I’m going to be away from the blog for a few days, because Megan and I are getting married tomorrow. It’s an exciting time, with lots of friends and family in town, and there aren’t enough minutes in the day for all we want to get done between now and the ceremony. So blogging isn’t on the list for a while.
Have a great weekend, and I’ll be back here to moderate comments and post more random ramblings soon.
- Doug
My co-worker Don Campbell has put together a cool visual representation of various topics and concepts related to the 2007 Office System, with embedded links to take you to relevant online resources. Check out the Mind Map of Office 2007 Resources.
Don is the newest member of the Office 2007 technical evangelism team, and he’s a great guy. I’m looking forward to working closely with him on some projects we have planned around the upcoming release of Beta 2.
Wander over to Don’s blog and say hi!
I’ve written before about how cool it is to have so many smart people around Microsoft to learn from. And when it comes to Sharepoint, or MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) as we’re calling it in the Office 2007 System, one of the best people to learn from is Mike Fitzmaurice. Fitz is a longtime Sharepoint expert, and has been intimately involved in the evolution of the product into the rich development platform that it has become in Office 2007. Every time I’ve spent time around him, I learn cool things about Sharepoint that I hadn’t known before.
Well, you can spend time around Fitz, too. Here’s a video he recently put together that will give you a great high-level overview of what’s new and exciting in MOSS 2007. If you’re tired of canned demos being recited robot-like by the presenter, you’ll love Fitz’s approach. He just dives into the product and puts it through the paces, with the same casual “hey, check this out!” tone he’d have if you walked into his office.
One of the key concepts covered in this video is the fact that Sharepoint — and the Office system in general — is now a true development platform, capable of hosting a wide variety of business applications. Developers need to learn to see Sharepoint as both a portal product that can be extended (which is more true than ever in the 2007 version), and also a data-storage platform / development platform for almost any type of application. Fitz explains these concepts in straightforward language that any developer will understand.
Note that you should have popups disabled to watch this video. If you can’t disable popups easily, click here to go straight to the hands-on demo section of the video.
I spent some time today cleaning my Nikon D70 and lenses, getting ready for the week ahead. I moved out of the small camera bag and into one of my bigger ones, a black tattered Lowepro that I’ve had since February of 1999.
I also set up an SB600 flash for wireless use. This is a very powerful technique: once you have it set up, you just set the flash to point at your subject and fire away. Here’s an example of what you can do, with no thinking, no details, just point and shoot.
Anyway, the following is a summary of D70/SB600 wireless info, for my own reference and also for the reference of all my friends who have D70s. Nic, Greg, Mauricio, Kit Kai, and everyone else who has a D70, if you haven’t played with wireless flash check this out. The SB600 is a great deal, and in stock in Seattle this week at Glazier’s Camera for $199, or $185 from Adorama. I also have an SB800, but it doesn’t handle the wireless mode as easily as the SB600. (At least in my experience — if you have a D70/SB800 and disagree, please let me know how to do this with the SB800.)
Shooting Mode. My D70 is nearly always in Program mode: auto-everything, but you can over-ride various settings easily. The procedure below works in Program, Shutter, Aperture, or Manual shooting mode.
Full-Detail Menus. These instructions assume you have the full-detail menus turned on. The setting is CSM MENU, and it’s under the yellow wrench icon in the D70 menu system. That must be set to DETAILED, or you won’t see some of the things described below.
Here are the steps to set up the SB600 flash to work in wireless mode with your D70:
After you follow these steps, you’ll see the display shown here on your SB600 flash. You’re ready to shoot with wireless flash — just set up the flash to point at your subject, and fire away. The exposure is automatically calculated “through the lens” in TTL mode, and you can concentrate on the picture you want to take, while ignoring the complicated details.
After you set the settings described above, the ONLY thing you can do with flash is take wireless flash shots with your SB600. You can take no-flash shots just fine, but if you want to take a “normal” flash shot with your D70’s built-in flash, or with your SB600 mounted on the camera, you need to un-do everything and set it back to normal flash mode. Here’s how to do that …
I first learned these techniques at KenRockwell.com, a great site for Nikon camera users. Here’s the page that covers SB600 flash technique.
I haven’t been taking many pictures lately. Too busy, with work and also getting ready for the wedding. But this week I snapped a few photos around town, and I picked out three that I liked enough to post …
On Easter, we walked into Renton for lunch at the Royal Orchid on Rainier Avenue. It’s about four miles each way, a nice walk along Lake Washington and past the Renton airport. This little abandoned house caught my eye, with its moss-covered roof and grass growing out of the gutters.
Tuesday, the Chinese President visited Microsoft. These two cops were doing crowd control along 40th, where the motorcade arrived around 5:00 in the afternoon.
One of the coolest things about the change to Daylight Savings Time this month is that it’s often light out when I’m driving home from work, so now I can see Mount Rainier in the distance while driving south down Rainier Avenue.
