One of my very first gigs when I started at PC Pro in 2007 was to interview Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe. He was an affable chap, full of engaging answers to questions he’d no doubt heard a hundred times before. The interview practically wrote itself – though for the sake of appearances I held the pen.

Safari for Windows had just been released and I asked Tristan what he thought of it. “I want Safari to have a significant market share. We want choice, we want innovation, as a company that’s what we stand for,” he told me.

I’ll be honest, at that moment Tristan was the software world’s Tom Jones and my knickers were mid-flight. Three years later and things are a little different. These days, standing for choice and innovation in the browser market is a bit like saying you stand for air and the colour blue. We have the browser ballot – Opera’s work, but Mozilla celebrated loudest – bookmark syncing across multiple machines, private browsing, hardware acceleration. The list goes on.

Standing for choice and innovation in the browser market is a bit like saying you stand for air and the colour blue

Internet Explorer is learning how to play nice with others, Safari gets prettier every iteration, Opera’s on feature steroids and Chrome goes whoosh. Do we still need Mozilla keeping everybody else honest? If not, then what is it that Firefox still offers? What is the outstanding feature? Add-ons are nice – I don’t use any because Chrome comes with all the ones I need preinstalled – but selling your browser on them, as Mozilla seems to be, is riskier than inviting Wayne Rooney to your nan’s birthday party.

Like the catalyst in a science experiment, I’m beginning to wonder if Firefox’s greatest contribution to browsers is not its continued existence, but that it existed at all. Put another way: Mozilla has won all its battles, is it time the company picked a new war?

My lord, if looks could kill I’d be stabbed, shot and dropped off a bridge by now. But bear with me, ferocious internet creature filled with malice and wrath. I’m not suggesting Mozilla give up on Firefox, or that the company’s rubbish at creating browsers. It’s not. However, given the resources available to rivals, and their renewed impetus, Mozilla’s beginning to look like a pantomime horse with a 100,000 people inside being asked to race in the Grand National.

Roaming troublemaker

I think Mozilla has a lot more to offer as a kind of roaming software troublemaker. The company has already proven itself brilliant at pulling a community together, offering it direction and spurring innovation in a lifeless market. Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?

Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?

And in the finest traditions of “did you hear what that bloke just said about your mum” I’d like to suggest that it crash Microsoft’s cushy Office party. As it stands, Office 2010 and Office 2007 are brilliant, and all the rest are rubbish. I’m sure the community behind OpenOffice.org work very hard, but pretending the last seven years never happened is no way to make an office suite. Similarly, and I’m looking at you Google, pretending hard disks don’t exist isn’t exactly healthy, either.

In fact I’d rather carve words into my own flesh than ever use either again – a point rammed home every time to use Ubuntu for an extended period. (Just imagine how much more attractive Ubuntu 10.10 would be with a decent office suite pre-installed.)

This is a market that desperately needs somebody to be brave. Look at Scrivener on the Mac, an utterly brilliant piece of software chock full of ideas that deserve a bigger audience. I’ve written before about the implementation of tabbed documents in a word processor, and that’s only the beginning. There’s so many things that could be better.

I can feel the rope being slipped around my neck, but before you kick away the stool, give yourself over to wistfulness for just a moment. Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?

The press release said that a survey of 600 sales, marketing and IT professionals from companies in the UK, France and Germany had revealed millions of pounds were being wasted every year on unused applications. Actually, it said millions of Euros but I knew what it meant. Actually, at first I didn’t know what it meant as my thoughts turned to smartphones and while I appreciate that the iPhone, BlackBerry and assorted Android devices are doing well, I wasn’t swallowing a survey which reckoned that business were wasting millions every year on apps they don’t even use.

Then I read the document again, and everything became clearer. This was a story about data governance rather than Angry Birds in the office, and don’t even get me started about that one or the wife will kill me. According to Informatica, the outfit that provided me with the research data, some 81% of those IT professionals questioned said their corporate networks were hosting unused applications and data. Which isn’t really any surprise at all, is it? I’ve just looked at my own corporate network and it’s full of applications that sounded like a good idea at the time but turned out to be a waste of money as they are never used. Microsoft Office 2010, for example.

