Office 2007 sp2 Group Policy ADM and ADMX files and OCT available

October 2, 2009 1 Comment

It’s been a while since Office 2007 service pack 2 came out, but now you can get the files you need to successfully administer this, using Group Policy to apply settings from the ADM or ADMX files, or using the Office Customisation Tool (OCT)..

This Technet page has more information including some important details about making sure to reset some of your policies before replacing the ADM files, as you won’t be able to edit them afterwards:

If you have previously configured any of the Group Policy settings affected by this update, you must set those policy settings to their Not Configured state before you remove the previous 2007 Office system ADM files and load the updated version 3 ADM files. This removes the registry key information for the policy setting from the registry. This is because if an .adm file is removed, the settings that correspond to the .adm file do not appear in Group Policy Object Editor; however, the policy settings that are configured from the .adm file remain in the Registry.pol file and continue to apply to the appropriate target client or user. This also applies to any policy settings that you had previously configured that are listed in “Removed settings” later in this article.

You can download the Administrative Templates and OCT in a self-extracting exe file. Included are ADM, ADMX and ADML files in various languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and a couple of flavours of Chinese).

Also has the OPA files and a settings reference, but this other page claims that this is the definitive version of the Office 2007 GP and settings file. I can’t tell the difference – they are the same size and have the same number of rows on the list pages, and have identical MD5 checksums, so they are the same file.

I suspect this was a newer version than the old version in the old download before the newer version superseded the old version so it is now the current version. Clear as mud?

Anyway, most of the focus of these is on fixing a few broken things and targeting settings relating to Open Document format files (making it the default for saving, or blocking it being used at all, that sort of thing.)

Happy policy making!

Filed under Group Policy, Office System Tagged with , , ,

Windows 7 RTM, Server 2008 R2 and IE8 group policy settings lists

October 1, 2009

Microsoft have updated their usual Group Policy settings lists following recent releases of new Windows versions. On one page you can now get 4 downloads to include pretty much all current versions of desktop and server OS, and v-1 (so Windows 7 and Vista, server 2008 and 2003 sp2).

Group policy settings for Windows Vista sp1, Windows 7, 2003 sp2 2008, 2008 R2

Group policy settings for Internet Explorer 8 are also available (on a different page).

Note that the latest files are all in Excel 2007 format so if you are not yet using Office 2007 or 2010TP you would need to install the Office compatibility pack to allow you to view these on a previous version of Office, or the Excel 2007 viewer (+ service pack 2 as well) to view them (but not be able to edit or save changes). Both of these downloads are free.

Hat tip to Jeremy Mosokowitz at GPAnswers.com

Filed under Group Policy, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista Tagged with , , ,

A couple of quick Excel 2010 discoveries

September 24, 2009

At the moment I’m revisiting pretty much all my course materials for my Microsoft Office training courses, partly to restructure them into different chunks, and partly to start work editing where necessary to include coverage of Office 2010 so that I will be ahead of the game when that gets released next year.

Along the way I’ve been finding out loads of cool things about major new features such as sparklines and slicers (more on that in a future post, as promised), and the ability to customise the Ribbon easily without writing code. There are also lots of tiny changes as well, which are easy to miss and may get drowned out in the sea of other news about the next version, so I thought I would mention a couple of them here – the status bar summaries and filters in Tables.

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Filed under Excel, Office 2010 Tagged with , , , ,

Windows 7 64 bit experiences, my current software stack and that pesky CSC folder

September 24, 2009 1 Comment

Recently, like many others, I have been through the process of installing various releases of Windows 7, from the Beta, through RC1 and finally the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version. I decided to take the plunge and install 64 bit on my Dell D620 and everything went really well, no driver issues or any other hiccups. Had to do a manual download of a driver for my old(ish) Epson scanner, but it still installed straight off first time. RC1 needed a bit of manual intervention to get the NVidia drivers working for some reason (Beta and RTM both just worked, strangely), and it was a bit temperamental with docking and undocking while running, but RTM seems to have cleared this up, and is now way more stable than Vista ever was at doing this (I used to get a full system lock about 1 time in 10).

