go ahead, mac my day

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04/20/10--10:29: Microsoft employees are the most social media-savvy in the world (chan 2090558)

I saw a tweet from @Microsoft which tells us that Microsoft tops social media use survey. The NetProspex Social Report lists the top 50 most social corporations in America (top 5: us, eBay, Amazon, Disney, and Google) and the Twitter 20 (top 5: us, Raytheon, Analog Devices, Disney, Kodak).

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that you can find me on twitter here, and there's also @officeformac too. The former is me in all my unedited glory, which means that you'll see some stuff about Office:Mac and my worklife, but you'll also see me whinging about a DJ explaining who Courtney Love is. The latter is all Office, all the time.




04/29/10--17:44: Q&A: when is the next version of Office:Mac coming out? (chan 2090558)

I keep on getting variants of this question in email:

When is the next version of Office coming out?

As we announced at Macworld Expo this year, Office:Mac 2011 is coming out at the end of 2010, in time for your holiday shopping pleasure. I don't have an exact date to share yet, look for that information to come this fall.

The team is hard at work on getting it finished, and I can't wait until we can start sharing more about what's in it. When we do start sharing more, I'll post here (of course!), and you'll also see more about it in Mac Mojo.




04/30/10--12:42: Q&A: how do I make Entourage:Mac my default mail application? (chan 2090558)

Via email, I was asked:

How do I set Entourage to be my default mail application?

There are two ways to do this:

• In Entourage 2008 or Entourage for Web Services, open up the Preferences. In General, click the "Set Entourage to be my default e-mail client" button.
• In Apple Mail, open up the Preferences, and set the default mail application there.

If you find that some applications are still launching another mail app after you've done this, it probably means that the application isn't respecting the system settings. In that case, check out the offending application's preferences to see if they have a setting for which mail client to use.




05/03/10--05:48: help improve Exchange (chan 2090558)

Paul Robichaux, one of the Exchange MVPs, has a great blog post about Exchange and the Customer Experience Improvement Program. As with many other Microsoft products, Exchange allows users to submit totally anonymous data. This data is then analysed and used to help identify areas for improvement in future versions. Paul's post details some of the data points that the Exchange team could gather. If you haven't opted in to the CEIP for Exchange, Paul's post tells you how to do that, too.

Office:Mac 2008 also has a Customer Experience Improvement Program. I wrote about it soon after the Office 2008 release over at Mac Mojo: we are watching you. If you want to opt in, you can do so in the Preferences for any Office application: go to the Feedback section and select "Yes, I want to participate".




05/06/10--07:39: airport reflections (chan 2090558)

I've been travelling a lot lately, spending plenty of time in various airports across the US. It's given me too much time to reflect on the experience of flying.

Every decision of the airlines has some kind of repercussion on those of us who get on airplanes. Most of them make the act of actually getting on the airplane that much more difficult.

Consider the cuts to meal service on flights. For cross-country flights, this means that everyone's bringing food, and often drinks too, onto the flight with them. This makes boarding the plane trickier, since you've got to juggle all your bags and whatever food-related-substance you managed to pick up from some vendor in the airport. I've long since lost count of the number of times I've watched someone fumble their dinner all over the aisle or their seat because their hands were already full with their luggage.

Bag fees, of course, mean that people are trying to get bigger and bigger bags on board the aircraft, and they're stuffing more into the bags. Boarding takes longer because there are more bags to get into the overhead bins, not to mention all of those bags that have to get gate-checked because they can't all fit into the bins.

I flew on a red-eye recently where the airline didn't provide pillows and blankets. There were plenty of people boarding the plane carrying their own travel pillows. There were even a couple of people clutching full-size pillows, which I thought was crazy during boarding but liked the idea as I tried to turn my coat into a pillow. Not being able to count on a pillow and blanket for a red-eye means that there's more stuff for me to take on board the flight, more stuff to manage in my seat, more to forget when I get off the plane.

It used to be that I would get on board an airplane with my laptop bag, which would contain my laptop, a book or two, maybe a magazine. Now I'm boarding with that laptop bag and a carry-on bag pretty much every time. I'm careful to never pack my bag such that I can't quickly lift it into the overhead bin, but it still means that there's at least a little bit of a delay before I can take my seat.

I wonder if air travel will ever return to being a better experience.




05/06/10--09:59: PowerPoint is not the right tool for every job (chan 2090558)

I've got a post up over at Mac Mojo today: PowerPoint is not the right tool for every job.

