Now that Office 2007 has gone “Gold” and is available for download and soon on retail shelves, it would be a good time to go here and download the “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats”.

According to Microsoft’s web site this does the following:

 By installing the Compatibility Pack in addition to Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, you will be able open, edit, and save files using the file formats new to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007. The Compatibility Pack can also be used in conjunction with the Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003, Excel Viewer 2003, and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 to view files saved in these new formats. For more information about the Compatibility Pack, see Knowledge Base article 923505.

Since Office 2007 has new formats for everything it is only a matter of time before someone sends you a Word or Excel file that you cannot open with your older version of Office. This option should mitigate the pain somewhat!

Cheers,

Robert Porter

If you have installed Office 2007 you have been nagged to install the new Desktop Search engine version 3.0. Until recently I had held off doing so because Desktop Search 3.0 was an engine only install, no UI. Since I use MSN Desktop Search frequently, (I prefer it over Google Desktop), I did not want to loose my UI for Desktop Search 2.5.

But I checked again and now Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Beta 2 is available and it includes the full UI! So I have downloaded and installed it and will let you know what I think about it as I begin to experiment with it.

UPDATE: After playing with the new version for the last several days, I have found no issues or problems. I love it! It seems faster and searching inside Outlook was incredible compared to the older search functionality.

I frequently use it to search Source Code as well as standard documents on my hard drive, indeed, I can’t imagine life without it, so if I run into snags with this version I will let you know fairly quickly.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

It appears that if you use Outlook 2007 and have Grisoft’s AVG Anti-Virus product you may be sending some or all of your emails with no body text.

The solution is to tell AVG NOT to certify your e-mail, either in or out. See the screenshot for the two options that need to be turned off. I did this and Outlook now seems to have stopped firing blanks!

I can’t take credit for the fix, I did a quick Google search and saw a number of posts on the issue.

That being said I am somewhat annoyed that Grisoft has not addressed this issue, since a lot of the posts I saw were at least a month old and AVG is updated frequently.

Lets hope they get it fixed soon.

Bob Porter

Hmmm