Microsoft Word 2010, along with the rest of the redundant suite of Office applications, sits there taunting me

Yep, I invested in a copy of Microsoft Office 2010, as you do when you are a small business running on a Windows platform. It was only after I had installed it that I started wondering why I had bothered; this was a knee-jerk purchase rather than a business-needs driven one. Now please don’t file this under ‘Microsoft Basher’ as that really couldn’t be farther from the truth. Both my kids are happily using Office 2010 Home and Student edition, and I’m quite happily running the equivalent of a small zoo full of Microsoft software here.

But as  a professional writer, as well as a consultant,  surely Microsoft Word gets used to within an inch of its life, I hear you pondering. But no, I’m writing this blog entry in my text editor of choice which happens to be NoteTab Pro. Yes, I said text editor rather than word processor, because my business-driven need for writing happens to be getting words onto a blank page with minimum fuss. That means I want a clean and compact interface without annoying distractions, and I want text entry to be straightforward and equally distraction free. By the time I have turned off everything that Microsoft throws in my direction by way of interface and text-entry distraction I could have written a small novel. NoteTab Pro has a spoil chicken (you know, the thing that checks your spellings), it has a word count function, and it has all the letters of the alphabet that I need.

Yet Microsoft Word 2010, along with the rest of the redundant suite of Office applications, sits there taunting me for being a slave to something (truth be told, I’m not even sure what). Am I really so gullible that I fall for the marketing hype, or such a predictable geek that for me ‘upgrade’ is the same as ‘fix’ to a junkie? I suspect the latter, although why I was upgrading from something I hadn’t been using to something I wouldn’t be using, at considerable cost, on the off chance that I might be missing something, I have no idea. It’s not even that I cannot view Office documents without it when they arrive, as I can.

Back to that report, and the suggestion is that unused applications and data on your corporate network are ‘inefficiencies’ which place a significant cost burden on your business in terms of resources, power and management time. The bigger your business, the bigger those inefficiencies and the bigger the bottom line. Eighty six per cent of those asked agreed that removing unused applications would result in their IT systems running more efficiently. Mind you, so could preventing sales and marketing droids from installing unnecessary apps in the first place. The findings revealed that, and I quote, “sales and marketing departments are prone to side-stepping the IT department when it comes to adding new software and applications to existing systems”.

I can’t use that excuse: I am the sales and marketing department here. I can, and indeed have, used the research as a catalyst for having a long overdue clear up of unnecessary and unused applications from the servers. Which revealed that I am a pretty average kind of business guy, I guess, as just as the survey predicted the unused application detritus accounted for around a quarter of the total number of applications installed.

Also, just like 46% of those surveyed, I wasn’t keen on removing all the unused apps just in case I needed them for something at sometime in the future. Yes, you guessed it, Microsoft Office 2010 is still there and I’m still not sure why. It’s as if it has an uninstall block imprinted on my brain, and I remain convinced (for absolutely no good reason) that to remove it would be folly.

Go figure…

September 18th was the final delivery deadline for a variety of course dissertations at the Open University. How do I know this, you ask? Old Cassidy must be well past the time when he thinks anyone’s got anything to teach him, surely?

I know it because in the preceding ten days I somehow got the mark of Cain when it came to friends and acquaintances with dying laptops. They all had to be fixed in time for the traditional all-night panic-fuelled scribble-fest on the 17th, and no, I could not take the machine away. The note of panic in the various emails, tweets, texts and wheedling phone calls was nothing short of a full-blown emotional assault. Castle Wolfenstein is, by comparison, a warm-up.

I suspect that most PC Pro readers and contributors are wily enough to steer clear of this kind of situation. There comes a point when there is no longer any shame in simply playing dumb when asked to repair a computer, or terrifying the hormonal supplicant by threatening to “fix” their laptop with a copy of Knoppix.

But these approaches don’t always work — or help you to sleep at night — when friends are trying to get themselves out of the recessional doldrums with an OU qualification.