For my committed readers, I'll tell you that I had a hard time naming this post. Here are the rejected titles:

• we have met the enemy, and he is bad PowerPoint
• some problems in the world can't be expressed in PowerPoint
• if you've only got a PowerPoint hammer, everything looks like a presentation nail
• your spaghetti dinner got beaten up by a rainbow
• use the right tool for every job, and you won't become one (this suggestion courtesy of Rick Schaut, who might even actually blog again before the end of eternity)




05/10/10--07:18: Q&A: what's the best way to get help with Entourage? (chan 2090558)

In my post about how you can help improve Exchange, I got the following question:

What's the best way to get specific help to issues regarding Entourage?

There are plenty of options:

• The Entourage online help. We've put plenty of time and effort into making the Entourage help as awesome as it can be. If you can't find what you're looking for, or if you think that our help could be better, more clear, or something else, then help us help you. At the bottom of every help file, there's a one-question survey: did this help you? Click the appropriate button. There's also a comment field if you want to give us more details. We analyse those comments every month. That analysis leads to changes to the help files, or new ones getting written, or changes to the content plans for the next release.
• Call Microsoft tech support. You get two free calls to tech support with your purchase of Office 2008. We've got people dedicated to providing support for Entourage, and they're really good at it.
• Try posting your question to the Entourage product forums. There are lots of Entourage experts who hang out there and answer questions.
• There are other Entourage-specific forums like the entourage-talk mailing list. I'm subscribed to this mailing list, although I very rarely need to answer a question there because the other experts have beaten me to it.
• The Entourage help page is maintained by our ever-awesome Entourage MVPs, and has lots of awesome information in it. They also have a blog, and they're on Twitter too.
• There's this blog as well. Look through my posts that are tagged with Entourage, Exchange, or Outlook. You can leave comments, which I try to answer, although all of the above methods will get you a much faster response to your question.




05/10/10--17:53: PowerPoint is not the right tool for every job -- and that's perfectly okay (chan 2090558)

When I wrote my PowerPoint is not the right tool for every job post last week for Mac Mojo, I knew that it was only a matter of time before someone would read it and crow about it. I just wasn't sure who would be the first. The Apple Core blog at ZDNet didn't disappoint. In their bizarrely-titled PowerPoint: The Devil's tool? Maybe, get a Mac, David Morgenstern takes delight because I have "admitted that there are good presentations and bad presentations", following it with an "ouch!".

I find it especially amusing that Morgenstern would make the claim that "Mac users should take many of these rules with a large dash of salt — they are based on PowerPoint's toolset and a user base unaccustomed to manipulating high-res, quality images." As Morgenstern himself points out, many of the articles that I linked to provide "good ideas" for making a good presentation and avoiding making a bad presentation. And leaving aside that PowerPoint was originally a Mac-only app and thus has a userbase that is accoustomed to his asserted behaviour, which I would expect someone who claims to have 20 years of experience in covering the Mac industry to know, presentations are rarely about "manipulating high-res, quality images" -- and they shouldn't be, either.

Manipulation of images, preferably in ways that aren't as depressing as the recent side-by-side comparisons of the published Britney Spears photos and the untouched ones, isn't necessary or even desirable for every presentation. They're fitting in some presentations, yes, but definitely not all of them. A high-res, quality image doesn't get around the problem that was discussed in the original NY Times article: presenters need to carefully consider and polish their message, and deliver it in a manner that gets the job done right. Spending a weekend pixel-pushing a high-res, quality image in your graphic editor of choice is no better than creating that rainbow spaghetti slide if the accompanying message isn't one that is complete, accurate, concise, and understandable.

I honestly don't know what could be wrong in saying that PowerPoint is not the right tool for every job. When I share my research with my teams, I create both a PowerPoint deck for the high-level findings, and a Word document with deep details about every aspect of the study. I present the deck to the team, discuss what I learned in my research, and use the Word document to provide additional details as necessary and to allow the team to do a deep dive into something if appropriate. For one of my standard usability studies, the PowerPoint deck is usually on the order of 15 slides, and the Word document is around 30 pages. Those two outputs have different goals and different audiences. For each of them, I choose the right tool for the job. I don't try to make one tool do everything.

So yes, this employee of Microsoft is saying that PowerPoint is not the right tool for every job. Want to buy a new car? A spreadsheet that makes use of goal seek is a good tool for that job. Want to learn music theory? Surprisingly, you could also discover the circle of fifths in Excel, too. Writing your annual holiday letter? That's probably a job for the publishing layout view in Word:Mac. I could head into the ridiculous and point out that if you need to connect to the Windows computer that lives headless under your desk in your office (as mine does), PowerPoint is very much not the right tool for that job, but Remote Desktop Connection is. As someone said to me via Twitter today, "Hammers ain't the best tool for sawing, either. Doesn't say anything bad about hammers."




