Darren Straight's Blog

Got to love this video song on youtube of Excel program managers, Karen and Manpratap, singing a song about Excel and Excel Services.

Saw this post on the Microsoft Excel 2010 Blog and at first I thought WOW have they brought back easter eggs in Microsoft Office! :p Well it wasn’t an Easter Egg but still cool.

It’s official, Office 2010 is out! To celebrate, we’ve created two games that are playable in Excel for you to download.

• Missile Command
• Tower Defense

To play, you’ll need -

• Download games here
• To install Excel 2010, hot off the press last week. You can get a free trial here. The games use features that are new to Excel 2010, so they won’t work in older versions.

When you open the files to play, don’t forget to enable the macros.

Here’s a video of the two games in action:

In the next two blog posts, we’ll explain how we made these games.

And one more thing – for a look at the people behind Excel on the job, check out this video of Excel program managers, Karen and Manpratap, singing a song about Excel and Excel Services.

I’ve been working pretty hard lately on my garden – I just wish there was some miracle way of stopping weeds and roots from growing back and also to slow time . But hey it’s a challenge right – a one man band doing all he can within reason while still having no transport to get rid of all the cuttings!

8th of September 2009 – Before winter came and took the garden back.

24th of April 2010 – The sun is coming out time to do that garden!

21st of June 2010 – No car anymore, so work has been hard but it’s getting there, shame the rain came and ruined all the work I had done – weirds grow back quick!

27th of June 2010 – Finally shifting that dirt.

6th of July 2010 – More dirt shifting and still no transport makes for a hard life in the garden. Summer holidays soon – will have to clear as much as I can before winters back!

UK Tech Days is a series of events for developers and IT professionals celebrating the latest Microsoft technologies.

Microsoft has announced the worldwide availability of Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010. Consumers can now purchase Office 2010 at more than 35,000 retail stores across the globe, such as Best Buy, Fnac, Harvey Norman and PC World; through online retailers, including Amazon.com; and direct from Microsoft at Office.com.

Office 2010 can also be purchased with the most popular desktops and laptops from leading PC makers including Acer Inc., Asus, Dell Inc., HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Sony Corp. In the next year, more than 100 million PCs will ship with Office 2010 preloaded, which can easily be activated with the purchase of any one of the three versions of Office 2010, including Office Home and Student 2010, Office Home and Business 2010, or Office Professional 2010.

“Working with major retail partners and PC makers, we’ve made dramatic changes in the way we deliver Office 2010 to give consumers more buying choice, making it easier than ever to unlock the power of Office on new and existing PCs,” said Stephen Elop, president, Microsoft Business Division. “For the first time, people can purchase a Product Key Card at retail to activate Office 2010 preloaded on new PCs. For those who want to download Office 2010 direct from Office.com for an existing PC, the new Click-to-Run technology will have them up and running in a matter of minutes.”

Office 2010 Represents a Great Growth Opportunity for Microsoft and Its Partners “Recent comScore Tech Metrix™ data confirms that more than 1 billion PCs worldwide have Office software installed, making it the most widely used productivity suite in the world,” said Mike Hurt, senior vice president of comScore. “This milestone helps illustrate the importance that software products like Microsoft Office have played in shaping the digital world to date.”

Considering there are approximately 1.8 billion Internet users worldwide, Microsoft and its channel partners see an incredible opportunity to deliver Office 2010 to existing and new Office customers around the world.

From a survey of Office 2010 beta users, Microsoft found that 75 percent say they plan to buy Office 2010 within six months. The Office 2010 beta program had more than 9 million downloads — more than six times the size of the 2007 Microsoft Office beta program — indicating strong consumer interest in Office 2010.

“Following the great response to the Office 2010 beta and the success of Windows 7, we predict this will be the biggest consumer release of Office, ever,” Elop said.

Productivity Solutions Across the PC, Phone and Browser
Throughout its development cycle, customer feedback has been critical to the improvements found in Office 2010. Based on this valuable input, Microsoft has made considerable enhancements to help users do the following:

• Create great-looking documents and presentations. Express creativity in PowerPoint 2010 presentations with new video and photo editing features. Add extensive text effects and table formatting options in Word 2010. Reveal important trends in data with Sparklines in Excel 2010. OneNote 2010 makes everything you need simple to find, organize and share.
• Connect and work together more simply. Advanced e-mail management and calendaring capabilities in Outlook 2010 and the new Outlook Social Connector help people stay productive and in touch with personal and business networks. Work with others more efficiently using new co-authoring in Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010. Deliver presentations over the Web with new PowerPoint Broadcast Slideshow.
• Get things done from virtually anywhere. With Office 2010 and the Office Web Apps — the online companions to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — people have the freedom to save documents directly from Office 2010 to Windows Live SkyDrive, then view, edit and share those documents in the cloud. The Office Web Apps preserve the look and feel of Office documents, so valuable content and formatting are not compromised while moving between the PC, phone and browser*

