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- ZDNet Author Biography
Marc Orchant has been building, testing, and sometimes breaking hardware and software for 25 years. A recovering graphic designer, Marc is currently the Storyteller at VanDyke Software, a co-host of On The Run With Tablet PCs, a weekly podcast, and a self-admitted "productivity maven, gadget freak and software addict"....- more about Marc Orchant »
ZDNet Resources
- iWork '08 - no Office killer 'cause it's not supposed to be
- I picked up a copy of iWork '08, the new update to Apple's productivity suite, the other day and have been noodling around in it since I installed it on my MacBook and my wife's iMac. It's a worthy upgrade for two principal reasons in my opinion: the significant improvements...
- Tags: Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Office, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Apple iWork, Marc Orchant
- Blog posts 2007-08-17
- Microsoft delays Office 2008 for Mac until... 2008
- Jim Dalrymple, reporting at MacWorld announced the following news from Microsoft's Mac Business Unit:Microsoft will delay the release of Office 2008 for Mac until mid-January 2008, representatives of the company’s Macintosh Business Unit announced Thursday.The long-awaited Intel-native Office, featuring programs such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage, was originally scheduled...
- Tags: Software, Microsoft Office, Microsoft, Mac
- Blog posts 2007-08-02
- Fake Microsoft security bulletin in the wild
- If you or someone you know receives an e-mail about a zero-day exploit affecting Microsoft Outlook do not, under any circumstances, click on the links embedded in the message. It's a phishing scam folks. The Security Bulletin (MS07-0065) it points to doesn't exist. And just because it can never be...
- Tags: Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft
- Blog posts 2007-06-28
- Microsoft and Linspire play nice
- Wow. Talk about the lion laying down with the lamb! In a joint announcement today, Microsoft and Linspire, a Linux distribution popular with consumers and SOHO, said they will collaborate ina number of areas to promote interoperability and a better user experience for Linspire's customers. While maybe not the biggest...
- Tags: Software, OpenOffice, Microsoft, Linux
- Blog posts 2007-06-14
- Quantifying the "Microsoft Tax"
- Eighty dollars. That's the number at least for Vista Home Premium according to this comparison from Coding Horror of the price delta between identical Dell systems configured with Vista and Ubuntu Linux. The hardware is essentially identical. We can infer that Dell's price for a Windows Vista Home Premium license...
- Tags: Hardware, Software, Vista, Windows
- Blog posts 2007-05-25
- Does it make any sense to "hate" Microsoft?
- Marc Wagner at the ZDNet Education IT blog asks a question that has come up here and elsewhere many times. "Why do so many people hate Microsoft?" Marc begins his post exploring some of the antipathy that exists between the pro-Microsoft and pro-*NIX crowds with relative dispassion and points to...
- Tags: Windows, Mac, Blogs
- Blog posts 2007-05-21
- TechNET guide to DST fixes for Windows
- Microsoft TechNET has compiled a pretty comprehensive guide to the various patches and updates related to this weekends Daylight Saving Time DST switch. Reproduced here for your convenience, but follow the link to the original and complete listing. What time will your organizations computers think it is on Sunday? Or,...
- Tags: Operating systems, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Servers, Microsoft TechNet, KB932590, Microsoft Windows, Daylight Saving Time, Microsoft Corp.
- Blog posts 2007-03-09
- Microsoft offers a royalty-free license to the new Office UI
- Jensen Harris drops a bombshell on his blog today. With certain understandable restrictions, Microsoft will issue a royalty-free perpetual license to any developer who wishes to use the new Ribbon UI in a product. You must agree to Microsoft license agreement (I have not had time to read the entire...
- Tags: Ribbon UI, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Corp.
- Blog posts 2006-11-21
- Weighing in on the browser as the new OS
- Some memes in the online conversation are like songs that get played often on the radio. Remember the radio? That medium we used to listen to before we all became pod people? If you like the song, that's a good thing. If you're sick of hearing the same tune, not...