Which then leaves one to discover the truly horrifying state of home user laptops. There is a whole “Prison Cigarettes” economy out there, awaiting those who can’t buy a fresh machine, won’t put up with a netbook to get their costs low enough, or don’t understand free trial software – and yet want to rely on the machine to achieve life-changing academic goals.

This year, I’ve come across the end result of “my friend who says he has a cracked copy of Microsoft Office”, “my friend who knows how to move applications from your old laptop to your new laptop”, and half a dozen other strategies which take advantage of the cash-strapped sector of our economy, in return for non-monetary bartered favours of whatever flavour suits the participants (let’s not linger over that for too long, shall we…)

OU Advice

I expect that somewhere in a Social Sciences department, someone is studying the way the balance of ignorance, lack of money, and pressure of market forces drives the penniless OU student to such extremes; but the fact is, the issues I see in that population are pretty far from the issues addressed in the OU’s own documentation and advice for students.

They seem very concerned that students check for a “Genuine Windows” or “Vista” sticker, for example. I have yet to ever encounter an actual counterfeit copy of either product, despite Microsoft frequently, automatically and incorrectly insisting that my installs qualify for this status.

The OU’s old central resource to help you pick a machine has now been divested, so each course gives separate advice: even so, I think these guys are much too heavy on the processor speed and much too light on the memory – even in the last 18 months the market has moved so far that a 1.8GHz with 4Gb of RAM is a lot more usable than a 3.0GHz with 1Gb, to take one piece of their advice.

Easy fix

The saddest part of watching people reach boiling point over the challenge of cobbling together a working computer for their studies is that the whole thing can be so much easier than they make it.

Microsoft’s student discount scheme is so far beyond generous it’s just absurd: under £60 secures the new student a usable copy of the current Office 2010. No matter how you run your bartering, I reckon that’s about 10 cars washed, a week shelf-stacking, less than that as a cycle courier: all of which are far, far less stressful than those last seven days before deadline spent thinking more about dissertation failure rather than the dissertation’s topic.

Surely, as we inch out of recession, some smart systems vendor will re-invent the “student bundle” just in time for the next course enrolment season, with a handy “learn to work” finance package to ease the pains of self-improvement?

Word Web App

This applies to Word documents created in Word 95 or later. Note that the only limitation to file size is SkyDrive’s 50MB limit. Note that, although macros won’t be stripped out and the document will be opened, the macros themselves won’t run.

Excel Web App

The Excel Web App will open workbooks created in Excel 97 or later. The maximum file size is 2MB. As with the Word Web App, macros won’t run, but unlike Word if you attempt to edit the .xlsm file then you’ll be asked to create a copy of the file with the macros removed.

PowerPoint Web App

The PowerPoint Web App will open presentations created in PowerPoint 97 or later. There’s no file size limit other than SkyDrive’s 50MB ceiling, and macros aren’t run.

OneNote Web App

OneNote only supports notebooks created in OneNote 2010. And that’s it.

You had to jump through three or four hoops in Office 2003 and Office 2007 to add them (clicking Tools | Options | Calendar Options and then tickboxing “Show week numbers in the Month View and Date Navigator”), but fortunately Outlook 2010 makes it much easier.

Or at least, easier to explain. So, here are the three steps you need to add week numbers in Outlook 2010.

First, click File to bring up the Backstage View.

Second, click the Options button and then the Calendar button, third from top.

Third, scroll down until you see the checkbox option “Show week numbers in the month view and in the Date Navigator”. Check the checkbox.

Lo and behold, the numberless view you had before (below left) is now basking in the full glory of week numbers.

Easy? Yes indeed. But it took me about 20 minutes to find this option hiding away, because I was foolishly hunting around the Ribbon looking for the right setting.

UPDATE: The first commenter to this post, Chris, pointed out that Outlook determines the first week of the year by default as the first week that includes January 1.

But you can change this. In Calendar Options (see the second step above), you can choose between three different ways to determine the first week. See the screenshot below. However, there’s no way I know of to force Outlook into tying week 1 into your company’s financial year.

If you’re running 64-bit Windows Vista or Windows 7 (or Server 2008 or Server 2008 R2), you can choose whether to the install 64-bit version of Office 2010 beta. (It is not compatible with 64-bit Windows XP.)

