Friday, November 20, 2009

Microsoft Office, Windows 7 and other Random Occurrences

Hey,

I haven't had a lot of time to post recently, but I have a little time now.

You may (or may not) have heard of Microsoft's new Office Suite, Microsoft Office 2010. It looks pretty sweet. Well, I stayed up till like 10 o'clock last night downloading it (717 MB) and finally got the download finished. Thank you Microsoft for supplying us with a tool to pause the download if we lose the connection!! Anyways, I booted up Windows 7 (Home Premium, which I bought a few weeks ago) and installed it. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be a ton of changes to the UI. The Office button is gone, replaced with an extra tab called "File." All the Office apps now have the Office ribbon (if you use Office '07, you will remember that things like Outlook didn't come with the ribbon). There are a few features that you might have missed in '07 that are now present in '10. I can't remember them all (I will update this post when i get back on Windows OS), but the one that i remember most of all is the option to Save As PDF. Now, we could download an Add-On in '07 that allowed us to safe the Word doc as a PDF, however now it is an option in the drop-down menu for Save As…. Very nice. The Office 2010 Beta expires in October of 2010, so we have a bit. Download link is here: Get FREE Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta

Now, we bought Windows 7 for myself and for two of our PCs (family pack, $150, great price btw), so I decided to install it on my MBP. I had a little bit of trouble since I was running the RC version of Win7 Ultimate, and you're not allowed to downgrade from Ultimate to Home Premium (although…somehow i got it working on the PCs…???), so I installed a copy of XP, then did a clean install from there. Worked well. I now have a fully functional 32-bit copy of Windows 7 running on my beautiful MacBook Pro. I am *not* a Windows fan, but I have to admit, Windows 7 is so far the best MS OS yet. I like having Windows on my Mac in case I ever need it :) works well.

We got our HP OfficeJet G55, I downloaded an app for it after discovering that it was made FOR MACS (yay HP!), and now I can scan stuff in to my computer through the printer. OH YEAH!

I figured out how to change the wallpaper on my locking screen for my Windows phone, now it looks just like an iPhone:
Pretty sweet. :)

Well I will post more later…gotta go finish a writing assignment…

Isaac :)