05/13/10--07:19: Q&A: can I send a mail in Entourage that the recipient can't forward? (chan 2090558)

I saw this post on the Entourage product forum that has a great question about Entourage:

Several corporate e-mail clients have security features that prevent Reply To All and Forwarding of e-mails if the flags are set for that message.
Does Entourage have any such capability?

This feature, where you can say "I don't want this email to be forwarded" or "I don't want the recipients of this email to be able to reply-all" is called Information Rights Management (IRM). It's not something that you can do alone on your client. It's something that the server manages.

To use IRM, you need both a client and a server that support it. Exchange does; neither POP nor IMAP does. Today, Entourage does not support IRM. Outlook:Mac does support IRM, and it's coming out later this year. If you're on Exchange 2010, you can also create and consume IRM messages via Outlook Web Access in either Safari or Firefox because Safari and Firefox are now fully-supported in Outlook Web Access 2010.




06/07/10--14:39: looking for blog feedback (chan 2090558)

Hmmm, the move to the new blog has thrown me off more than I thought. I'm working through issues with the new platform to make things here better.  As I'm working through things, what have you noticed about this new blog that you'd like me to fix? Top of my list is getting back to full posts on the main page instead of excerpts, and also getting a post's tags visible on the main page too. What else?




06/08/10--14:40: Office:Mac updates today: Office 2008 12.2.5, Office 2004 11.5.9 (chan 2090558)

Update Tuesday is here!

Office:Mac 2008 12.2.5 has some security updates, as well as an improvement to the custom dictionary.  Full details are in the 12.2.5 knowledge base article.  This is a roll-up update: if you're currently on 12.1.0 or later, you can just install this update and not go through all of the previous updates, if you haven't been keeping up with our updates.

Office:Mac 2004 11.5.9 has security updates as well; more details are in the 11.5.9 knowledge base article.  Make sure that you've installed 11.5.8 before installing 11.5.9.

While we were on an update frenzy, we also updated the standalone Open XML File Format Converter with the same security updates; details are in its knowledge base article.   

To update our applications, you can simply go to Help -> Check for Updates from any of the Office applications.  You can also download directly from our downloads page if you prefer.




06/10/10--12:57: Q&A: Should I get Office:Mac now or later? (chan 2090558)

I noticed this question on the Office:Mac forum:

My daughter is headed to college this fall. I just got her a Mac because the college she is going to is a Mac campus...that is all they use. I would like to get her the Office 2011 for the Mac. I understand that the release date might be in 12/10 but it also might be later. Are we at a place where MS is on schedule with that or is it later? I would hate to get Office 08 if in 6 months, Office 11 comes out. Is their an upgrade policy regarding that or am I just buying two versions? I am sure others has this question as I had read that on here but didn't see any specific responses from the Mac Microsoft team. Thanks for your time.

We're still on track to release Office:Mac 2011 later this year.  I don't have a specific date to share yet, but I will the second I can.  We don't yet have an upgrade policy.  I'll share that when I can as well.  

Before buying Office:Mac at a retail store like the Apple Store, Best Buy, or Amazon.com, any college student should check with their institution.  Many colleges and universities offer Microsoft products, including Office:Mac, at a deeply discounted price.  (Likewise, if you're an employee of a large company, check around: you might find that your company takes part in Microsoft's Home Use Program, which also gives you a deeply discounted price for Microsoft applications.)  The student bookstore should know, and a departmental secretary will know too.  (In fact, make good friends with your departmental secretary: they know everything.)  

If your college doesn't offer such a deeply discounted rate, and if you don't have a need to buy Office at this split instant, you might want to wait to see if any good back-to-school deals come about.  I don't know what kinds of plans the various retail outlets have, but I've often seen good back-to-school deals in previous years.  Watch the ads in your Sunday newspaper.  I'm sure that good deals will also be noted by the various Mac news websites, too.




06/10/10--16:44: Outlook:Mac usability study in Mountain View, California (chan 2090558)

Are you in the San Francisco Bay Area, available during the week of June 21, and want to help us determine the future of Outlook:Mac?  My team is conducting a usability study for Outlook:Mac.  I need people who meet the following criteria:

1. You use a Mac at work, and your Mac is your primary work computer.
2. You use Tiger (10.4.x) or later.
3. At work, you connect to an Exchange Server with your Mac.
4. You use mail and the calendar several times per week on Exchange.
5. You are in the San Francisco Bay Area, and are willing to come to my lab in Mountain View.
6. You are available for ~2 hours during the week of June 21.

