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I give Microsoft credit. They are pulling out all stops in their new campaign to generate buzz around the forthcoming Office 2010 suite. There is a full site called www.office2010themovie.com and we’ve got one of the ‘trailers’ here!
Enjoy!
‘Tech Tips’ Category
Office 2010…Clippy Returns…
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009Windows 7 Upgrade for Free?? Yes it’s Possible.
Thursday, July 9th, 2009Yes, it is possible to essentially get the Windows 7 upgrade for free. You can now buy a ‘pre-order’ upgrade of Windows 7 premium for less than half price at for
$49.99. When the deal expires it will cost $119.
The trick is this, just buy two copies now. Then when it starts shipping (October 22, 2009), sell your extra copy on ebay, craigs list or whatever. Of course you can’t sell it for the $119 list, but sure you could get $100 bucks. Right now, upgrade copies of Vista go for $100 on ebay, so surely you can get the same soon after the product is released.
About your only cost is the time value of the extra $50.
Ok, you can call me a cheapskate now.. 
Social Networking Pitfalls – Stay out of trouble
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009Social networking is the hottest subject area on the internet right now. Currently the most popular site for this by far is Facebook. A similar site, but one that is much more business oriented is LinkedIn.
Some sub-topics of social networking include the red-hot Twitter.
Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can be used to help promote business. Most of them are well positioned within the search engines so topics you may write about will often have higher rankings than on your own website.
The general concept around Social Networking is that you create a mini-website usually consisting of your background, photos you want to share, sometimes what you are currently doing, and then threaded conversations with your ‘friends’ or colleagues.
TechRepublic has a good article on how to be careful however. See below. My opinion is you simply should just not mix a personal account and business account. Or better yet, use LinkedIn for your business networking and Facebook for your personal. If you want Facebook for both, simply setup two different accounts. As the article states, friendly conversations among your friends may very well offend a prospective customer or employer.
Make text bigger in Microsoft Outlook (Zoom)
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009I just ran across this by accident. If you use Outlook 2007 and find the text of your reading or composing email to be too small to read, you can actually set the zoom level which saves for future messages.
While composing a new message, click on the Format Text Menu on top. Then second to the right, you’ll see a zoom panel. Click it and you can select a zoom percentage, just like Word, and all your future OUTGOING messages will have this zoom set. See Here:
Oddly, this is more difficult to do for READING messages sent to you as there is no format text menu. However, thanks to there is a way to add this function.
Windows 7 & Dual Monitors? You need this.
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
I highly Recommend Display Fusion Pro if you have Windows 7 and Dual Monitors. It works great with Vista and XP as well, but they have a few other options. This application is currently the only one I’m aware of that fully supports Windows 7.
It has a number of features to make the management of windows easier, but the two most important features are:
A second INDEPENDENT task bar on your second monitor that shows the apps running on that screen. It visually is identical to the new Windows 7 task bar. It still doesn’t support 100% of the functionality such as Aero Peek, but it does show previews. It also has the option to remove the icon from the main task bar so it isn’t doubled up. If you happen to be monitor crazy, it supports as many monitors as you have connected.
The second key feature is a great automatic desktop background feature. It can randomly download images based on categories and keywords as your desktop every X minutes you choose. It directly supports flickr and Vladstudios. The Vladstudios images are beautiful. Most are illustrations and are full resolution relative to your screen size. flickr is mixed. Some very nice, some very amateur since anybody can contribute.
It amazes me that Microsoft didn’t at least include a dual task bar in Windows 7 (or even Vista for that matter) given how popular they are an how much more productive you can be with them. Having to always move your mouse all the way to your primary task bar for windows management is very ineffecient. For what it’s worth, the Mac OS is just as bad in this department and they’ve supported more than one monitor for 10+ years
.