The best part is the live collaboration that Google or the likes of Zoho have made possible. Online collaboration among team members was something in which Microsoft has also dabbled, but in its typical manner of releasing "Enterprise" features. No surprise that that has never really become the norm outside some corporate microcosms.

Today, Google has upped the ante in the war for online document editing by launching the templates. Simple addition to their rapidly growing arsenal, but a shape of things to come. From wedding invites to business letters, it's an easily expandable service. The API and "open source" extensibility thinking of Google will make sure that you or I can contribute our own templates to the gallery. Nifty.

Office 2007 — First Look

Now I don't know about you, but to me this bloo-ey look is hideous.I am not on Vista yet, by choice, so that sky blue gradation thing going on the top was not my cuppa. Why software designed for a certain platform cannot honor a user's general system UI preferences is beyond me, but Office 2007 does insist on having it's own look and feel. As though the new ribbon clutter was not enough.

I wanted to get rid of those ribbons to begin with. So I downloaded the the free version of Ribbon Customizer. They offer some Pro version but it does things I don't particularly care about. Alternatively, there is ToolbarToggle, but on their site I did not seem to catch a free version, and I was unwilling to pay for this stuff.

The RibbonCustomizer install is pretty straightforward and when you start Word 2007 after its installation, here is how Word looks. There is an additional item in the View menu at the end:

Word 2007 after RibbonCustomizer

I clicked on the obvious menu option to make ClassicUI my first menu tab. This is what this does:

Classic 2003 interface

That's a good start, but I now wanted to clean up some other stuff. Fortunately, Microsoft chose to include the additional "Minimize Ribbon" feature, which contextually hides the ribbon when your focus is on writing inside the document. So let's do that:

Minimize the Word 2007 ribbon

Now to get rid of the forced Blue. Click on the "More Commands" option in the menu shown in the screenshot above. Choose Silver and make other adjustments to your taste:

Choose silver

Now this is what Word 2007 looks like, with minimized ribbon, classic 2003 UI, and a somewhat less intrusive silver gradient:

Phew. I also recommend setting the default "Save" options as your regular Word ".doc" instead of the new ".docx" (or other .xlsx and .pptx equivalents) as that is a bit more standard even today in 2008.

Here's a nifty little utility that allows you to set most often-used folders on your PC and access them quickly from a FILE OPEN dialogue box.

FileBox Extender

These little icons appear in all the File –> Open boxes in Windows. Which is very handy. Among the several customizations you can make to this oft-used file dialog box is the ability to automatically sort the file names by name, date, size, or type, and the ability to see the file names in Details or Thumbnails views. (Btw, the skin you see in that screenshot above is from Flyakiteosx).

How to Change FbX Button Images

You can tell a utility is well coded if you can customize it to your tastes. I have changed the icons that come with the tool as default (which are somewhat Win3.1-ish). This is simple. In the folder where you installed FileBox eXtender, there's a sub-folder named ICONS. Inside that are several standard format Windows icon files (with the extension .ICO). Copy a pair of these files into the main program folder, and then rename them to FAVORITE.ICO and RECENT.ICO. Now exit and restart FileBox eXtender. (In some cases you will have to reboot your machine—exiting and restarting the program may not be enough to effect the change). That's it. Your new icons should now appear.

Have a bunch of clumsy Word documents that become huge and it takes the good old MS Word minutes to open it? Here's a tip.

Open the file in OpenOffice (at version 2.2 at the time of this writing), save it as Word .doc, reopen in Word itself, and voila — the file opens without much pain. This is especially useful with documents written in languages other than English, and if you have pictures in them.

Same with Excel. Have password-protected cells? Open the spreadsheet with in OpenOffice Calc, just uncheck 'protection', re-save as an Excel file, and you're good to go. Really helps when the original spreadsheet designer has left the company and something needs changed.

For those who say OpenOffice isn't "truly compatible with MS Office", well, MS Office isn't fully compatible with MS Office. Tried Office 2007 yet? The interface revamp was supposed to be a major breakthrough, but it's just pesky. Here's a quote from OpenOffice 2.2 release notes.

While OO isn't exactly the most efficient (memory hog alert) it is a fantastic option for start-ups and people who're unwilling to fork for an overpriced office suite when office tools are going online (think Google Docs, thinkfree, and such).

Own Microsoft Windows XP Home but would like to own Windows XP Pro? Gizmodo is running a simple hack that apparently upgrades the system inadvertently.

No point duplicating it. Read it at Gizmodo.

YMMV, and of course, I do not endorse bootlegging. Enjoy

UPDATED: You need your Windows XP or Microsoft Office product key, but you have lost them. Well no fear:

Just download it, run it, and it sees more than you will ever want to know about your system.