Office Mobile 2010 also is available from Windows® Phone Marketplace for all Windows Mobile 6.5 phones. People using Office Mobile 2010 can perform lightweight editing of Office documents and take notes on the go, or work on Office documents stored on their phone or attached to an e-mail. Today, Office 2010 is available in 10 languages and will expand to 94 languages.
“For information workers the lines between home and office are becoming blurred; in return for flexible working practices that fit better with lifestyle employees are prepared to spread their working hours. Facilitating this involves accessing documents and information from a range of devices, so providing a consistent experience is necessary. With Office 2010 Microsoft has done a lot to help this.

First, being free, Microsoft Office Starter will ensure that basic productivity tools, that are familiar to many from their work place experience, are freely available on many consumer PCs. Second, Office Web Apps makes the basic office capabilities freely available to anyone with an internet connection and facilitates that sharing of documents. With the Office 2010 announcement Microsoft is taking both OpenOffice and Google Apps head-on. This release should ensure Microsoft remains the dominant vendor in the productivity tools space for the foreseeable future”. Bob Tarzey, Analyst & Director, Quo Circa

This is what happens when BP spills coffee.

As part of the official 50th anniversary of the Anne Frank House, LBi Lost Boys and Anne Frank House have developed a 3D version of the house at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam where Anne and her family lived in hiding for two years during the Second World War. The Secret Annex Online is part of the new Anne Frank website, and allows visitors to explore the front of the house and the secret annex as it was then, and hear stories that explain in greater depth what happened there.

The museum in Amsterdam is not furnished as the secret annex was cleared of its contents after those in hiding were arrested. After the war, it was Otto Frank’s wish that the rooms should  remain empty. The online hiding place allows visitors to see and learn more about various objects not on view. The virtual rooms were furnished using reference photographs that were taken in 1999 when the front part of the house and the secret annex were temporarily re-furnished.

The microsite is full of richly descriptive video clips, telling the story of Anne Frank through diary excerpts and archived witness reports. The English voice-overs are by Tamsin Greig and Ellie Kendrick, both of whom were involved in the 2009 BBC series “The Diary of Anne Frank”. Atmospheric music was kindly provided by Mark Isham, the American Grammy and Emmy Award-winning composer perhaps best known for his work on ‘Crash’ and ‘A River Runs Through It’.

To spread the story of Anne Frank through social media channels, there is also a Facebook application. Selected quotes from Anne’s diary can be posted to your profile weekly or monthly, spreading her words of inspiration.

The Secret Annex Online is Web Pick of the Week on Commarts, and was Site of the Day on FWA (Favourite Website Awards). More info can be found via the press release on RealWire.

The Microsoft Desktop player allows IT professionals to access technical content (videos, webcasts, podcasts, white papers, and more) and links to resources (such as IT evangelists, local training opportunities, and local user groups) in your area. You can either view it online or download the WPF application to view offline.

You can now check out the Cross-browser Test Results Summary for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 here. Or why now take the IE 9 Test Drive if you dont want to see the data, and then have a nice read on Solutions for Virtualizing Internet Explorer to learn how to create a virtual operating environment in which you can run earlier versions of IE.

This website contains several collections of new test pages that we developed in conjunction with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working groups. These 192 test pages have been updated based on feedback and now include some new HTML5 test pages.

We respect how challenging it is to build one page that works the same in every browser as the technology advances and customer expectations rise. We have created these tests (and welcome your feedback!) to help web developers see if a browser supports what they are trying to do before they depend on it. Because there are ambiguities and options in any specification, there may be cases where some browsers behave differently. The Internet Explorer team remains committed to making the same standards-based markup work across browsers. This is why we are contributing these new test cases to the appropriate web standards working groups at the W3C.

There are two tables below. The first table is a summary of the test results with the May 2010 IE Platform Preview and each of the major shipping browsers running on Windows. The table at the bottom of this page provides details and links to each of the new test cases we submitted to each appropriate W3C working group to help the web become more interoperable.

I want to thank the members in the W3C working groups that helped us develop these tests, the community members for providing valuable feedback on the tests, as well as the engineers on the IE team that made these possible.