Microsoft Office Annoyances: Turn Off Personalized Menus

In Microsoft Office (prior to Office 2007), there is a feature called “Personalized Menus” that I find very annoying. What personalized menus do is hide the full list of features from you when you click on the menus at the top of your Office document (like “File,” “Edit,” “Tools,” etc.). This was designed to keep your most commonly used options easier to find, but what it really does is hide the features you are looking for!

Luckily, turning off this “feature” is really easy! All you need to do is:

1. Go to the “Tools” menu and click on “Customize”
2. On the “Options” tab, check the checkbox next to “Always show full menus”
3. Click “OK”

Done! Now you will see the full menus!

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One of the most annoying features of Microsoft Word 2003 (part of Microsoft Office 2003) is the Reading Layout view. This is the default view in Word that displays two pages side-by-side on your screen. Reading Layout view also hides your toolbars. This view is seldom people’s favorite, but many people don’t realize that you can turn it off. Turning off Reading Layout view is easy:

1. First, in Microsoft Word, go to the “Tools” menu at the top of the screen
2. Click on “Options”
3. On the General tab, uncheck the checkbox next to “Allow starting in Reading Layout.”
4. Click “OK”

That was easy!

Microsoft announced a new promotion today that offers Office 2007 to students at the discounted price of $59.95. The software will be available for digital download at 8 PM EST today, September 12th, 2007, at www.theultimatesteal.com. To qualify for the promo, higher-ed students in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. will need to provide a valid email address provided by their institution. (The promo starts in France, Italy and Spain on Sept. 20, 2007). "The Ultimate Steal" will run until April 30th, 2008 and includes Microsoft’s Office Ultimate 2007 suite of programs. Office Ultimate is the premium Office suite, providing students with a comprehensive set of tools that can help them create high-quality documents, gather and consolidate lecture notes and other information, stay organized, find what they are looking for quickly, and easily collaborate with colleagues and professors across geographical boundaries. The program included in Office Ultimate 2007 are:

• Microsoft Office Word 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel® 2007
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007
• Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager
• Microsoft Office Access" 2007
• Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
• Office OneNote 2007
• Office Groove 2007
• Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007

"We’re listening to students who have told us they need Microsoft Office for their studies and want more flexible ways to get the latest version," said Alan Yates, general manager of Worldwide Education at Microsoft. "We’re committed to providing accessible and affordable technology to students so they can meet their academic goals. The Ultimate Steal is the latest in a long history of providing compelling academic offers for students."

UPDATE: the site has a timer…the deal isn’t available 24/7…you have to wait for the timer to count down (every hour?) before it becomes available!

This is exciting news! Gizmodo is reporting the confirmed development of "Photoshop Express," a free online photo editor. John Nack, Photoshop’s senior product manager states, "Photoshop Express isn’t meant to duplicate/replace Photoshop CS3 or Photoshop Elements. Rather, it’s a new member of the Photoshop family that’s meant to make Adobe imaging technology immediately accessible to large numbers of people." The teaser of a screenshot posted on the Adobe blog (click the image to the left to enlarge) hints at a full-featured photo editor and not simply a crippled version of Photoshop, a la Photoshop Elements. Nack also mentions one of Photoshop Express’s new features will be the ability to "adjust an image just by rolling over the different versions shown at the top, previewing the results & then clicking the desired degree of modification." Stayed tuned to the Adobe blog for more details.

I received an email recently about a new service from Diigo called WebSlides which lets you, as they say, "convert your bookmarks into slideshows." However, I think their marketing plan to sell WebSlides as just another bookmarking tool is doing it a disservice. I initially could not imagine why I would want my bookmarks saved as slideshows, but I immediately saw the value of the app as a training tool. I could picture WebSlide users making a walkthrough of how to use a particular website, presenting the features of a new web service, or making a WebSlide show to be used in a classroom setting. WebSlides’ value is not just in the way it lets you stitch together a series of web pages together to form a slideshow; it is the ability to add sticky notes, highlights, and integrated annotations to the slideshows that make the service so useful. In addtion, you can record and narrate tracks to go along with the slideshow or add music.

Some other suggestions for the use of WebSlides, as noted on their site, include:

• Show a list of houses to real estate clients
• Review a list of job candidates found online
• Bundle important course resources for students
• Assemble all the pages on a specific family line
• Provide guided use cases for potential customers
• Share the favorite places you would like to visit with your friends and blog readers
• Provide a quick briefing, a simple tutorial or guided tour on any subject.

As with every new service these days, WebSlides is in private beta. Sign up for an invite here.