Older Recommendations

Some neat utilities to help you find stuff about your system:

Good thing about these tools is they also find a lot of other details about your system.

In a first for the industry behemoth, Microsoft has donated its Windows Installer XML (WiX) to SourceForge.net, the open source developer network.

WiX is a toolset that uses XML code to build Windows installation packages. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages. It includes a compiler, a lib tool, a linker and a decompiler.

According to a blog posting by Microsoft employee Rob Mensching, "The WiX toolset and all of its source code has been released so that you can build Windows Installer databases (MSI and MSM files) the same way most groups inside Microsoft do.

However, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. WiX became the first project from Microsoft to be released under an OSS approved license, namely the Common Public License."

Explaining the reason for the current release of WiX, Menshing said, "Back in 1999 and 2000, I did not feel that many people inside Microsoft understood what the Open Source community was really about and I wanted to improve that understanding by providing an example.…Via WiX on SourceForge, you get to see the results of many people's efforts to improve Microsoft from the inside out. I'm not exactly sure what is going to happen next but I'm sure there are quite a few people who are interested to see where this leads. Personally, all I hope is that if you find the WiX toolset useful then you'll join the community and help us improve the toolset."

More information about the toolset and its OSS release can be found at:

Here's a cool, handy macro that will auto-generate a Table of Contents for any Excel file.

Steps remains the same as in any macro (Alt F11 to start VBA, Insert module, paste the code, save, File -> Return to Excel, then Alt F8, and Run). That's a mouthful, but you know what to do.

Here's the code:

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<strong>Sub GenerateTableOfContents()</strong>
' Does a TOC already exist?
' If Err system variable is &gt; 0, it doesn't
Dim wSheet As Worksheet
On Error Resume Next
Set wSheet = Worksheets("Table of Contents")
If Not Err = 0 Then
 
' The Table of contents doesn't exist. Add it
Set wSheet = Worksheets.Add(Before:=Worksheets(1))
wSheet.Name = "TOC"
End If
On Error GoTo 0
 
' Set up the table of contents page
wSheet.[A2] = "Table of Contents"
 
With wSheet.[A6]
.CurrentRegion.Clear
.Value = "Subject"
End With
 
wSheet.[B6] = "Page(s)"
wSheet.Range("A1:B1").ColumnWidth = Array(36, 12)
TableRow = 7
PageCount = 0
Worksheets.Select
displayMessage = "We'll do a Print Preview for some calculations."
displayMessage = displayMessage &amp; "Please 'Close' the window when it appears."
MsgBox displayMessage
ActiveWindow.SelectedSheets.PrintPreview
 
' Now loop thru sheets, collecting TOC info
For Each S In Worksheets
S.Select
ThisName = S.Name
HPages = S.HPageBreaks.Count + 1
VPages = S.VPageBreaks.Count + 1
ThisPages = HPages * VPages
 
' Enter info about this sheet on TOC
wSheet.Cells(TableRow, 1).Value = ThisName
wSheet.Cells(TableRow, 2).NumberFormat = "@"
If ThisPages = 1 Then
  wSheet.Cells(TableRow, 2).Value =
  PageCount + 1 &amp; " "
Else
  wSheet.Cells(TableRow, 2).Value =
  PageCount + 1 &amp; " - " &amp; PageCount + ThisPages
End If
PageCount = PageCount + ThisPages
TableRow = TableRow + 1
Next S
<strong>End Sub</strong>

That's all there is to it! Note that VBA does not allow putting the lines after an equal to sign (" = ") on a separate line, although the above code has them so (only to save formatting.)

Feel free to leave a note if you don't understand some bit of the code and I'll try to explain, though it's quite self-explanatory. The calculation of the number of pages is done through the number of page breaks inside the Print Preview.

Have fun!

Want to see the size of your folders and not just files in your Windows XP Explorer listings?

Well it's probably a simple feature that the Windows team at Microsoft forgot to include, so Mark Dormer has a solution. Just download his tiny DLL file:

It's an EXE file. All you really have to do is:

1. Copy the file to your c:\windows\system32 folder.
2. Execute the following command in Start –> Run dialogue box and you're ready to roll:
   regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\dirsize.dll
3. Now open Explorer in details view, you wont see the column yet. Right click on a heading in the right pane and select "Folder Size".

Couple of Caveats

• Calculating folder size is a turtle on very large folders with lots of subfolders. There's no indexing built into this.
• As much you and I would like, this tool doesn't do sorting of folders based on the folder size. You may want to give another utility a try, the Folder Shell Extension.