I did as advised by Microsoft and did this as a clean install every time, rather than doing a hack to allow me to run an in-place upgrade. Thanks to James O’Neill’s blog article I did this from a bootable USB drive, and this was lightning fast since I also recently upgraded my hard drive to a 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD.

Applications, applications, applications

A bit of a pain re-installing applications again each time round, but it does mean I have a nice shortlist of the apps and utilities that I actually need and use regularly enough to merit an install. Without being an exhaustive list, the apps that made the grade every time, in approximately the order they got installed are:

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Filed under Office 2010, Utilities + Tools, Windows 7 Tagged with , , ,

Excel 2010 new features – Sparklines

July 20, 2009 3 Comments

As discussed previously, we have some marketing information about what we will be seeing in the next release of the Office system, but not really a great deal of technical information. The Excel team are starting to blog a bit more now that the Technical Preview is underway; their 10,000 foot view is a good starting point to find out what’s coming, or you can read the press release. On the official Office 2010 site there is a video by Albert Chew, Product Manager for Office, which shows off some of the new features of Excel 2010 (sorry, no direct link to the video available, it’s linked in the menu on the left of that page). On the Microsoft PressPass videos page there is an Excel 2010 demo video which you can also download (16MB wmv file). This covers two new features – sparklines (from the start) and slicers (from about 1min 55 into the video)

As more information emerges, I’ll write in more detail about some of the new features. Today let’s have a look at probably the most eagerly awaited extension to Excel’s data visualisation capabilities – sparklines.

Sparklines in Excel 2010

Sparklines are very dense microcharts used to display simple information, usually showing historical values to give context to the current data. The term was coined by information visualisation guru Edward Tufte and discussed in a whole chapter in his book Beautiful Evidence, which describes sparklines as “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”.

Examples might include past share values, commodity prices, exchange rates, or internal business key performance indicators. Lines may have key points highlighted (high value, low value, last value), show a trendline or normal band, but otherwise will be deliberately uncluttered to aid easy interpretation.

Typical sparkline sales versus targetThe example to the right shows the previous 12 months sales and target, with the highest and lowest sales figures highlighted. Some people might prefer to show the figures to the right of the sparkline as they relates to the final data point and therefore the right hand end of the plotted line, but this is a matter of personal preference. Although this example is show here in quite a large screenshot, the trend is very clear at much smaller sizes too.

While lines are by far the most common choice for sparklines, especially to show changes over time, other formats may be found – columns to show breakdown of a total by category for comparison, for example. Another popular use is to track success and failure, such as wins and losses for a sports team, a technique described well by this article on sparklines at Bissantz, the creators of SparkMaker, an add-in for Excel.

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Filed under Excel, Office 2010 Tagged with , , ,

Office 2010 first thoughts

July 19, 2009 1 Comment

Well, there’s some information finally coming out about Office 2010 and some of the features we will hopefully be seeing in the final release version next year. As the Technical Preview gets released to an invited audience only at this stage, there aren’t loads of sources of details, but a few places are showing off some interesting ideas and if you watch the videos carefully and look closely at the screenshots there are nuggets to be found.

If you want to be considered for the technical preview yourself, you can still sign up via the “Get a pass” link on the main “launch” site at Office 2010 – the movie. This site started out just hosting a teaser movie but now has a look and feel similar to the new “Backstage” interface which has been added to the Fluent UI to replace the current Office button menu to help you work with different aspects of your document in one place. There are a few videos posted on there right now, no doubt more to come soon.

Where can I find out more?

