Microsoft is adding their Office product line to the Genuine Software Initiative, to lower the number of illegal installations of Office, like the initiative also lowered the number of illegal Windows installations (*cough*). Will this be the final push for people to switch to OpenOffice.org?
Read Microsoft’s press release about the OGA.
Way ahead of Microsoft’s initiative to “give” us an online version of Office, the people at Linspire (Linux looking like Windows) give us ajaxWrite, an online word-processing application. Written with (you guessed it) the latest web-hype…erm…technology Ajax.
Their intention is to release a whole office-suite over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye on their site (or mine). Best of all (you guessed it again): it’s free to use.
Sorry I missed the announcement, but OpenOffice 2.0 is no longer beta. Read the press release, or go to the download page immediately (via bittorrent).
Microsoft beware! The new beta of OpenOffice has features to be a Microsoft Office killer. It opens and saves Microsoft Office documents flawlessly. It has the option to export to PDF, without a need to buy extra software. It includes an Access-like database product BASE (Access is only available in bigger Office versions, or as a standalone product). Most of all: OpenOffice is free.
True, it lacks a good email program like Outlook, but if you can’t live without it, buy it seperately for about $110. Free OpenOffice + $110 <<< MS Office Standard!
Click on the title for a review of the new beta.
As a sidenote, OASIS (an organisation defining/approving e-business standards) has approved the OpenDocument format, a minor extension of the format OpenOffice 2.0 beta uses. The OpenDocument format will save you from the vendor lock-in, since you can switch Office applications without losing your documents.
The PIA’s (Primary Interop Assemblies) for Office 2003 are now available as seperate download, so if you’re a developer, and don’t have Office 2003 (that includes the PIA’s), you can now download them and target your application at Office 2003. You can find them here. They are Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 assemblies.
Yesterday, I corrected a little bug I discovered. When an appointment had several attendees, my program would create multiple entries in Outlook, each with one attendee. I moved a line of code and now things work like they should.
What I want to achieve, is marking the appointments in a non-default color, which you can do in Outlook manually in the New->Appointment dialog. By default Outlook chooses None, but you have Important, Personal, Holiday, etc. The odd thing is, that the “label” (as it is called in the dialog) is not an exposed property of the AppointmentItem you can set.
You need to access Outlook via de MAPI-interface, look for the Calendar-folder, find the item in the Calendar folder, and then change some properties. Very odd, and not very well documented. I spend a great deal of the evening looking for samples how to do it, but so far I have no working code.
I still get a lot of search hits from people looking for a way to change the extensions that cannot be viewed in Outlook, because Microsoft decided in all her wisdom to mark a lot of extensions as “unsafe”. In Outlook Express there is a nice dialog to change this behaviour, in Outlook there is not. You can do it by editing the registry by hand, but a lot of people are afraid to do so.
For that reason, I created ouau.exe, or “Outlook Unsafe Attachments Unblocker”. It detects your Office version (which you can override) and lists the extension so you can block/unblock them. There’s a handy “select all” radiobutton that will save you some clicking.
Here is a screenshot.
Click here to download the program. It’s in WinRAR format, so you need to extract it first.
Oracle released an add-in for Microsoft Excel, that enables end users to display and navigate Oracle OLAP data from within Excel, and treat it just like other Excel data. Thanks for noticing, Amis. Let’s see if we can use it to replace Discoverer…
I use Mailwasher Pro (from Firetrust) as an anti-spam tool. After the trial, I decided to buy it, since it tagged the proper messages as spam, and left the rest untouched.
Nick Bolton sends an email message to you, whenever there is news from Firetrust. I don’t get spam that much, but everytime Nick announces something, I also get a lot of scam/spam messages. What is that? Is this guy selling his client-list to spammers?
I’m thinking of switching to an all-in-one solution: Norton Internet Security 2005. It is anti-virus, anti-spam, and firewall in one product. And it integrates with Microsoft Outlook (instead of running it after the checks are done).
Please have a look at these components. When I look at the sample Delphi code found in the FAQ, I can’t help but thinking: why is this company selling something that’s already present in Delphi? Why do we need a Word or an Excel component? It’s already there in the “Servers” tab. Geez…
What I was looking for was something in the line of RichView (that I have licensed). RichView doesn’t handle headers and footers in RTF/Word documents very well, so I was looking for something else. WPTools seems to do the trick very well, but being a small company, €225 is a lot of money if you don’t know if it will pay for itself. Especially since I already bought TRichView.
Any comments?