Couple of Tips

• To apply this setting for all the folder, click Tools, Folder Options. In the View tab and click Apply to all folders.
• To remove the feature, simply un–register the DLL later with the following command (ignore error messages if any) –
  regsvr32 /u %Systemroot%\System32\Dirsize.dll

Hope this helps.

Here's a handy macro to make a new worksheet inside your Excel file, then traverse through each and every sheet in the file, collecting all functions and formulas used in the whole file. All these formulas are listed on a separate worksheet in the same file.

The code is below, feel free to use it but please attribute whenever you use it, thanks –

Option Explicit
Public Sub ListFormulasInWorkbook()
Const SHEETNAME As String = "Formulas in *"
Have fun!

Const ALLFORMULAS As Integer = _
xlNumbers + xlTextValues + xlLogical + xlErrors
Const maxRows As Long = 65500
Dim formulaSht As Worksheet
Dim destRng As Range
Dim cell As Range
Dim wkSht As Worksheet
Dim formulaRng As Range
Dim shCnt As Long
Dim oldScreenUpdating As Boolean
With Application
oldScreenUpdating = .ScreenUpdating
.ScreenUpdating = False
End With
shCnt = 0
ListFormulasAddSheet formulaSht, shCnt
' Enumerate formulas on each sheet
Set destRng = formulaSht.Range("A4")
For Each wkSht In ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets
If Not wkSht.Name Like SHEETNAME Then
Application.StatusBar = wkSht.Name
destRng.Value = wkSht.Name
Set destRng = destRng.Offset(1, 0)
On Error Resume Next
Set formulaRng = wkSht.Cells.SpecialCells( _
xlCellTypeFormulas, ALLFORMULAS)
On Error GoTo 0
If formulaRng Is Nothing Then
destRng.Offset(0, 1).Value = "None"
Set destRng = destRng.Offset(1, 0)
Else
For Each cell In formulaRng
With destRng
.Offset(0, 1) = cell.Address(0, 0)
.Offset(0, 2) = "'" & cell.Formula
.Offset(0, 3) = cell.Value
End With
Set destRng = destRng.Offset(1, 0)
If destRng.row > maxRows Then
ListFormulasAddSheet formulaSht, shCnt
Set destRng = formulaSht.Range("A5")
destRng.Offset(-1, 0).Value = wkSht.Name
End If
Next cell
Set formulaRng = Nothing
End If
With destRng.Resize(1, 4).Borders(xlEdgeBottom)
.LineStyle = xlContinuous
.Weight = xlThin
.ColorIndex = 5
End With
Set destRng = destRng.Offset(1, 0)
If destRng.row > maxRows Then
ListFormulasAddSheet formulaSht, shCnt
Set destRng = formulaSht.Range("A5")
destRng.Offset(-1, 0).Value = wkSht.Name
End If
End If
Next wkSht
With Application
.StatusBar = False
.ScreenUpdating = oldScreenUpdating
End With
End Sub
Private Sub ListFormulasAddSheet( _
formulaSht As Worksheet, shtCnt As Long)
Const SHEETNAME As String = "Formulas in "
Const SHEETTITLE As String = "Formulas in $ as of "
Const DATEFORMAT As String = "dd MMM yyyy hh:mm"
Dim shtName As String
With ActiveWorkbook
' Delete existing sheet, create new
shtCnt = shtCnt + 1
shtName = Left(SHEETNAME & .Name, 28)
If shtCnt > 1 Then _
shtName = shtName & "_" & shtCnt
On Error Resume Next
Application.DisplayAlerts = False
.Worksheets(shtName).Delete
Application.DisplayAlerts = True
On Error GoTo 0
Set formulaSht = .Worksheets.Add( _
after:=Sheets(Sheets.Count))
End With
With formulaSht
' Format headers
.Name = shtName
.Columns(1).ColumnWidth = 15
.Columns(2).ColumnWidth = 8
.Columns(3).ColumnWidth = 60
.Columns(4).ColumnWidth = 40
With .Range("C:D")
.Font.Size = 9
.HorizontalAlignment = xlLeft
.EntireColumn.WrapText = True
End With
With .Range("A1")
.Value = Application.Substitute(SHEETTITLE, "$", _
ActiveWorkbook.Name) & Format(Now, DATEFORMAT)
With .Font
.Bold = True
.ColorIndex = 5
.Size = 14
End With
End With
With .Range("A3").Resize(1, 4)
.Value = Array("Sheet", "Address", "Formula", "Value")
With .Font
.ColorIndex = 13
.Bold = True
.Size = 12
End With
.HorizontalAlignment = xlCenter
With .Borders(xlEdgeBottom)
.LineStyle = xlDouble
.Weight = xlThick
.ColorIndex = 5
End With
End With
End With
End Sub

Have fun!