This fantastic ad for Microsoft Office for Mac is called Pretending to Work, and it was animated entirely within Microsoft Office.
Now we’ve seen movies made inside of Excel before, but the level of detail that this ad goes into is impressive, and with PowerPoint stop motions, folder art, image slide shows, Excel movies and more, it’s a tour de force with what you can accomplish using Microsoft Office for Mac and a lot of time.
Just make sure to not-getting-caught-feng-shui your desk if you’re going to watch this at work…
Apparently the web world is fed up with PDFs, because alternatives are popping up left and right.
The latest entry into this world is iPaper, which aims to entirely replace the PDF.
The basic idea is that, like a YouTube video, iPaper documents can be embedded into any existing web page through a Flash widget, and can display PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and other document formats without the need for separate readers.
Features include viewing documents without downloading any additional software, monetizing documents with integrated advertisements, social aspects with a built in share functionality, enhanced security, and easy integration.
Edit: Box.net, a free online storage and file sharing site, is one of the first sites to embrace the iPaper technology. You can now view any of your PDF, Word, Excel, or Power Point documents that you have stored on Box.net using iPaper.
Google gave a big FU to Microsoft this week with the addition to their Presentations app to the Google Docs family.
Designed to create presentations (similar to PowerPoint), it’s a free utility that completes the Office alternative.
Though it doesn’t have the features of the Microsoft offering, the price is hard to beat, and when Google gets involved, you know it’s going to be big.
There are a few minor things on my computer (PowerBook G4) that have been bothering me for a while now, so I finally decided to sit down and figure out what needed to be done to fix them. If you share my annoyances, here’s what to do:
First, when you install Adobe Acrobat Professional, it puts a PDF Toolbar in Excel, PowerPoint and Word that automatically pops up when you open each program.
I never use either button on the toolbar, and when I want to make a PDF I just use the “Save As” option, so I wanted to get rid of the toolbar entirely. Unfortunately, you can’t just deselect the toolbar in the View/Toolbars menu, since it just comes back the next time you start the program, so you need to:
Go to: /Applications/Microsoft Office/Office/Startup/
Open the Excel folder
Trash PDFMaker.xla
Open the PowerPoint folder
Trash PDFMaker.xla
Open the Word folder
Trash PDFMaker.xla
That should solve the recurring toolbar problem once and for all.
Second, when you install Adobe Creative Suite, it a bunch of .exe droplets that can be used to quickly edit photos and documents with common changes. Each of these .exe droplets shows up in my “Open With” menu when I go to open a photo (I use a variety of photo editing programs to edit photos for DYH, so I do this a log). Again, I never use any of the droplets, and they just make it harder to find the program that I really want, so I decided to get rid of the droplets entirely. Unfortunately, you can’t edit what shows up in the “Open With” menu (Dear Apple, I would love this function), so you need to:
Quit all running applications
Use Finder’s search funcion to find all .exe programs
Delete the Adobe ones that you don’t use
Go to /Macintosh HD/Library/Caches/
Trash com.apple.LaunchServices-0140.csstore
Trash com.apple.LaunchServices-014xxx.csstore (xxx is your uid number)
Restart your computer
Empty the Trash
For some reason, Adobe doesn’t play nicely with user customizable options. It would be nice to just disable certain options, but if you can’t do it the easy way, there’s usually a hard way that gets the job done. Just make sure to create backup copys of each file if you’re worried about bricking your computer.
Sometimes it’s the little things that can make all the difference.