- Tags: Web browser
- Blog posts 2006-10-24
- Hugo Ortega named Microsoft MVP for Tablet PCs
- Hugo Ortega, a passionate and very active member of the Tablet PC community from down under, has just been named a Microsoft MVP. This is a terrific choice - Hugo has been blogging and pod- and vid-casting about his Tablet PC experiences nonstop and is a regular read in my...
- Tags: Hugo, Hugo Ortega, tablet, tablet PC
- Blog posts 2006-10-02
- Mary Jo Foley is blogging at ZDNet!
- Just catching up on feeds before calling it a day and I learn that Mary Jo Foley - day in and day out one of the Microsoft commentators and analysts I most enjoy reading - has left Microsoft Watch and joined the blogroll here at ZDNet. Her new blog, All...
- Tags: Microsoft Corp., Mary Jo Foley
- Blog posts 2006-09-20
- Office 2007 Beta 2 TR - first impressions
- I downloaded and installed the Technical Refresh of Office 2007 Beta 2 on Thursday and, after a couple of days of working with the update especially Outlook and Word, my experience has been very positive. The speed and stability of all of the core apps is significantly improved and a...
- Tags: Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook
- Blog posts 2006-09-17
- Microsoft unveils the Quick Customize menu in Office 2007
- Jensen Harris, Microsoft's prominent UI blogger, announced a new enhancement to the Quick Access Toolbar QAT in Office 2007 called the Quick Customize menu. This new drop-down menu contains one-click links to add the most commonly-used commands in each of the ribbon-enabled Office 2007 applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and parts...
- Tags: Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office 2007, ribbon, Quick Access Toolbar
- Blog posts 2006-09-12
- Turn e-mail into action
- Microsoft recently posted an article I wrote titled "Turn e-mail into action with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007" on the 2007 Microsoft Office system community site. The article covers some of the new features in the forthcoming update to Outlook including Follow Up Flags, the To-Do Bar, Instant Search, and the...
- Tags: Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook
- Blog posts 2006-09-01
- Microsoft backs off on the ribbon In Office 2007
- Lots of people commenting on Microsoft's decision to provide an auto-hide function for the new ribbon UI in 2007 Microsoft Office system (small "s"). Here's a techmeme permalink if you simply can't get enough of this kind of stuff. I don't have much to add except to say that...
- Tags: ribbon
- Blog posts 2006-08-25
- Microsoft Live Writer is a litterbug
- If you're going to use Microsoft Live Writer, please stop littering. I must have seen at least a hundred of these test post messages littering my aggregator in the last two days. "This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually." Please. Delete this post from...
- Tags: Microsoft Live
- Blog posts 2006-08-15
- Microsoft to charge for Office 2007 beta downloads
- In what I can only imagine is a stimulus response experiment worthy of Pavlov, someone at Microsoft has decided t ocharge $1.50 for the privilege of downloading the public beta of 2007 Microsoft Office system (small "s"). In a wild flight of fancy on a Saturday morning, I can imagine...
- Tags: Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Office, beta, Softie 1
- Blog posts 2006-07-29
- Microsoft announces Student 2007
- Microsoft announced the release of Student 2007, an add-on to the Office suite designed to provide a rich set of tools to assist middle and high school students with their studies. Last year, my son Jason and I wrote an in-depth parent/student review of the Student 2006 package. Following...
- Tags: Jason, Student
- Blog posts 2006-07-07
- Microsoft backs off on WGA "phone home" - sort of
- eWEEK has just reported that the update pushed out yesterday through Automatic Updates to the problematic Windows Genuine Advantage checker turns off the "phone home" feature, at least on a daily basis. According to Ryan Naraine's report:In the pilot phase, a PC that had installed WGA Notifications checked a server-side...
- Tags: phone home, Microsoft Corp., WGA Notifications
- Blog posts 2006-06-28
- Microsoft enables Creative Commons licensing in Office
- Kudos to Microsoft for making it possible for users of their Office suite (now numbering 400 million) to easily apply a Creative Commons license to the work they author using the applications in that productivity suite. In a press release issued yesterday, Microsoft announced that a new add-in will...
- Tags: Creative Commons, Microsoft Corp.
- Blog posts 2006-06-21
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