Category: Office

Right smack in the middle of the deployment roadshow talking about deploying Windows 7. Tomorrow it is time for the fourth city (Linköping) and it will be our pleasure to announce that USMT 4.0 now finally migrates Office 2010 settings, as of a few hours ago. Download and install from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2023591 and follow the instructions for updating the USMT components if you ar eusing LiteTouch or ZeroTouch deployments.

Well, the answer is quiet simple and here are a couple of reasons:

Conversation view: Nested view of each conversation, with the ability to see both incoming and sent items in one thread without having to change to the sent folder. This is also available in Outlook Web App which is great.
Multiple Exchange accounts:  It is possible to have up to three Exchange accounts in one Outlook profile. No more creating separate profiles for multiple Exchange accounts.
Ignore conversation: Are you familiar with being spammed with a lot of unnecessary emails, like “where will we eat lunch today”, “watch this funny movie” etc etc? With ignore conversation all future replies to such a conversation is automatically directed to the Deleted items in Outlook. Sweet!
Mailtips: When about to send an email to someone who is out of office you will be notified by this instantly before sending the email. This is by default but you can also create your own mailtips rules for certain distribution groups etc.

I must also mention improvements to IMAP which is splendid! So when will Office 2010 go to RTM?

As always it is good to be prepared and plan ahead and Office 2010 is “soon” to be released so why not prepare for it now instead of later? With Office 2010 Assessment tool you can inventory one or many computers in one go and get a good view on for example which addons are in use, which applications interact with Office and potential problems when upgrading the current version to Office 2010. The tool can be found at Microsoft Download Center.

Office 2010 beta was just about a couple of hours ago released to the public. Anyone can now download and try the newest Office system from Microsoft. I really like the new features in Outlook 2010 in particular, with the very much improved conversation view which is fantastic. Download and try it yourself today and note before downloading that there are two versions, one for x86 and one for x64.

Download Office Professional Plus 2010 beta

I’ve encountered an extremely interesting problem today. A user complained about Word 2007 appearing to hang when opening documents and the smallest document take around 30 seconds to open. This should be instant. First thing to try was to narrow the problem down by moving it locally and trying to open it. The problem remained the same, as did it when trying to open the file on a bunch of other clients.

As the Word documents the user was trying to open was in Word 97-2003 format I tried converting it to Word 2007 format but still the problem remained. Renaming the .docx file to .zip (yes, the new docx is just a bunch of xml files that are zipped :) ) and then opening it showed that in the directory “word/rels” there was a settings.xml file that contained references to a template refering to a retired file server. Removing this settings file and zipping the files back up and renaming it to docx and opening it worked like a charm, it opens instantly.

This made me suspect that Word was trying to locate this server but eventually timing out. After installing Network Monitor and running a trace when trying to open the document everything became clear. When opening the file it is actually trying to locate the file server referenced in the file, and it keeps trying until it times our some 30 seconds later. Searching support.microsoft.com gave a few pointers and there are a number of ways to attack this problem but they are all workarounds and half good solutions:

1. Edit the problematic files manually by doing what is described above. This is too time consuming if there are many files involved.
2. Open all documents, select all and copy and paste the information to a new document, then save it and replace the old one. Also too time consuming if there are many documents.
3. There are scripts that go through Word files and replace the bad information, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830561.
4. I found that KB970270 reference this type of problem and by installing the April 30th hotfix package combined with setting a registry value the problem is worked around. This is still not a solution but instead a work around. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970270 for more information. This workaround also applies to the problem with opening documents, verified it myself.

How many times have you created a new profile in Outlook for the sile purpose to try another Exchange account in your Outlook? Well, starting with Outlook 2010 you will be able to have up to three Exchange accounts in one profile in Outlook.

Speaking of Office 2010, having used the technical preview of Office 2010 for quite some time now I am really looking forward to the beta version as it will contain quite a few improvements over the technical preview. Hopefully it will be here soon!