If you meet all of these criteria, please email uccoord@microsoft.com with "Mac Office" in the subject line.  

In a usability study, you will come to my office in Mountain View, California.  My team will show you some ideas for what we might do in a future version of Outlook, and we'll ask you to do some specific tasks.  You don't need to bring your Mac; we'll provide everything you need for our study.  Just bring yourself, and be prepared to tell us what you think about what we're showing you.

If you don't meet all of these criteria, then watch here for future announcements of usability studies.  

If you want to see a cross-section of usability studies that are conducted by Microsoft, you can follow Microsoft User Research on Facebook.  They posted this study on Facebook earlier this week: Do you use a Mac at work? Help improve Office for Mac in a research study.




06/14/10--07:54: Q&A: What do you think about Office:Mac 2011 being 32-bit? (chan 2090558)

Via email, I was asked:

What are your thoughts about Office 2011 being 32 bit instead of 64 bit?

As we announced last week during WWDC, we're drinking the Cocoa and moving our world in that direction.  Moving to Cocoa is a huge undertaking.  Outlook:Mac is Cocoa, and new features in the rest of the applications are also being built in Cocoa.  Since we're not going to be all-Cocoa in Office:Mac 2011, that means that we're going to be in a 32-bit world. 

From a user experience perspective, the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit isn't terribly meaningful.  I can't imagine what one could do to a Word document that would benefit from running in 64-bit mode instead of 32-bit mode.  That said, there are cases where 64-bit is meaningful.  For example, if you had an extremely large Excel spreadsheet with millions of cells and lots of complex calculations, there can be a benefit to 64-bit.  You could also get there with a massive PowerPoint presentation that mostly consists of high-resolution images, but it would have to be on the order of thousands of those images.  Moving to 64-bit is part of our future plans, and it's why we're beginning the long transition from Carbon to Cocoa.  We've got around 30 million lines of code across the suite, so that transition is anything but trivial.

From a performance perspective, while there are performance improvements that come with 64-bit, there's still improvements to be wrung out of our 32-bit suite.  With each update to Office 2008, I've seen reports from users that it launches and runs faster.  In Office 2011, we've continued that performance work.  I can't talk a lot about it just yet, so for now I'll just say that there are some absolutely awesome improvements that we're putting in our users' hands for Office 2011.  

In my opinion, and I say this as someone who has a technical background but hasn't gotten down into the deepest innards of our code, one of the main benefits of moving to 64-bit is about future-proofing. 32-bit is going the way of the dodo, the Newton, and Carbon itself.  The future is 64-bit.  Getting there is a big technical undertaking, and it's something that we've started working on already.  For most people, they'll never notice the difference between 64-bit and 32-bit.

 




06/24/10--09:58: Office:Mac 2011 preview on CNet (chan 2090558)

The folks over at CNet have a video giving you a quick preview of Office:Mac 2011.  Check it out!




06/25/10--07:07: 20 years of Rick! (chan 2090558)

Today is an auspicious day, for it is Rick Schaut's 20th anniversary with Microsoft.  He's been working on Word:Mac the whole time (well, we might occasionally let him look at some code that's shared across Office:Mac).  

Rick, you're one of my favourite people here in MacBU, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate everything that you've done to help me out in my comparably-short time here.  Congratulations on 20 years!  




08/02/10--14:54: Office:Mac 2011 will hit store shelves in October (chan 2090558)

It's been a hugely busy few weeks for me, but I have to pop in to share a couple of things about Office:Mac 2011.  It will be available in late October, which is right in line with our earlier statements that we'd be out in time for your holiday shopping pleasure this year.  For more details about our versions and pricing, check out our blog post on Mac Mojo.

We've created a video to share some more details about what you'll see in Office:Mac.  Starring in the video are members of my team!  It's pretty cool to see people with whom I work every day talking about our apps.  We'll be sharing more details about Office:Mac 2011 in the upcoming weeks, but this is a nice little taste ...




