Blogged.com says this blog is ‘Good’!

Hi Readers,

I’m glad to share one sweet moment with you all. Recently I submitted my blog to be reviewed by blogged.com, one of popular blog listing sites and the editors of the site has reviewed and rated my blog as ‘Good’; to be precise 6.8 out of 10.

Thanks to you all for visiting the blog every now and then. I’m in a pursuit of making this better and then take it to among the best!

Keep reading! Keep coming back!! Leave comments & share the knowledge!!!

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Few things to complain about IE8 beta 2, but …

I installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 today and was curious to experience all it’s new features.

IE 8 Beta

There are lots of post in the IE blog about various features & facts of IE 8 beta 2 & IE 8 in general. So I thought I just highlight what I feel those here…

I like the enhanced auto complete feature in IE, which I feel is similar to the ‘awesome bar‘ in FireFox 3. (I bumped on this blog post which calls FF address bar as ‘junk’, see if you ever felt like that). I have no idea why the ‘Activities‘ in beta 1 became, ‘Accelerators‘ in beta 2. I guess it’s something to do with marketing and I’m not sure if it has to do anything with Ubiquity of FireFox. In principle, these two are looking different: Ubiquity promises to increase user experience with [existing] mashups, where Accelerators are like plug-ins to IE (here’s how you can create one). But how these are extended in the future will really determine their fate, in their current form

(At time of this writing, one of  IE 8 features link still talks about ‘Activities’ only. Here’s the updated page in another location (not sure why two pages!). Hope the names are not changed again, which will definitely bound to create confusion among users. )

I still need to check the In Private browsing on how it is going to change the way I’m going to peep into the Internet. ‘Search Suggestions‘ – simply great improvement. WebSlices are good but they need to be popularized (read ‘be used by all major websites’) first to have very good use across every user of the web. Smart Screen filter is an improvement over the beta 1’s website blocker, but kinda reminds me of FF3.

Overall, it’s thumbs up for IE 8 beta 2. Only using it for a prolonged period will tell me whether it had gotten any better for me . I still have one thing to complain about IE 8 beta about, at least only in my office PC. (strange that things work fine in my laptop. Anyhow, I need to know how to the fix the issue.)

There are other blogs that talk about FireFox & Internet Explorer fight over these features, but I leave it to you to decide which is better. My opinion is that both browsers are getting better everyday.

If you have tried IE 8 beta 2, comment here… Share what you felt good & bad!

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Some learning resources for Microsoft Office – we were hunting for.

I & my colleague Anand were in search for some common shortcut, tips & tricks in Office apps. and he was kind enough to hunt down and sent me few links.

1. Training – Microsoft Office – here
2. Best keyboard shortcuts to use in Excel – here
3. One shortcut everyone should know – here

Thanks Anand.

Actually these are not the exhaustive ones (as you might have figured out already ) but only those we were looking for… For complete training you can always reach the ‘Help & How to‘ section of the MS Office (btw, you have to accept the website design is cool!)

7-Zip was able extract 160% of data from a zip file!

You should see this. I was amazed!

7 Zip Shows incorrect extract % value

Need submit it to 7-zip forums.

Update: Man! Sourforge.net has a real clumsy sign up process. First I’ve login with OpenID and then I’ve to create an account with new username & password. They have explanations for that as well. All I had to do was to submit a bug to 7-zip forum!

Have you ever wanted to disable “Reply to all” and/ or “Forward” for your emails?

Have you ever wanted the email receiver not to ‘Forward’ the mail to anyone? Or wanted the email receiver not to hit ‘Reply to All’ to the mail you send?

If you are using Outlook 2007 and within Exchange network, here’s a plug-in from Gavin (written in C#) that restricts your email readers to ‘Forward’ and/ or ‘Reply to All’ – http://www.beesknees.freeserve.co.uk/software/.

