CHRISdotTODD

Perhaps it happened with prior versions of Word and Excel, but I definitely noticed for the first time switching to Office 2007. As a laptop user, I don't always work while connected to my office network, or it may just be that I'm connected via a much slower VPN connection. Regardless, every time I start Word and Excel, they ping the Default Printer, which happens to be on the office network. Due to this, whenever I'm using Word or Excel outside the office the applications hang for several minutes. Apparently so the onscreen display will match the Default Printer specifics, such as margins, Word and Excel will perform this action when started. When over 95% of my documents are never printed by me, and the great possibility that when printed by someone else, they won't have the same printer, I fail to see why Microsoft has chosen this path. From the research I've done, the workarounds are limited. For the Word/Excel VBA Power Users, you can write some code and have

I may be a little late to the party, but I finally upgraded to Office 2007 a few months back. While I like the new styles and themes, and I can still use the keyboard shortcuts I've learned, I'm still struggling with find other features within the Ribbons. Top of my list has been switching windows (view another open file) within Excel. In prior versions of Excel, I could go to the Windows menu and select another file. With Office 2007, you have to first select the View ribbon and then click Switch Windows, where you can select a different open file. As with many of the changes, I had to hunt for a while to find the Switch Windows option. In the mean time I did learn a new keyboard shortcut for switching windows. Use Ctrl-F6 or Ctrl-Shift-F6 to go in reverse order. As with the View >> Switch Windows menu, this also works in Word and PowerPoint as well as Excel.

Unlike XP, Vista does not provide the same privileges by default, and therefore it can be difficult to repair your PST file. The trick is to run the scan and repair program with Admin privileges. Here are the steps: Close Outlook -- likely it's already closed, because if the PST file is corrupt, Outlook wont run. Find the Command Prompt, right-click, and run as Administrator. At the command prompt, enter "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\SCANPST.EXE", including the quotes. If you have a different version of Outlook, you may still have a repair program -- find it and replace with the string I have here. When prompted to Repair, select Repair. Enter 'Exit" at the command prompt to close the Command Prompt window, and run Outlook again. That should do the trick. Some folks may not have an Admin password for Vista. If that's the case, check out these instructions for further help.

Sometime you need to manage music on your iPod that iTunes doesn't allow. I tried iDump, and it didn't recognize my music, so I tried SharePod . While iDump has a 30 day trial before purchase, SharePod is completely free -- donations accepted. SharePod installed quicker, and was very simple to use.

I noticed in my video viewing that when I set the view mode to full screen, the message "Press Esc to Exit Full Screen" is never going away. I tried searching Google, and while many people have asked the same question, there was no clear answer. Through some experimentation, I learned that in locking down my Flash Player (see New "Cookies" and your Privacy ), I introduced this new issue. Apparently the Flash Player wants to store information as third-party content in order for the message to go away. You need to go to the Global Storage Settings panel and check "Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer." Interestingly, you can keep the storage setting on "None", and it will still work. (Remember, the Flash setting for your installation is reached by going to a website, with each tab having its own URL. There is no application you can open locally to make configuration changes. Learn more here .) This seems like a real mista

I'm sure you've received an email from time to time that you need to save in Word or publish online, and there were carriage returns every line as if it was entered using a typewriter (you remember those). It can be very time consuming to manually delete each Carriage Return on every line. But thanks to a Word Macro, the job is easier. Note that once they are all removed, you still need to re-enter the appropriate paragraph marks. Create a new Macro and use code: Sub NameOfMacro() For Each Xpara In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs Xpara.Range.Select Selection.Characters(Selection.Characters.Count).Delete Next End Sub After saving, run the macro.

2009 was a very difficult year for our economy, and many friends and colleagues lost their jobs and/or their homes. While I can't very well predict how our economy will do in 2010, I will try to out due my 1 for 3 predictions of 2009 with my 2010 predictions. In no particular order, here are my 5 top tech predictions for 2010. With the number of players increasing in the eBook Reader arena, Amazon will adopt the ePub format as a supported file format. The next version of the iPhone , announced this spring, will be available on Verizon . Similar to the data loss that occurred for Sidekick users in 2009, a significant data loss or corruption will happen on a Cloud platform . Though hopefully like with the Sidekick data being recovered, even if the data is recovered, it will send a strong message to CIOs and others considering moves to the Cloud. Depending on the reports you read, the browser war statistics can vary widely. Regardless, Internet Explorer continues to dominate, despi

I made 3 rather tame (or lame) tech predictions for 2009 -- none with any real relevance. Here's a recap of how I did. Apple will become less popular. Miss. Though a very subjective opinion, here's what happened. Throughout much of 2009 there was a lot of buzz about an Apple Tablet that never materialized, but it kept Apple in the news. Early in the year there was also a lot of buzz about Steve Jobs' health and further whether he would return to Apple or not. Upon his return, as announced, the buzz has died down. Finally, Apple received some spill over from the new Verizon ads that really trashed the AT&T 3G network. To counter some of the Apple buzz, we started seeing several Android phones (finally) ship late in the year. Overall, I don't think the buzz, and therefore popularity, died down as much as expected. On the other hand, clearly Apple was no where near as popular as they had been the two prior years with the iPhone. TWiT will lose its spot as the top te

When you first apply an Auto-Filter in Excel, the Status Bar indicates the number of records in the filter (e.g. 517 of 8614). In many cases when you start performing other manipulations, the number disappears. Using a simple formula, you can calculate the filtered total. Assume you want to count all rows that are not empty -- the CountA function -- and assume you want to count the rows in column A. The formula would be SUBTOTAL(103,A:A)-1 . The syntax is as follows: subtotal(function_number, reference) , where function_number is 1 of many possible options as illustrated below. I included the "-1" to remove the count for the column heading row. function_num (includes hidden values) function_num (ignores hidden values) function 1 101 AVERAGE 2 102 COUNT 3 103 COUNTA 4 104 MAX 5 105 MIN 6 106 PRODUCT 7 107 STDEV 8 108 STDEVP 9 109 SUM 10 110 VAR 11 111 VARP Note: I used Excel 2003 for this example.

With increasingly more complex web pages, I found myself running into a limit in the number of IIS connections allowed for the constrained web server on Windows XP. By default Microsoft has limited the connections to 10. Even when I changed the time to release connections down to 5 minutes, I was still running into problems. With a little Google searching, I found a solution ( here , here , and here ). Apparently the hard-coded limitation Microsoft has set is 40 connections. The trick is determining how to raise the level from 10 to 40. There's a script, adsutil, that can do this for you. Go to the Command Prompt and navigate to C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts. Enter "adsutil set w3svc/MaxConnections 40". If you get an error message, "This script does not work with WScript," click OK and click Yes to make Cscript as the default script for VBscript. When this completes, go back to the Command Prompt and press F3 (repeats last command) and Enter. If you were successful, t