08/03/10--17:48: what's on your Office:Mac to-do list? (chan 2090558)

For those of you who aren't following Mac Mojo, the MacBU team blog, or following us on twitter @officemac, you've been missing out on a chance to win a customised colour Macbook and a copy of Office:Mac 2011 when it's released[1].  We're asking a series of questions in our blog about your usage of Office:Mac.  Respond to us on twitter, or post a comment to one of the relevant threads in Mac Mojo, and you're entered into the contest (and make sure you read the rules for the contest while you're there, too!).  The latest question is this:

This week we want to hear how Office for Mac helps you regularly stay on task. From the frequent requests that land in your email inbox, to the ongoing projects that you are working to wrap up – Office for Mac helps us stay productive. So for this contest question, we want to know: “What’s on your current Office for Mac to-do list?” Let us know how you are using Office for Mac to get things done!

I'm not eligible to enter the contest, but I'll answer anyway.  For me, keeping on top of things is almost exclusively managed through Outlook:Mac.

1. I have a big address book (currently 818 entries in it).  All 818 entries in my address book have a category assigned to them.  My categories are mostly based around the applications that are here in MacBU, so there are categories for Outlook and PowerPoint, as well as for my User Experience team.  I also have a few categories for business contacts and personal ones, plus things like travel.  In all, I've got 14 categories right now.
2. Since all of my contacts have a category assigned to them, when I get an email from one of them, their mail is automatically assigned that category.  This allows me to glance at my inbox and see what's going on.  If I see a lot of red in there, that means that I've got a lot of PowerPoint mail.  If it's all purple, then that's my UX team.  More than 90% the mail in my inbox has a category; if it doesn't, then I look at it and decide whether I need to add it to my address book.
3. Likewise, every event on my calendar is categorised, which means that I know at-a-glance what I'm spending most of my time on this week.  
4. I have several recurring tasks to remind me to do things that I'd probably forget otherwise.  For example, I have a task named "install dogfood" which fires a reminder at 9am to remind me to download the latest version of Office:Mac and install it.  On Friday afternoon, I have another recurring task called "close blinds" to remind me to close the blinds on my window in my office, which helps to reduce Microsoft's use of air conditioning on the weekends.  
5. The new conversation feature in Outlook, which we announced last week, has been a boon to my productivity.  If there's a lot of related mail in my inbox, I can see more of the mail that's in my inbox without scrolling.  An unexpected side effect is that if there's a lot of stuff in my inbox that I don't really need, deleting it is a lot faster.
6. I'm one of those Inbox Zero people.  It's my goal at the end of every day to have nothing left in my inbox.  I manage this through a mix of rules so that only things that are addressed directly to me end up in my inbox (everything else gets routed to other folders), which means that my mail is pre-triaged for me.  Then I ruthlessly handle the contents of my inbox.  If I can respond immediately, I do.  If I can't, then I figure out what is needed before I can respond, and I do it.  If there's a task that I need to do as a result of that mail, then I move it to my task list and give it a deadline.

Make sure that you share your answers at Mac Mojo -- sharing your answer here doesn't enter you into the contest!  I don't mind if you comment here too, but if you want the Macbook and Office:Mac 2011, you've got to post in Mac Mojo or respond to @officeformac on Twitter.  Now go forth and share your productivity secrets!

(Speaking of twitter, you can follow me here, but be warned that I don't just talk about Office:Mac stuff!)

 

---

[1] Random trivia: that picture of the Macbook was taken in the little nook that I often use as my office when I'm in Redmond.  In fact, here's a picture I took of that nook when I was using it on an earlier trip to the mothership this year.




08/10/10--16:35: Office:Mac 2008 (12.2.6) and Office:Mac 2004 (11.6.0) updates available now (chan 2090558)

Update Tuesday is here!  

The latest and greatest version of Office:Mac 2008 is 12.2.6.  It's got security, performance, and stability enhancements across the board.  If you're using Entourage for Web Services, the updater for Office:Mac 2008 will also update you to 13.0.6.  The Knowledge Base article for the update has all of the details.  Office:Mac 2004 is now version 11.6.0, and it's got security improvements.  It's got its own Knowledge Base article, too.  Both of these updates are roll-up updates, and include all of the previous updates.  Since we had revved our update engines we also updated the Open XML File Format Converter to version 1.1.6, with security enhancements.  Its Knowledge Base article is here.

All updates are available on the Mactopia download page.  You can also go to the Help menu of any Office application and select "Check for Updates".  