All you need to need to do is download the installer (mentioned in above page) here.
Caveat: This plug-in works only in Outlook 2007 with Exchange (within your company network only; does not propagate to external emails)

I came to know about this from Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) via twitter. If you are interested to try this out manually read the blog post from Scott in his blog post. Anyhow, read the ‘update’ he has posted – ‘it is not a macro’ but just a change in message header.

Office Labs is doing some real good job!

Office Labs…

I was introduced to Office Labs long back. It is the place where new ideas on Office products gets tried and tested. Yes, it promised to try really cool things – I was wondering if people in Office Labs will bring out innovative products just like Photosynth, Listas, etc from Live Labs team. As matter of fact, they are doing some real good job.

Things that I’ve tried…

I first started using the ‘Search Commands’, which helped to find the exact location where a particular setting was hidden in any Office application, given the humongous number of settings & options available in Office. It was fun and also helpful. After a long break, last weekend, I again stumbled up on the website to find more new plug-ins. Couple of them, Email prioritizer and pptPlex, I started using from today and my initial feedback on those are ‘quite good’.

Email Prioritizer – really clears the clutter in my Inbox. Together with Xobni and Outlook’s categories, I think I’m having a new experience with email nowadays. I haven’t completely tried out pptPlex, but I think as reported in website, it should be of real deal for people who are involved extensively in creating & delivering presentations.

What & Why of the usage metrics …

It’s good that user feedback & usage statistics are taken seriously here (Well, as any prototype or ‘beta’ application, things don’t get ‘better’ unless user gives feedback on them or the developer has better understanding of the usage of the application – so the ‘usage metrics’ of these prototypes really plays key role in whether they make it to be part of Office package in future and/ or be released as individual plug-ins itself.) But I would like to see if new ideas can be submitted to the Office Labs team for them to try it.

Where is the discussion?

I also want to comment on the thing I noticed in their tag line which reads ‘Try. Experience. Discuss’. I’m not sure, where the ‘discussion’ is happening among the end-users or the users with the Office Labs team. The Office Labs blog is available here.

Other plugins in my system…

I have also installed the foll. plug-ins…

1. No replies plugin from http://www.beesknees.freeserve.co.uk/software/
2. Speed Launch from Office Labs

What do you think?

Are you using any of these? If not, try it today. Do you really think this model of trying out ideas by Office Labs is effective? Comment back..

Update: 08/27/08

1. I received a mail from Christi (from Waggener Edstrom), explaining few of clarifications I needed. I’m happy to know there is indeed an ‘discussion forum’ for each of the projects in Office Labs.
2. OfficeLabs has released yet another cool plug-in, this time for Excel – Chart Advisor.

Thanks Christi. I’m glad.

My Mobile & my new contact number…

From today, I’ll be using my new mobile number (Bangalore city) since I wasn’t ‘happy’ with my previous subscriber.

I was already getting nightmares of ‘backing up’ my older phone numbers and restoring them into my new SIM. There came my mobile to rescue. I’m not sure how many handheld manufacturers take the ’software’ part of it seriously, but in my opinion Motorola does it in style – be it a low range cheap mobile or the high-end ones.

Temporarily I was going to use my low-end (C168) for making & receiving call. period. No other tasks I expect to do with that. The feature that I was talking about was the very simple and basic ‘Copy’ in the phonebook. Yes, it allowed to transfer all my contacts between mobile phone and SIM with just not more than two clicks.

Okay, I can see you wondering why am I talking about this feature here and  how did it help me. As I mentioned since the mobile I have is not going to be used for all the ‘tasks’ and I plan to purchase or switch to another mobile, I stored all my contact in my SIM card directly. To start my new SIM, I just had to copy all contacts from my previous SIM to mobile and then to my new one.. it took just 2 minutes.

I could have used my mobile sync application to do this, yet the attention to the details on small and cheap gadget is worth notable & be used.

So, how many of your mobile phone has this feature in built? 

Btw, I have sent my new numbers to people in my recent contact list. Did you get it already?