While at my parent's this weekend, my mother asked me about setting the font to Bold in Word 2008 for Mac.  She claims to have turned on the Formatting toolbar, but wasn't seeing the ability to Bold her fonts.  Not being a Word expert, and being in a hurry, I pointed out that she should buy a book (which I've told her to do before) or visit the Genius Bar.

This morning, I decided to take a look and see what the options are, in comparison to what you would see on Windows.  Actually, it is quite similar.

Microsoft Word 2000 on Windows XP

Microsoft Word 2008 on Mac OSX Leopard

As you can see, the selection method and resultant toolbars are surprisingly similar.  Honestly, I'm not sure what my mother was doing wrong in turning on the toolbar.

Office 2007's ribbon is quite different, however, I don't believe she has any experience in that area.

Word 2008 does have a Mac specific formatting feature, the Formatting Palette.

The Formatting Palette is a little floating window which contains a number of formatting controls.  It seems to be quite powerful.

Given the two methods for performing the same task in the Mac version, it appears that Microsoft has done a fairly good job of keeping their switchers and Mac-faithful happy.

We use Exchange for Lobrecht.com's email.  i was counting on the fact that Entourage was supposed to work with Exchange.  Well it does, sort of.  It isn't even as complete as Outlook Web Access.

My first problem is with the certificate for SSL communication with our server.  My server has it's own certificate authority, and has generated it's own certificate.  Apparently Entourage didn't like this, and Leopard seems to have changed the way certificates work.  This MacRumors form post had the answer for me.  I needed to use certtool as root to import the certificate into a certificate chain which is no longer accessible through the keychain access application.

sudo certtool i certnew.cer v k=/System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors

This change has allowed me to consistently connect to my email.
The second problem is around message formatting.  Unlike any other mail application that I've used in recent history, this one seems to have absolutely no way to automatically format your messages (either newly composed or replies and forwards.)
The third problem is with my contacts.  Even though Outlook, Outlook Web Access, and Entourage all have Categories, it seems that Entourage doesn't bother to get the Categories for contacts from Exchange (and I assume Calendar entries as well, however I haven't looked into that yet.)  Entourage also doesn't download Distribution Lists, even though it has Groups which look like the same thing.  This is going to be a pain that I will have to solve.

I searched all over for this a week or so ago (Google and Word's help.)  Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Day explains how to correct the case of selected text in Word (and presumable Powerpoint.)

"Select some text in Word or PowerPoint, then press Shift+F3. It’ll toggle between three possibilities for text capitalization:

• Initial Letter Case
• ALL CAPS CASE
• lower case "

In the last couple of days, I've been getting the error "The required file naCmnLib71.dll cannot be fouund in your path.  Install Microsoft Office Outlook again."  When I click OK, Outlook 2007 crashes.  A quick Google turned up only one hit, a PC Review forum thread.  Reading through this, it implies that its a combination of Outlook and McAfee, that is the problem.  My machine also has McAfee Enterprise 8.0.0 installed.  I'm going to try the suggestion of adding the McAfee directory "C:\Program Files\McAfee\Common Framework" to the path.

I'm the kind of person who keeps all their email, even junk.  I archive manually, including deleted items.  Lately, I've started to notice that when I move a message from my IMAP inbox into a Deleted Items folder in a PST, it doesn't move, it just disappears.  In fact, Outlook seems to do an immediate purge on the Inbox when I do it.  Definitely not the desired behavior (for me at least.)  Trying to search Google for this problem hasn't gotten me anywhere.  I guess I'm going to have to dig through all the Option screens in Outlook to see if I can figure out how to turn it off.

My employer is very into the C:/D: partitioning scheme on our laptops (its a side effect of their policy to reimage a machine if it takes IT longer than 30 minutes to fix a problem.)  Yesterday, I went to defrag my drives, and found out that my C: drive had 3% free space.  Oops.

So I started to search for a way to move Outlook's cached copy of my mailbox to my D: drive.  There's a knowledge base article Q896591, which describes a ForcePSTPath and ForceOSTPath, which controls where Outlook creates those files.  I guess I will find out how well they work.

UPDATE: this only seems to take effect for new profiles.  I tried renaming the OST file for an old profile, and it just recreated the file in the same location.  I created a new profile, and it created the file where I specified in the registry entry.

I've had a heck of a time finding a comparison table of the Office 2007 suites.  There are a lot of pages with text describing the suites, but what I was looking for was a table showing which products were in each suite.  You can find one here.

I do find it odd that the only suite that includes both Outlook and OneNote is Enterprise.  The Ultimate suite doesn't have Outlook!  It seems that someone missed out on the integration between Outlook and OneNote.  I guess for personal use, the choices that make the most sense are Home and Student + Outlook as an add-on.  Maybe most people are getting Outlook licenses from their hosted Exchange accounts.

Daniel Escapa posted a few code snippets to determine the currently viewed One Note page.  Good stuff.