08/13/10--13:00: relaxed, funny, and quirky (chan 2090558)

Summer is always intern season at Microsoft.  This year, all nine women in the Brown University CS programme interned at Microsoft.  In MacBU, we get lots of interns too, and we got one of those Brown ladies this year.  Here's what our Brown intern, Nell Elliott, had to say about her experiences here:

Elliott interviewed with Google and Apple for internships as well, but chose to intern at Microsoft for one major reason — she was able to meet the people she'd be working with in advance. Even if she had met her future coworkers at Apple and Google, she says it would be difficult to think she could enjoy them more than the team she ended up with at Microsoft, the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU).

"I worked on real stuff," Elliott says. "My team treated me like an adult. They took me seriously. It's more like you just started working here than being an intern." She adds her team at Microsoft is relaxed, funny, and quirky, but also clearly dedicated to their work.

Yeah, "quirky" is probably a good word to describe us ... 




08/18/10--13:28: another taste of Office:Mac 2011 (chan 2090558)

Today, my team has released another video about Office:Mac 2011.  This time, it stars one of my absolute favourite people: Kurt Schmucker, our evangelist.  Kurt's one of the smartest and nicest guys you could ever hope to meet.  So watch the video:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

In the video, Kurt shows off sparklines and pivot table improvements in Excel, and our new image editing (the background removal is especially useful!).   

There's lots more details about the suite to come in the following weeks as we lead up to our late October launch.  My favourites haven't yet been announced, so there's still a lot of awesomeness forthcoming ... 




08/31/10--14:58: Office:Mac usability study participants needed for studies beginning in September (chan 2090558)

Office:Mac 2011 is hitting store shelves in October.  In conjunction with our release, my user experience team will conduct multiple research studies about the new applications to track their usage and usability over time.  Since I have several big studies coming up, I need a lot of new participants!

For all of my upcoming studies, I need a bunch of participants who are meet all of the following criteria:

• are located in the San Francisco Bay Area or the Puget Sound region
• have not already used Office:Mac 2011 (sorry, beta folks!)
• use Office:Mac 2008 at work (extra special bonus points for Exchange usage)

If you fit all of these criteria, please email me with the following information:

• your name
• your phone number
• which Office applications you use at work
• how frequently you use those applications at work (daily, a few times a week, weekly, a few times a month, etc) 
• whether you use Exchange

If you don't meet all of these criteria, don't despair!  We conduct studies elsewhere.  If you don't meet these criteria, please don't mail me, so that I can focus on getting the participants right now.  Instead, you can sign up to participate in usability studies here. 




09/08/10--15:42: more details about Office:Mac 2011 (chan 2090558)

Today, my team released a video showing off more of the upcoming Office:Mac 2011.  Watch it to learn more about the Scheduling Assistant in Outlook (one of my favourite features, not only because I worked on it!), broadcast slideshow in PowerPoint (another personal fave), and integration with the Office Web applications.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

For more information about these features, check out our blog post on Mac Mojo!




09/10/10--15:06: RTM, baby!!!!!!! (chan 2090558)

I'm not often given over to exclamation points, but today is Really Truly Massively awesome because Office:Mac 2011 has hit RTM.  

RTM stands for Release To Manufacturing.  Office:Mac 2011 (v14.0.0) is done, and now it's in the hands of our manufacturing partners.  They'll start cranking it out, and it'll be on store shelves at the end of October.

I am truly proud of the work that we have done on Office:Mac, and I can't wait until it's in your hands for you to try out.  

But now, to cap off this Really Truly Massively awesome day, I'm going to go have some celebratory margaritas with the rest of my team.  Happy RTM!




09/28/10--10:13: moving to new digs, and open Q&A thread (chan 2090558)

I've been meaning to do this for ages, but I've finally moved my blogging home from here on the MSDN blogs to my own domain.  This gives me greater flexibility in blogging, not to mention full control over my blogging tools (a pain that I've been feeling pretty sharply here on MSDN lately, which you can observe through the drop-off in blog posts here).  I'm using Bluehost for my provider, and I'm running WordPress.  I'm sorry to say that I still need to find a new theme, and I'm sure that I should spend some more time playing around with widgets and plug-ins, but the basic framework is there.

Anyway: I've kept my blog name, but my new domain is the blindingly-obvious nadynerichmond.com.  For those of you who want to update your RSS reader, the feed for blog posts is here, and the feed for comments is here.

Earlier this morning, I posted about Office:Mac 2011's official release date and linked to the earliest reviews.  Now that reviews are appearing, I can also (finally!) start answering questions about Office:Mac 2011, and you can ask them in the comments thread on my new blog.  Think of that open Q&A thread as the housewarming for my new blog.  Now I'm going to close comments on this blog, and encourage you to join me over at my new home.