There are some useful overview documents on the Microsoft PressPass site, including an Office 2010 FAQ which covers a number of things, notably an outline of which products will be included in which versions of the suites available through retail or volume licensing. The oddest thing is that the various press releases available here are all Word .doc documents. Not a universal format like PDF. Not even Microsoft’s own portable format XPS. Not Word 2007 DOCX (probably a good idea not to assume people would already be on board with that, even with the compatibility pack for older versions). Other documents linked from that page give more detail for each of the products individually, but only at a brief marketing level, nothing too technical.

What are the biggest changes?

The most obvious change across the Office system as whole is that all the applications will now have the fluent UI and ribbon, which has also had slight facelift – they have removed many of the borders round buttons, reducing the visual clutter and “flattening” the overall effect (almost exactly what they did in the evolution of the toolbar from Office 97 to 2000). Selected or active options still appear to have borders to make them clearer. When you have additional context-sensitive tabs appearing in the Ribbon, the coloured highlight above them seems to be bolder because it extends from a solid colour at the top of the title bar fading out as it goes down into the Ribbon tabs area, rather than at the moment where this is only visible in the title bar area and fades quickly upwards. This may make the additional tools more obvious to new users when they need them, and help distinguish between similar items by getting used to the colours used.

The other big news items are the introduction of browser-based document viewing and editing (discussed below), and the availability of a 64-bit version of all the products (as well as 32 bit for legacy compatibility). This may provide some speed and productivity benefits to those who have appropriate hardware and OS to take advantage of this, use more memory and so on. Larger Access models might make more sense, but Excel spreadsheets of over 2GB? Hopefully not too often. I do know some people who could probably build PowerPoint shows that big though…

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Filed under Office 2010, Office System Tagged with , , , ,

Is the Office button a menu or a dialog box?

July 9, 2009 2 Comments

Another of Simon’s excellent posts about the Ribbon and other parts of the Fluent UI in Excel 2007 has prompted me to respond. Read the ribbon file blunderfest, where Simon says (I snipped a few bits out here for brevity, and the bold is mine):

I already mentioned the lack of file open icon, and previously I have talked about the ridiculous blob. And the initial flashing they had to incorporate to tell us its a button. But when you actually get closer it just gets sillier – I really wouldn’t have thought that was possible!

When you click and look, if you decide to cancel and move to the traditional cancel location (lower right) and click that button, does it close the file open dialog/ribbon? Or does it close Excel?

Everyone I have asked (and me) has accidentally closed Excel numerous times before eventually learning that this particular piece of the interface is not ‘normal’. In fact to cancel that thing you click anywhere else in Excel – and Excel ignores the click but closes the dialog! How ridiculous is that?

They have created a thing that is not as powerful or controllable as a dialog, but is too big and intrusive to be a menu or toolbar so they butchered an existing UI concept – the click away to cancel menu concept to work with this quasi dialog. But dialogs never worked like that before or in other applications. So now Office is the most friction-full application in the widows world (excluding perhaps Ulead products).

So, does the Office button bring up a (poor) dialog, or is it just a menu?

Sorry Simon but I have to disagree with you on this one (I seem to recall being told I was the voice of balance on smurfonspreadsheets by someone…).

Just because you think it’s a dialogue and call it a dialogue does not mean it is a dialog or should behave like one. Shredding a straw man / ribbon does not make a valid argument. To me it looks and behaves pretty much like I would expect a menu to behave:

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Filed under Excel, Office System Tagged with , , ,

Excel cell styles – useful feature or waste of ribbon space?

July 3, 2009 6 Comments

I agree with Simon in his article about the usefulness of cell styles in Excel, where he says:

Styles in Excel are one of those things that sound good in theory, but are significantly worse than useless in reality. In an isolated world they may work but as soon as you start copying a pasting between workbooks…then you get a right royal style mess.

Cell styles as a concept seem pretty weak to me. The built-in ones are hopeless; I know hardly anyone (actually no-one that I could name right now) that uses them.

I have recently done some extensive work for a client on a set of templates, themes, etc for the whole Office suite. For the Excel templates I included some cell styles to make it quick to format things in “corporate” colours for headings and so on (as well as default table styles for the same reason). This provides user convenience and helps them create more consistent documents with more of a “branded” feel to them.

