Studio 2005

That’s irritating folks. Microsoft are you listening?

Other simple things it doesn’t remember are:

• table layout structure (as mentioned)
• window size and position
• pane visibility

On the surface these items don’t appear to be that big of a deal do they? But when you’re in and out of these windows and using this tool throughout the day, these are quickly becoming very annoying "burps" in the process.

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Image: Screen capture of email message in Gmail

I’ve been getting a number of spam email messages that are using Microsoft as their "trusted" name to let people feel safer about an email and feel that it’s a legitimate message they need to be paying attention to in their Inbox.

As you can see from the screen shot above, the message tells the user they’re receiving the message because they opted in.

If people are being alert they should hover their mouse over the links in the message to see where they’re going before they click on them. These are obvious and are all redirecting to a site of www.pagegim.cn

It would be nice if Microsoft would actively pursue this type of thing and use some of their weight and clout to really go after blatant spammers like this. Especially so since the spammer is misrepresenting themselves as Microsoft to fool customers.

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