When I’m going somewhere for the first time, I’ll search online to get the directions. And since satellite imagery became available, it’s nice to be able to get a bird’s eye view of where you are going as well. Of course, Google has Street View in some areas, but more than likely, it’s not available for your city yet. So, in the meantime, I found the "Bird’s Eye View" feature at maps.live.com pretty useful. Here are some screenshots of my search for "downtown Tampa". Can you tell which one I found more useful? Click on the images to see them larger. The building on the right in image #1 is the building in the center of image #2.

Joopz is a new service that offers web-based text messaging, something they’re calling “web texting.” With this web-texting service from, you can send and receive text messages (SMS messages) from the web to any mobile phone for free. Another feature Joopz offers is the ability to do group messaging, where you can have conversations via text message with several people at once. Other services provided are text reminders and scheduled messages.

Using Joopz is easy, you just: 

   1. Create an account at Joopz & enter in your mobile phone number.
   2. Once you’re logged in, type a message into the message window.
   3. Enter the mobile number of the person receiving your message.
   4. Choose to send the message immediately, or specify a later time or date.
   5. Click “send the message.”

The free version of Joopz is limited to 50 texts per month. The unlimited plan lets you text as much as you want, while also providing advanced contact management and a real-time history of the messages sent and received. The unlimited plan is a very reasonable $2.95/month. 

This is fun- the Osiris Project is an amazing technology/art project. Osiris is a visualization engine that uses song lyrics to create dynamic music videos using tagged images. Designed to interact with your media player, when you start playing a song, your media player will retrieve the current playing song’s title and artist. With that data in hand, Osiris then will search for the lyrics of the song and download them automatically. The returned song lyrics will be parsed into sing word tags (ignoring tags like “a”, “of,” and “the”, etc.). Osiris then searches the flickr database for images with those tags. The tagged images are returned and queue up. The images are then streamed as your song plays, with image effects that blend, filter, float, transform, or transpose themselves into dynamic visualizations. The result is a customized music video of sorts that displays relevant images along with your music. Although Osiris may not be something you use everyday, it’s a pretty amazing use of technology and worth a look.

Osiris got its start when a guy named Schuyler Maclay became obsessed with the connections between music mashups and words. Schuyler then stumbled upon the flash art project “Islands of Consciousness” by Mario Klingemann (http://incubator.quasimondo.com/flash/islands_of_consciousness.php ) and started thinking about the connection between music and sound. After a few chats with Sebastian and Zack, Schuyler presented the first conceptualization of what would become the Osiris Project. Now coded by a team of programmers from around the world, Osiris is bridging the gap between technology and art.

Zoho, the makers of a popular online office suite, is staged to launch a business version of their suite, designed to compete with Google Apps. Like Google Apps, the Zoho Business
suite will offer a combination of user management and an integrated suite of applications and
services.   However, unlike Google Apps, Zoho’s Business Suite will offer more apps from start, including a slideshow app and Wiki.

Specifically, the Zoho Business will offer:
            

• Single sign on across applications
• Company level administration console
• Multiple levels of security including SSL
• Telephone support
• Remote back-up
• Document and data storage management self service
• Co-branding      

Zoho Business will include the following applications :
            

• Writer (Word Processor)
• Sheet (Spreadsheets)
• Show (Presentations)
• Wiki (Group Wikis)
• Planner (Organizer)
• Notebook (Note Taker)
• Chat
• Mail
• Calendar
• Start Page
• Domain management

With Zoho Business, users will be able to add multiple locations, each with their own time zone, and set up local admins. Some aspects of the interface can be "branded" with customers’ own images and customers will be able to apply their own domains to the Zoho applications. Also, when Zoho Mail is out of private beta, the company will begin hosting email for businesses.

Zoho Business will be unveiled at the Office 2.0 conference and then will begin a private beta. (You can sign up for the private beta here). The beta will continue for about a month, then move into public beta, with general release planned for Q1 2008. The final cost for the business suite will be $50 per year. Zoho will continue to offer a personal suite at no charge. There’s also a mobile suite optimized for the iPhone.

Get a  sneak peek at what the Personal and Business Suites will offer here:

Perhaps they were overshadowed by the iPod announcement, but yesterday Google announced a feature in Google Reader that we all have been dying for - SEARCH. Unbelievably, up until now, the company known for "organizing the world’s information" neglected to include a search box into their popular online RSS feed reader, Google Reader.  The new search feature lets you use keywords to find items in your subscriptions and you can filter it to search "All Items," Shared Items, Starred Items, or by tags. If you subscribe to someone’s shared items, it can search those too. A couple of other tweaks to Reader were also announced at the same time. For example, you can now hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. Unread counts now go to 1,000, so that you can know just how far behind you are (oh great, now we can really obsess). And finally, Google Reader now lets you use the forward and back buttons like it’s a webpage to move between folders and subscriptions that you’ve navigated to. Google Reader is now perfect.