The advantages of the 64-bit version are that it lets you use additional memory installed on your computer – for example Excel 2010 workbooks can be bigger than 2GB. Project 2010 can work with very large projects consisting of many sub-projects. You also get enhanced security through Data Execution Prevention (DEP) by default.

But, not many people will actually need Excel Workbooks bigger than 2GB. If you ever made one, you could not store it in SharePoint – 2GB is SharePoint’s limit for any file – and you could not share it with anyone who wasn’t running 64-bit Office 2010 because they wouldn’t be able to open it.

Access databases with their code removed (split data & code in separate files) can’t be shared between 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office and any VBA code may not be compatible between 32-bit and 64-bit versions, particularly where the code declares API calls to Windows or uses the new LongLong or LongPtr data types introduced in the 64-bit version.

Graphic elements may render more slowly in the 64-bit version of Office because 64-bit CPUs may lack MMX support for multimedia and communications.

The biggest problem by far is that ActiveX controls Add-Ins and COM DLLs written for 32-bit Office will not work with the new 64-bit version. Microsoft are due to release a new VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) runtime which will bridge this gap for DLLs and Add-Ins written using VSTO but it isn’t available yet. Other manufacturers will have to test, possibly change, and re-issue their DLLs and Add-Ins in 64-bit versions to get them to work.

There are yet more problems if you try to work with web based solutions that use ActiveX controls. For instance SharePoint uses an ActiveX control to render SharePoint lists in Datasheet View. This view is not supported if you install the 64-bit version of Office 2010.

All in all, the 64-bit version of Office is useful to very few people and has many limitations. The vast majority of people will be much better off sticking to the 32-bit version.

Online-overlord Barry Collins has been fiddling with the Office 2010 beta for the last couple of days, and his reaction to it has been terrifying. Barry greets technology in only two states: the apoplectic fury of a man for whom every hollow promise is the death knell of another dream, and the rapture of somebody who’s just discovered that Nirvana’s a theme park with a £35 admission price.

What terrifies me is that he’s greeted Office 2010 with an almighty ‘meh’. There’s been bafflement and a few half-hearted jokes, but not once has the office fallen still at the ominous ticking of the Barry bomb which sits at the core of his being.

I must stress that this conclusion is drawn only from my observations of him in the last couple of days. We sit next to each other, you understand, I’m not stalking him – only the Grizzly Man would be foolish enough to stalk Barry Collins, and he got eaten.

I’m sure Barry will divulge more detailed thoughts on the beta in due course, but from what I’ve seen while peeking over his shoulder, much of Office 2010’s additions are pointless tinkering. And yet, there was one feature missing from Office 2007 that seems so self evident, so perfect and useful that I can’t believe the hive mind at Redmond hasn’t already spotted it: tabs.

The joy of what I do is that I get to write lots of words, on lots of subjects, on lots of documents. Over the course of the day it’s likely I’ll have around seven different documents running concurrently. Having each of those documents under a separate tab within Word, easily identifiable and accessible, would be so helpful I collapse in a giggling heap just thinking about it.

Consider the browser before tabs and after. There’s no going back, and a similar revolution needs to be made if Office is to progress. So please, please, please Microsoft, stick some tabs in Word. Pull Barry from the mists of ‘meh’ he’s stumbling around in, and give me a reason to upgrade to Office 2010. Because from where I sit, there’s precious little reason to do so right now.

Completely new in Outlook 2010 Beta is the People Pane. This appears below the Reading pane in the main window and in all the individual item windows. It shows thumbnail images, one for every person (or email address) associated with the item and lets you quickly access other items which are also associated with that person/address.

The contents shown in the People Pane are derived from the Windows Search index which is kept up to date as new items are created or arrive via email. When you first install Office 2010 Beta all your existing Outlook items must be re-indexed so don’t expect the People Pane to spring to life immediately but once indexing is complete all the other emails, attachments and meetings known for a person are just a click away.