Added Saturday … we went to Cicada down on First to check out Megan’s dress today. For those who keep asking about it, here it is.
I blogged about the BDC (Business Data Connector) technology in Sharepoint back in January, and Lawrence Liu posted some great information this week about the four BDC web parts that ship with MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007).
Another cool feature in Sharepoint is mobile views, which allow you to use your Sharepoint site from smartphones and PDAs. Martin Kearn has a simple overview of how it works, with some screen shots.
One of the things I love about India is the way the traffic flows.
Here in the US, our approach to traffic is very rigid and simplistic: it’s all about rules and standardization and predictability, with a hierarchical “command and control” mentality in place. The traffic lights tell you what to do, and you do it, and people carefully stay within the lines of their lanes. Any variation from the predefined procedures is considered an act of aggression or stupidity, and often elicits an angry reaction from drivers nearby. (I’m quite familiar with that reaction!)
But in India, people just drive. Or walk, or ride a rikshaw, or whatever. The focus isn’t on rules and regulations, it’s on getting to your destination. And this goal-oriented approach works great: in spite of the wide variety of vehicles involved (and variety of species too, but I won’t offend my Indian friends by mentioning any of them 
), Indian traffic flows very efficiently. It’s like a self-correcting network protocol that automatically re-routes around congestion and keeps the data flowing in conditions that would shut more rigid systems down.
If you haven’t been there, here’s a video clip that shows what you’re missing: two minutes of typical Indian traffic. It’s obviously unedited and truly quite typical. I’ve taken dozens of photos to try to capture the feel of traffic over there, but a video conveys the feel of it better than a photo ever could.
Here’s a great post about the performance of Open Document Format. As the author says, “Why even mess with OpenDocument when it’s such a huge liability in performance and offers no advantage in competing with Microsoft? Stick with Microsoft’s lean binary format but if you must have XML, use Microsoft’s open XML format since it’s still much faster than ODF.”
The comments on that post are also worth reading, and reflect a range of views on this topic. Thanks to my new colleague Don Campbell for referring me to this article.
In the work my team does at Microsoft, we often demonstrate the “big three” client programs (Word, Excel, and Outlook) to people who haven’t worked with them before. One feature that most people immediately understand and appreciate is conditional formatting. It’s easy to use, the results look great, and it can make complex data patterns easy to comprehend quickly.
To demonstrate how easy conditional formatting is to work with, I usually just enter some data into a blank worksheet. Consider a column of labels next to a column of numbers, like the example shown here.
This is a simple example, so it’s fairly easy to see some patterns in the data. The numbers build to a peak in April, fall to a low in July, then finish the year strong.
One way to demonstrate these trends is with a graph. And, of course, Excel 2007 has all sorts of cool graphing features.
This graph here, for example, was created from the sample data above in a couple of clicks. It shows the the trend of the numbers nicely. It also takes up a lot of space on the screen, and the precise numbers aren’t displayed.
Conditional formatting is an alternative to creating graphs. You can show similar types of trends, without using up precious screen real estate on a graph, and you can leave the numbers right where they are in the spreadsheet. Each cell is conditionally formatted, based on the value that’s in it. And you can decide the rules for formatting. Better yet, you can let Excel guess what rules might make your data easier to understand, and it usually guesses rules that work great.
To use conditional formatting, you just highlight some cells and then click the conditional formatting button on the ribbon. A dropdown menu shows the many options, and they’re mostly self-explanatory.
Some of the options include the cool new “live preview” concept, where hovering the mouse over a selection makes it temporarily take effect, so you see exactly what you’re asking for if you click on it. The Data Bars menu is selected in the example here, so hovering over any of the gallery images will cause the corresponding data bars to appear in the selected cells. It’s fast and intutitive, and once you use live preview for a while you start to notice places where it would be nice to have it in other programs. “What, I have to click on this just to see what it does? How old-fashioned!”
Here are some samples of various conditional formatting options (below). No explanation required, they’re that simple — you can tell what’s being communicated very intuitively, the numbers are all right there to see, and each of these examples was created with a few clicks of the mouse.
I predict that conditional formatting will become so popular by the end of 2007 that people will start to get tired of it being over-used, like when people used 10 different fonts in word-processing documents back in the 80s and 90s, just because they could. “Those spreadsheets with conditional formatting all over the place .. you know the type.”
Jeff Atwood has another great post, and this time it’s specific hands-on tips: specifically, Remote Desktop Tips and Tricks.
If you use Remote Desktop (and you should, if you own more than one PC), these tips will prove very useful. His explanation of how RDC handles screen resolution was especially interesting to me, having pulled my hair out trying to get a specific resolution over and RDC connection last week.
Yeah, yeah, I know … it’s just a figure of speech. I meant “having been quite frustrated” or words to that effect.
