Microsoft Office 2010 screenshots: Accessibility Checker

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Part of the Backstage view, Microsoft has built in a handy little checker that will reveal which parts of your Excel, Word and PowerPoint files will cause problems for people with disabilities such as impaired vision. For example, it will tell you if pictures lack Alt text, highlight headings that are too long, and point out if the document doesn’t use heading levels in a logical way.

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Microsoft Word 2010: inserting screenshots

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

This is one of those features I just happen to like: the ability to insert a screenshot quickly and easily into a document. So, you’re writing a report or some technical documentation. All you need to do is head to the Insert tab and click on the Screenshot button sitting in the Illustrations area. If you have a multitude of other applications open, you’ll see a screen rather like this:

You then just select your chosen screenshot and it’s inserted painlessly into the open document.

Microsoft Office 2010 screenshots

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

There were many good reasons why Microsoft Office 2007 earned a place on the PC Pro A List, but if we were to boil it down to one then it would be the Ribbon. While not everyone welcomed the new interface, it made it much easier for the vast majority of users to create professional-looking documents. And quickly. Microsoft Office 2010 would always struggle to have the same impact, but there are a number of nice new features that make this the best version of Office 2010 yet.

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The Windows 7 chkdsk bug that won’t go away

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Back in August, I told you how two of us in the PC Pro office had been struck down with an irritating Windows 7 chkdsk bug.  The fault saw the check disk utility spring into life every sodding time Stuart Turton and I booted our PCs, yet report a clean bill of health once it had completed its laborious scan.

Well, it appears the problem isn’t going away. A recent flurry of comments on the August blog reveals that the chkdsk flaw isn’t restricted to the beta software we were running at the time. The problem appears to be afflicting users of the final Windows 7 code, and in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours. A number of people leaving comments on both our blog and the various web forums discussing the issue pointed the finger at Avira’s free antivirus software (which both Stuart Turton and I were running), but there’s a groundswell of non-Avira users reporting the issue too, so that appears to be a case of mistaken identity.

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Sky Mobile TV app brings live sport to the iPhone

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Spotify generated huge excitement when it launched with its offer of unlimited music for £10 a month, but this simply blows it out of the water. Sky has today launched a new Mobile TV app which offers live streaming of a selection of its most popular premium channels for a monthly fee, and you don’t even have to be a Sky TV subscriber at home.

The core Sky Mobile TV News and Sports app is available for free, and offers full listings for the core sports and news channels. But for the paltry sum of £6 a month, you can stream live coverage from those channels over a Wi-Fi connection. (more…)

Microsoft shows courage at Tech-Ed 09

Monday, November 9th, 2009

The initial signs for this year’s Tech-Ed Europe - Microsoft’s annual get-together for its product gurus, partners and IT professionals – being the sort of show rich with standing ovations are not good.

Microsoft is in Berlin around the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, just after U2 has smeared the town with its dubious neo-political imprimatur, and just before Thanksgiving in the US – it’s one of those periods that might well be marked by suggestions in emails as “a good time to bury some bad news”. But: there’s some good stuff here. Calm stuff; stuff which shows MS is getting down to business, and not distracting the world with dancing paperclips.

The basic raw headlines are that Exchange 2010 goes to public availability as from today, worldwide: and Microsoft is very pleased with some rational improvements. (more…)

PowerPoint and Silverlight: a perfect match?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

With its place at the heart of the Microsoft Office suite, PowerPoint is the overwhelmingly dominant presentation software for business. However it has a fundamental flaw – it still doesn’t offer an in-built route for efficient, cross-platform, screen-based web delivery. For a program whose whole purpose is to help users get their message over, this is quite astonishing and unforgivable as we approach 2010.

Microsoft might not provide its own solution but there are plenty of third-party applications which fill the gap such as Adobe’s Captivate and Presenter, the bargain Flair from WildFX and my personal favourite Articulate Presenter. The major embarrassment for Microsoft is that these all rely on the Adobe Flash format.

It’s an embarrassment that is made considerably worse by the fact that Microsoft is currently busily touting its own cross-platform web format, Silverlight, as a direct alternative to Flash. It’s clear that PowerPoint and Silverlight should make a perfect match and native Silverlight export would certainly go a long way to explaining (if not excusing) PowerPoint’s lack of support for Flash.

So where is the ability to convert PowerPoint to Silverlight?

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Where are the killer apps for Windows?

Friday, November 6th, 2009

In the latest part of our bid to convert a Mac user to Windows 7, Chris Brennan wonders where all the brilliant Windows-only apps are hiding?

One of the things you need as a Mac user is patience. Patience with PC users who think you’re an idiot. Patience with IT help desks that don’t know anything about Macs, despite claims they support them. Patience with software developers who don’t have Mac versions of their products.

Actually, that last one isn’t true, as despite the numerous and seemingly never-ending claims that the Mac doesn’t have the necessary applications, I’m still to find a Windows application that can’t be matched on the Mac.

On my Mac I use Microsoft Office with Adobe Photoshop. I have Skype, Firefox, TweetDeck and iTunes, and this PC I’m working on now is capable of running all of those applications too. So, I’m wondering what are all these applications that the PC has that my Mac doesn’t? It’s supposed to be one of the major benefits to having a PC, isn’t it? Plenty of people in the comments on this blogs have cited it as a reason they use PCs over Macs.

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Typekit brings print-like typography to the web

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

The website is among the most iconic technologies of the 21st Century but, as any web designer will testify, the typographical capabilities of modern web browsers are stuck firmly in the 1990s. In essence, if you want your fonts to appear broadly the same in all browsers, you’re limited to a selection of around a dozen viable fonts . Over the past few years a number of workarounds have been developed, the most notable and widespread being sIFR, a Flash technology that involves embedding the fonts in a SWF. Widespread but hardly ideal.

In principle, salvation is at hand with the almost complete adoption of the CSS @font-face property by modern browsers. This makes it possible to download a font stored on your server into the user’s browser. Theoretically, this solves the entire problem but, in practice, copyright issues mean that even free fonts cannot be used legally in that way. This may change over time but, in the meantime, web startup Small Batch has developed an ingenious solution called Typekit. (more…)

How to install Windows 7 on the new 27in iMac

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Windows 7 isn’t officially supported in Boot Camp just yet, but that doesn’t stop it working a treat most of the time. We have it installed on one of the new MacBooks in the Labs, but the gigantic 27in iMac proved to be much more problematic (we’ll have a full review of the monster in question later this week).

The problem occurs after the main Windows 7 installation has taken place. The system reboots, the Windows 7 logo circles into life and the desktop should appear – but all you get is blackness. The system is still running – press the Caps Lock key and you’ll see the light ping on – but you can’t see anything, indicating a problem with the iMac’s ATI graphics drivers.

Fear not, though. If you’ve just blown £1,350 on this beautiful beast and are now scratching your head as to why you can’t get it working, there is a workaround to crowbar Windows 7 onto it. (more…)