As to imposing a regime of “pink means bad” and “orange double underline means linked” (linked to what?), no chance.

Why styles don’t address the real need for good formatting

I teach students on my Excel training courses that formatting of spreadsheets should be used for three purposes:

  • to highlight (data outliers; estimates as opposed to actuals)
  • to group or associate data together (months in the same quarter or year having a light shaded background say, next group no background; using matching colour for axes and lines in a two-series chart with two different scales)
  • to separate data by category or type (line above the first month of a new year; making the title row bold)

These principles of using formats to help interpret the data, rather than help it look pretty tend to get people focussed on the task rather than the appearance. The built-in cell styles only seem to address the concept of highlighting, rather than being useful for grouping or separating. The highlighting they provide seems arbitrary at best, and quite likely to cause headaches with some of the colours involved.

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Filed under Excel, Office System, Utilities + Tools Tagged with , , ,

Changing many cells in Excel to recalculate new values after VAT changes

November 26, 2008

So you have a spreadsheet with lots of values in – future monthly invoices for service contracts, say. Actual values, not calculations which multiply up by a VAT rate stored in another cell, or a named range, or even as a fixed number in a formula. And the Chancellor of the Exchequer just announced that the VAT rate (sales tax for our colonial cousins) has changed so all your values are now going to be wrong for the next twelve months.

What can you do to change many cells at once by a specific amount?

A few approaches spring to mind, depending on the scale of the problem and the structure of your data.

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Passed 70-291 to become MCSA:Messaging

November 25, 2008

“Implementing, Managing, and Maintaining a Windows 2003 server Network Infrastructure”, also known as The Beast has been slain.
Turned out to be a cuddly bunny rather than a beast (a bit like the end of Monty Python’s holy grail only in reverse).

I had put this off for so long because I thought I was weak on a couple of areas and needed some polish, and since everyone says it is one of the hardest I wanted to be sure to nail it.
But I was in the exam centre on Friday anyway (taking my CRM Applications exam MB2-632, also nailed) and I had second shot to back me up, so I figured “what the hell, even if I fail majestically at least I will know much more accurately what to expect on this one next time”.

So I waltzed away with 889 in a shade under half the time available (105 minutes out of 215 – I know some do better than that but I was well pleased with the result). Finally gave me my MCSA:Messaging and only two more to go (293 and 294) to MCSE.

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Filed under Certification Exams, Microsoft, Training + certification, Work and profile Tagged with ,

Microsoft Certified Application Specialist times five

August 16, 2008 4 Comments

MCAS logo I took five MCAS exams on Friday and passed them all. Some were easier than others, as always, but overall I found them a lot less stressful than when I took four on the same day to get the Microsoft Office Specialist:Master qualification.

Overall I like the way the Office exams work – the real application (minus the help!) running in the top half, and the questions at the bottom. Each question has a few tasks to complete, and you are measured on the end result, not how you got there.

This is a much better test of real-world ability to use the software than any multiple-choice questions can ever hope to be. Yes, it means that you could take a few wrong turns, and click on some irrelevant buttons before finding the thing you were looking for, but you can do that in real life too. The exam is limited to 50 minutes, so you can only afford to do this on a handful of questions, and you need to be able to make up the time on other questions by reading it once and going straight to the correct feature or function.

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Filed under Certification Exams, Office System, Training + certification, Windows Vista, Work and profile Tagged with , , , , ,

Microsoft second shot exam offer back again for 2008

August 5, 2008 3 Comments

It seems that Microsoft have listened to the community and brought back their Second Shot offer much earlier than most people expected. Previously this seemed to run only once each year (albeit for several months at a time), and the last one only closed for taking exams the first time round at the end of May and the retakes by the end of June. Re-opening this in August 2008 and leaving it open right through to June 2009 seems to indicate that this will effectively become a permanent fixture, but you can’t just roll your retakes forward forever, you will have to use the second chance within the year-long programme, which seems perfectly fair.

