2007

Ribbon Customizer for Office 2007 customizes the look and the arrangement of Microsoft Office 2007's toolbar, known as the "ribbon."

Microsoft changed the ribbon's look for Office 2007. With Ribbon Customizer for Office 2007, you can change it back to the way it looked in Office 2003. You can also move, add, and rearrange items on the ribbon, a useful feature for users who like to tinker with their software. We like the idea behind this Office add-on, but we found it difficult to use. We have Office 2007 on our computer, but we didn't … Read more

Microsoft Word 2007's document types, interface, and some features--very nearly every aspect of this word processor--have changed. With this update, Microsoft Word 2007 becomes a more image-conscious application. New picture-editing tools help you deck out documents and play with fancy fonts. Bloggers and researchers may also benefit. It's easier to get a handle on document security, but those who only need basic typing features may not want to relearn the interface or deal with the new file formats.

Our installation of various Office suites on Windows XP computers took between 10 and 20 minutes, which was quicker than … Read more

iPhone and iPhone 3G users hit a roadblock last week trying to login to Exchange 2007 servers after upgrading to iPhone OS 3.1.

Because the problems began with the latest update, it may seem reasonable to assume that the update is to blame, but it's not. In fact, everything is working exactly how it's supposed to be, according to Apple.

"iPhone OS 3.1 is working properly with Exchange Server 2007," Apple representative Natalie Harrison told CNET News. "We added device encryption information to the data that can be managed by IT administrators using … Read more

At or near the top of the list of aggravations for new PC owners is the trial version of a program that came preinstalled on the system refusing to uninstall once the trial period expires. The irritation really peaks when the product in question is from Microsoft.

Before I could install a bought-and-paid-for copy of Outlook 2007 on my laptop, I had to uninstall the trial version of Office Enterprise 2007 that was preinstalled on the machine's hard drive when I bought it several months ago. Very early in the uninstall process, an alert popped up reporting Error 1310 and instructing me to verify that I had access to a certain directory.

I decided to try the uninstall again using the free Revo Uninstaller utility. In addition to cleaning up the Registry entries, files, folders, and other refuse that the program's own uninstaller misses, Revo Uninstaller finds and deletes junk files on your PC and performs other cleanup duties.… Read more

RIGGINS, Idaho--For many years, I've been taking road trips around the United States. Many have been in the West, and I've covered a whole lot of ground.

In 2006, I did my first CNET Road Trip, a two-week-plus journey around the Pacific Northwest writing stories and posting photo galleries of the most interesting things I found along the way. Afterward, the project became an annual thing, and I'm now well into Road Trip 2009.

And I've finally completed a personal mission I set long ago.

In 2005, just before I joined the CNET News staff, I … Read more

If you find yourself spending way too much time trying to locate frequently-used Microsoft Office commands through its newly designed interface, this program is for you. It reintroduces the toolbars found in previous versions of Office.

During the installation process for Classic Menu for Office 2007, you have the option of selecting which of the MS Office programs you want to apply its changes to. The program doesn't dramatically change the interface. For MS Word and Excel, it simply added an extra Menu tab that contained all of the old toolbars from previous versions. If you want to remove … Read more

If you followed the steps in my post from August on merging your Outlook and Gmail contacts, you may have ended up with duplicates in your contact lists. Microsoft's advice for deleting duplicate contacts is to sort them by the date modified, Ctrl-select the ones you want to remove, and press delete.

The problem is, the duplicate entries probably aren't identical, so you're almost certain to delete some data along with the dupe. What you need is a way to merge the information in the duplicate contacts. There's no such feature in Outlook, but if you're willing to spend $30, you can make short work of your extraneous Outlook entries by running 4Team's Duplicate Killer for Outlook.

The program deletes or merges duplicate e-mail messages, calendar entries, tasks, and notes in addition to contacts. I tested the program with Outlook 2007 but, according to the vendor, it works with Outlook 2000, XP, and 2003 as well. The new version, 3, is said to work with "Microsoft Exchange type folders including public folders," according to the vendor's Web site, but I ran it on a standalone Outlook installation.

… Read more

Microsoft introduced the second beta of its Geneva identity-management server platform on Monday, with new features including compatibility with SharePoint 2007 and Microsoft Federation Gateway.

The announcement was made at Microsoft's TechEd conference, which is being held in Los Angeles this week. The first beta was announced in October 2008, with a final release scheduled for the second half of 2009.

Geneva is designed to be an open platform for providing user access to applications and systems, whether they are located on an organization's own premises or on remote infrastructure. It is based on standards such as WS-Federation, … Read more

Microsoft has come under fire for spreadsheet interoperability issues in its recent release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2, but the company says it is an issue inherent in OpenDocument Format 1.1.

The software giant released last week the second service pack for Office 2007, which provides support for documents saved in the ODF 1.1 format.

However, Rob Weir, chief ODF architect at IBM, posted a report on his blog saying SP2 had problems reading some ODF spreadsheets saved by OpenOffice.org and lost data by "silently stripping out formulas" from cells. The resulting spreadsheet displays &… Read more