The People Pane will connect to SharePoint Server 2010, if you have one in your organisation, to find data about a person and to other, as yet unspecified, social networks to get pictures and status updates for that person. If you have a mugshot for the person in your Outlook Contacts or a mugshot can be found on a social network, the People Pane will use that picture for the person. If not, you just get a generic grey person outline which makes it a little difficult to tell people apart. (The 64-bit version of Outlook seems to have a bug making it show the grey outline for everyone whether or not you have a mugshot for them.)

You can minimize or turn off the People Pane if you don’t subscribe to any social networks or you don’t want to see it and the company’s network administrator can tweak settings to deny access to external social networks if they don’t want users getting distracted by irrelevancies.

The People Pane is quick and convenient and is obviously Microsoft’s answer to add-ins such as Xobni – which does much the same things. It is interesting that the first comment to Tim’s blog posting about Outlook 2010 was from Matt Brezina, founder of Xobni. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/11/18/microsoft-outlook-2010-in-pictures-backstage-view/ In it he advertised Xobni complete with the old quote from Bill Gates calling it “the next generation of social networking”.

I think Mr Brezina may be fighting a rear guard action to try to save his job and his company as the People Pane and the Outlook Social Connector do the vast majority of what Xobni does but they do it better. Just about the only useful thing that Xobni does which Outlook 2010’s People Pane doesn’t is that Xobni scrapes people’s phone numbers out of their signature blocks. However, it keeps this information to itself in its own proprietary data store along with any pictures you give it of your contacts. It would be a lot more useful if it would add the data it gleans to your Outlook contacts folder. At least then the data would synchronize with your mobile phone. Xobni also uses its own indexing technology rather than relying on the Windows Search index (so, if you install Xobni, you have two indexers running, slowing your computer down).

Most of the other stuff Xobni does is fairly useless, such as showing you a chart of what time of day you get emails from Fred Bloggs. I know Tim liked Xobni when he reviewed it. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/179265/xobni but I have to disagree and wrote about my reasons in my Advanced Office column in Issue 173 called “What’s the Point of Xobni”.

We’ll start with the Calendar view. The colour coding isn’t new, nor the ability to view two calendars simultaneously, but the Home tab now offers quick access to far more options very quickly. Here are the other tabs:

When it comes to actually being invited to a meeting, you could see something like this:

It’s worth noting those five avatars at the bottom. If I had photos of the five other attendees in Outlook, these would appear there. I can also click on that upwards arrow next to the avatars and see this…

In an organisation with SharePoint implemented it can go far beyond pics. I’d be able to see if someone was online and available to instant message, get their social-networking updates and all sorts of glorious updates. For all those companies that don’t have SharePoint implemented, you’re more likely to see something like this:

So right now I can see what meetings online editor Barry Collins and I share, but that’s about it. Apart from Barry’s photo, which is always good to see, obviously. In theory, however, I should be able to see all the email exchanges we’ve had and what attachments Barry has sent me; Simon Jones talks more about the People Pane (to give this feature its official name) in today’s blog entry.

Below, you can see all the tabs on offer when you’re viewing the Inbox (click on them to make the images larger):

Then we come to the Contacts Ribbon:

And finally, the Tasks Ribbon:

Now Microsoft have released beta test versions of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 we can start to see what they’ve been talking about in the “co-authoring” arena. SharePoint Foundation 2010 supports multiple people editing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents at the same time. When you store your documents in a SharePoint document library, any number of people can open the document and they see who else is editing the document in the status bar. Your changes are bracketed with a blue line in the left margin and you get notifications when other people’s updates are available.

When you save your changes, you also get to see the other person’s changes that they have saved highlighted in green.

It seems that making small changes and saving often is the best way not to tread on each other’s toes.

In the Info section in Backstage (File | Info) you can see who is editing the document and send messages to them by email or by instant message (if you have Office Communicator). At the bottom of the Info section you can also see and manage all the different versions of the file, either autosaved or previous versions held in the SharePoint document library.

Co-authoring documents is going to be very useful for many people and it is good to see it is included in the free SharePoint Foundation 2010 and not reserved for SharePoint Server 2010 which will cost quite a lot of money.