The same launch page is being used as last time, although until today this was not live for the new offer and still showed the old information.

Microsoft Second Shot Exam Offer 2008

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Filed under Training + certification Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Our UK SBSC losses are Australian gains

July 30, 2008

Robbie Upcroft went back to Oz a while ago to carry on working with SBS partners down under after a stint at Microsoft UK. While over here he was a key part of expanding the Small Business Server community, working to set up local user groups, and it sounds like he is carrying on where he left off.

Another of the movers and shakers who made a huge impact to SBSC was the UK SMB girl herself, Susanne Dansey. After becoming an MVP just over a year ago for her contributions she upped and left us for foreign shores. Her passion and enthusiasm for technology and business are sorely missed, but now she too is bringing them to bear in Australia, joining the fun there in the run up to the launch of Cougar (SBS 2008 ) and EBS.

Susanne is blogging again as well, so with her and Robbie and other renowned SBS MVPs such as Wayne Small on the case, it looks like they have a great opportunity to make the most of the buzz. Good luck to all of them, and we hope to see you in the UK sometime soon, even if only for a flying visit!

Filed under Industry News, Small Business Server, Windows Server 2008 Tagged with , ,

UPS_Invoice email trojan variant claims to be from Customs Service

July 24, 2008 18 Comments

In the last hour I found in my inbox a variation on the UPS_Invoice trojans of last week. This new email claimed to be from “Customs Service” with the subject “Customs – We have received a parcel for you” and the following text:

Good afternoon,

We have received a parcel for you, sent from France on July 9. Please fill out the customs declaration attached to this message and send it to us by mail or fax. The address and the fax number are at the bottom of the declaration form.

Kind regards,

Rolland Hanna

Your Customs Service

This content was so close to the UPS_Invoice one that it seems obvious it originates from the same source.

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Filed under Security and Malware Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Follow up post about UPS_Invoice trojan

July 15, 2008 14 Comments

I’ve now had a chance to take a slightly closer look at the four copies of this Trojan Agent HFU that I received in the last 24 hours, as discussed in my previous post here. I’ve posted some details of file names and sizes along with MD5 hashes for people to be able to compare their versions against.

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UPS_Invoice.exe trojan received by email

July 14, 2008 37 Comments

This lunchtime I received an email as follows:

From: United Parcel Service [someone@not_ups.com]

Subject: UPS Paket N2410170593

Unfortunately we were not able to deliver postal package you sent on July the 1st in time because the recipient’s address is not correct.

Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our office

Your UPS

Attachment: UPS_Invoice_317.zip

Of course this was extremely suspicious. I had no recent dealings with UPS, the email clearly did not really come from them anyway (it was not even spoofed to appear to be from their domain), and why on earth would they need to send me a file, let alone a zipped one? The misspelling in the subject also smelled of an automated message (although Paket is the correct spelling for the German word for packet). I smelled malware and wanted to find out more.

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Using Field Chooser to find out when an Outlook appointment was created

July 4, 2008 6 Comments

Ewan Dalton posted a tip for finding when an appointment was created on his blog “The Electric Wand”. This involves dipping into the developer tools to have a look at the actual fields that Outlook / Exchange uses to store the data about the calendar entry, as opposed to the standard stuff that gets displayed through the default form view.

However, he posted a comment a day or so later with a much faster method which is probably less scary to the average user (no mention of words like “developer ribbon”, “forms” and so on). Simply using the field chooser in the search results window means that you can see the created date (and any other additional information you want) at a glance. I thought it would be useful to expand this and give a quick tutorial, since being familiar with the Field Chooser in Outlook is useful in lots of other ways such as:

  • You might want to see the size of emails so you can sort the large ones to the top to delete first, reducing the size of your email file the most amount with the least effort
  • Maybe you have filed sent and received items together which relate to a particular topic or project, and you want to show both the To and From fields in this folder view
  • It is easy to accidentally drag and drop a column heading away which removes it completely, so you need to know how to get it back

So, let’s have some show and tell:

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Filed under Exchange, Office System Tagged with , , , ,

Simple online content management from Texty

July 3, 2008 2 Comments

I found this online Content Management System (CMS) tool today which you can use to maintain the content of a web page without any great knowledge of how to write code.

