Harvey Balls for Office Documents

If you’ve been around for a while and/or you subscribe to Consumer Reports Magazine, you know what Harvey Balls are.  They are little circles with varying amounts filled in which can be used to represent a level of completeness, sophistication, match to a standard, etc.  They are a good replacement for numerical scales in many cases because they give a very quick visual cue.  Many people can scan a list with Harvey Balls and zero in on something they want faster than they can with numeric representations.

 

Today I wanted to put some Harvey Balls into a PowerPoint presentation, so I Binged “Office 2007 Harvey Balls” and found that a kind soul named Alastair Bor had created a Harvey Ball font for use with Office.  Having built these little beasties from scratch a few times over the years, I was very glad to have such a simple solution, so I thought I’d share it.  By formatting the numbers 0-9 with the Harvey Ball font, you get the nice Harvey Balls above.

Adding Graphics to Microsoft Word 2007

I’ve been using Word 2007 since it was released, but somehow I’ve not needed to do any real graphical work in it until now.  I was getting frustrated trying to figure out how to add multiple graphical objects into my Word document until I found something which talked about adding a Drawing Canvas.

To do this, you go to Insert / Shapes / New Drawing Canvas.  No, you’re not being dense, it’s way down at the bottom of the dialog.  (If it’s somewhere else more obvious, then I’m missing it.)  Once you’ve added the Drawing Canvas, you have the full Office 2007 graphics engine available to you.  What this means is that you can build up graphics like you may be used to creating in PowerPoint, with grouping, alignment, etc.

The only drawback I’ve found so far is that I can’t paste graphic objects from the Vista Snipping Tool into the Drawing Canvas.  Instead, I find that it works to save the screen snip to a file and then use the Insert / Picture / From File dialog.  A little cumbersome, but not a bad workaround.

Office 2007 / WSS / MOSS SP2 Is Available

I’m unlikely to unearth better details on this than good ‘ole SharePoint Joel. Check out Joel’s post for all the dirt. If, though, you’re like me and you just say “Gimme the downloads!” here are the key bits:

2007 Microsoft Office servers Service Pack 2 (x86)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7816D90-5FC6-4347-89B0-A80DEB27A082
2007 Microsoft Office servers Service Pack 2 (x64)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7816D90-5FC6-4347-89B0-A80DEB27A082

2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B444BF18-79EA-46C6-8A81-9DB49B4AB6E5

Sun ODF PlugIn for Office

We got an ODP file (turns out that’s a presentation file a la Powerpoint) from a friend the other day and couldn’t figure out how to open it until we found the Sun ODF Plug In for Office.

The overview from the above site:

The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format (ODF).

The plugin works with Microsoft Office 2007 (Service Pack 1 or higher), Microsoft Office 2003, XP and Microsoft Office 2000.

The plugin is based on StarOffice technology and is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently and the additional memory footprint is minimal.

The Sun ODF Plugin is currently the only converter with Enterprise support available. Enterprises who want to use the ISO-standardized file format with Microsoft Office can sign service contracts with Sun. Contact Sun Sales for further information.

Wait For It…The 2007 Office System Service Pack 2 coming to WSUS in April

<UPDATE date=”2009-04-15”> Seems I was a day early, as Microsoft announced today that the public release date for SP2 will be April 28.  From Gregg Keizer at Computerworld’s article Microsoft sets Office 2007 SP2 release for April 28:

Microsoft Corp. has set April 28 as the release date for Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2), the first update to the company’s popular application suite since December 2007.

Office 2007 SP2 adds support for Open Document Format (ODF) version 1.1 to Word, Excel and PowerPoint; boosts the performance of the Outlook 2007 e-mail client; debuts the ability to uninstall service packs using a separately utility and the Windows command line; and integrates the "Save As PDF/XPS" command into the suite’s applications.

</UPDATE>

Sure, this is from the WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) blog, but if SP2 will be available from WSUS, it won’t be far behind on plain old Microsoft Update (nee Windows Update).

Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Office System will be made available to Windows Server Update Services in April, classified as a service pack.  Service Pack 2 includes some significant work, including: built-in ability to save as ODF & PDF formats, improvements to Outlook’s performance and calendar reliability, significant bug fixes for charts in core Office applications, the ability for client service packs to be removed using an uninstall tool, and a host of customer-requested improvements to the Office Server products.  It is also a rollup of all fixes that have previously been released for Office 2007 products.  Additional information will be posted to the Office Sustaining Engineering blog later this month.

Thank you.

-Cecilia Cole
WSUS Program Manager

If you (like I) just can’t wait for that great new software smell, keep an eye on the Office Sustaining Engineering blog.  Synthesizing some of the expected features lists out there on the ‘Net, Office 2007 SP2 should bring to the table:

For Office Desktop Programs

• Improved Outlook Calendaring Reliability
• Improved Outlook Performance (thank goodness!)
• Enabling Object Model support for Charts in PowerPoint and Word
• Improved cryptographic functionality by supporting all cryptographic algorithms offered by the operating system
• Improved functionality in Excel’s charting mechanism
• Ability to ungroup SmartArt graphics (and as a result, the ability to add animations to them in PowerPoint)
• Ability for Visio to export UML models to an XML file compliant with the XMI standard
  Tool that enables the uninstall of Office client Service Packs

For Servers

• Performance and manageability improvements to variations in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) including STSADM commands for repairing links between source and target pages
• Improvements around processing status approvals from Office Project Web Access into Office Project Professional 2007
• Improvements to read-only content databases and index rebuild timer jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Note the mentions of WSS, ECM, STSADM, etc.  We should expect to see some stability improvements and fixes for MOSS as well.

iFilters for SharePoint Search

Once you have your SharePoint server up and running and begin to build up a corpus of content, you may find that certain documents aren’t turning up in searches.  This may be due to not having the appropriate iFilters installed.  From the Wikipedia entry:

IFilters are plugins that allow the Windows Indexing Service and the newer Windows Desktop Search to index different various file formats so that they become searchable. Without an appropriate IFilter, contents of a file cannot be indexed.

Here are a few important ones.  If your organization uses a particular type of file frequently, make sure to look into the iFilter for it.  The Wikipedia article above has links to many free and for-pay iFilters.  Note that there may be different versions of iFilters for 32-bit vs. 64-bit operating systems, different file versions, etc., so be sure to get the right ones for your needs.

2007 Office System Converter: Microsoft Filter Pack - This download will install and register IFilters with the Windows Indexing Service. These IFilters are used by Microsoft Search products to index the contents of specific document formats. This Filter Pack includes IFilters for the following formats: .docx, .docm, .pptx, .pptm, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb, .zip, .one, .vdx, .vsd, .vss, .vst, .vdx, .vsx, and .vtx.

Adobe PDF IFilter v6.0 or Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms - Adobe® PDF iFilter is designed for end users or administrators who wish to index Adobe PDF documents using Microsoft indexing clients. This allows the user to easily search for text within Adobe PDF documents.

SharePoint Error: “The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons…”

I recently updated my Windows XP SP3 machine with some recommended updates from Windows Update.  After I did so, I received the following error every time I tried to open a Datasheet view in SharePoint:

The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons: A datasheet component compatible with Windows SharePoint Services is not installed, your browser does not support ActiveX controls, or support for ActiveX controls is disabled.

Poking around on the Web, I found many solution for folks who were using Office 2003.  Here’s the most common solution I found for Office 2003:

1. Close Internet Explorer
2. Go to Start –> Run… –> "regedit"
3. Delete the following folder in the registry:

Path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftInternet ExplorerActiveX Compatibility
Sub-Key: {65BCBEE4-7728-41A0-97BE-14E1CAE36AAE}

Unfortunately, I’m running Office 2007 and that registry key isn’t in the registry on my machine.  However, I do happen to have Access 2003 still loaded on the machine (my Office 2007 install didn’t include Access), so I tried to do a Detect and Repair in Access 2003 to see if that would solve the problem.  Nope.

I had one more idea: I ran Office Diagnostics in Outlook 2007 (any Office 2007 application has this option under Help or application options).  I closed all of my Internet Explorer windows and tried again.  Success!

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