This is just brilliant.  Chris Pratley points to Mike Tholfsen's upcoming smash hit "My One and Only OneNote".  Ok, so smash hit is probably a bit far fetched, but Mike is definitely talented.  The music is good, and he has a good singing voice.  Plus, who can beat a song based about everyone's favorite cult note taking app?

I like it.  I'm going to download it.

I love reading RSS in Outlook.  The individual items method works really well for me, as well as all the great tools you have for tagging Outlook items.  I used to use intraVnews, but with the RSS support built-in to Outlook 2007, I've been trying to use it.  Unfortunately, this has been a difficult road.  Even in Beta 2, the RSS code is quite buggy, with feeds apparently dying, with no hope of them coming back to life.  Interestingly enough, its the blogs.msdn.com feeds that seem to have the most problems.  Well the solution on the newsgroups is to delete all your subscribed feeds, delete all the folders from your RSS Subscriptions folder, and then delete the xml.obi file from your profile (C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook).  This is all relatively easy to do, except for deleting all the folders from your RSS Subscriptions folder.  You can't multi-select folders in Outlook, and if you have hundreds of RSS Subscriptions, this can take a bit of time.  I decided to whip up a quick VBA script to delete all the folders for me.  You'll notice I have no error handling at all, but it seemed to work ok for me, ymmv.

Public Sub Delete_All_RSS_Folders()
Dim olMAPI As NameSpace
Dim olRSSFolder As Folder
Dim olSubFolder As Folder


Set olMAPI = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set olRSSFolder = olMAPI.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderRssSubscriptions)

For Each olSubFolder In olRSSFolder.Folders
Debug.Print olSubFolder.Name
olSubFolder.Delete
Next

End Sub

I just found a really cool feature in Outlook 2007.  I had highlighted a name, and right-clicked on it to copy it.  There was an item that says Who is.  I decided to click on it instead, and it ran a query against all of my Outlook Address Books, and ended up pulling the guys record from our corproate LDAP directory.  I then tried someone’s first name, and it found the appropriate person in my actual Outlook Contact folder.  Very cool.

I've been creating a bunch of new Outlook contacts lately, and its been really frustrating.  If I didn't put a + in front of the country code, Outlook was assuming that the phone numbers were for New Zealand.  I checked every setting I could think of in Outlook, and there was nothing obvious.  I finally decided to ask in the Outlook 2007 beta newsgroups, and you'll never guess where Outlook gets that default from - Windows phone settings.  I almost never use the modem, except when I'm traveling, and so Windows was still set to use a New Zealand dialing location.  I reselected the one for my house, and Outlook once again defaulted to US as the location.

One of the hottest new features in One Note 122007, is its ability to optically recognize characters in images.  The new print driver for One Note uses this technology to make the text in a printed page searchable.  Well, I found out today that it also works with screenshots that are pasted into a One Note page.  I had pasted a screen into One Note, but the text was too small to read.  I right-clicked on the image searching for some kind of zoom (or something.)  I was greeted with the option to Copy Text from Picture.  This worked really well to help me read the text I couldn't read in the screen shot.  No it wasn't, but it was good enough.

I wish that the mobile version of One Note was going to be supported on older versions of Pocket PC.  One of the most compelling uses for Mobile One Note is the ability to take a picture of something with your Pocket PC Phone, and have the text get recognized when it syncs up with One Note on your PC.  Oh well, maybe I can get a new phone next year.

Downloading now.

One of my questions about the Oragami devices has been somewhat (ok, not so satisfactorily) answered by Chris Pratley.  He doesn't really adress the ink question very well.  We'll see if he responds to the comment I posted.

It seems that the Oragami secret has been so closely held that not even the Office Program Managers knew that it was coming until a few weeks ago.  Which is pretty crappy, because Scoble had apparently seen a wood mock-up of one a year ago. 

Christ Pratley announces the not so terribly surprising name for Office and One Note 12.  Interestingly enough, One Note will be included in the $149 Home and Student SKU of Office, but Outlook will be excluded.  We have that similar version (Student and Teacher is what the 2003 version is called) running on our machines at home.  Not having Outlook in it is a major bummer.  Maybe the upgrade pricing won't be too bad.

One of the really cool things that is included in Outlook 12 is the To Do bar (which Melissa MacBeth talks about here.)  On my machine, it displayed my Tasks with the ones that have no due date, and then all the ones that have a due date.  Well, I use tasks without a due date as someday/maybe items, so this wasn't really working for me.  Well I figured out how to modify the view, and found something that has been in Outlook at least since XP (the oldest version I have running to go look at.)  To modify the To Do bar, right click where it says Arrange by, and choose Custom.  A normal Outlook Customize View dialog will appear.  Click Filter, click Advanced, choose Due Date from the Frequently Used Fields.  Then for the Condition pick exists.  All my someday/maybe items are now gone.