Texty: The Simplest CMS

The principle here is that you put a script on your page which pulls the information from Texty’s database. You edit the content in that database through a simple online user interface, much like editing a blog post, for example. This is great for small organisations who may be prepared to pay a small amount to a web design firm for a basic site (or an off-the-shelf template) but do not have the skills to maintain well-written HTML themselves. So clubs, societies, and small (or even large) not-for-profits could all benefit from a simple system to help them manage the content of pages which change frequently, such as news or upcoming events listings. Some commercial firms might also welcome the convenience, although I suspect that many smaller businesses simply don’t feel the need to change their website content all that often. The other benefit may be that it is easy to allow multiple people to produce content without fear that they can cause problems for one another.

Why not get a blog instead?

For many people a blog is a handy way to post short pieces of news or information without having to write underlying code. However, the popular free offerings only give limited control over the appearance of the site from a selection of templates.

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Filed under Utilities + Tools, Web publishing Tagged with , , ,

System Administrator Appreciation Day 2008

July 2, 2008 1 Comment

image

SysAdmin Day – last Friday in July every year

From www.sysadminday.com:

If you can read this, thank your sysadmin

A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.

A sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.

If you are not sure why you should show your appreciation, gratitude and even love for your SysAdmin, why not watch the System Administrator Song from Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie

Make sure you don’t forget SysAdmin Day this year or ever again

ICSfile

Click to download a calendar entry (.ics file) and add it to your diary (eg in Outlook or Lotus Notes) to remind you every year.

<update> Just found this SysAdmin day cartoon – maybe you should set it as your desktop background to remind you to celebrate on the day.

If you are a SysAdmin, are you celebrating this day? What gifts would you most appreciate from your colleagues?

If you are not in IT, how will you be showing your SysAdmin that you care?

Filed under Trivia and fun stuff Tagged with , ,

How Microsoft protects value of certifications against cheats and braindumps

June 16, 2008 5 Comments

Anyone who holds a Microsoft certificate or is thinking of taking one may sometimes wonder how much value there is in this piece of paper in terms of salary or expectation of finding a job in the first place. One way is to look at how many people share your qualifications although this does not tell you if any of those people are “paper MCSEs” who do not really have the depth of knowledge and experience it would normally require. People cheat in all kinds of ways to get some letters after their names, most notoriously using “braindumps” of genuine test questions and simply learning the correct answers rather than understanding why these are right. Even on exams with some simulations, this rote-learning technique buys a cheat more time to spend on the sims by answering the multiple choice questions in hardly any time at all. Microsoft claim to be working hard to eliminate cheating of all kinds as far as possible, and you can join in a Live Meeting to find out more about this here: MCP Live Meeting: Redmond CSI: Anti-piracy and Microsoft Certification

Certification fraud is big business and a serious threat to the value of Microsoft certification exams. Cheaters, braindumps, and sometimes even the actions of your well-intentioned peers can damage the reputation of your hard-earned Microsoft credential. Come to this session to learn what Microsoft is doing to protect your certifications from braindump providers, proxy test-takers, and score-report fakers. You’ll hear how technical innovations in the exams themselves, our piracy teams, and YOU are helping to reduce cheating in the world of Microsoft certification.

This meeting will be offered twice to accommodate worldwide calendars

This online event is on June 25th 2008 at 7:30 am Pacific time (What time is this in my region?) and later at 5:00 pm Pacific (What time is this where I am?) – use the online registration button at the top of the page to register for either of the two sessions.

Thanks to Trikah for the heads up.

Filed under Events, Training + certification Tagged with , ,

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