Alea jacta Ouest

Office for Mac SP2 just came out. The new update brings a horde of corrections and improvements.
As always, I’m sure people will notice a few new problems here and there, and I just found one such change that prove problematic for some.
In the process of updating your installation of Office to the latest and greatest, the updater moves some folder to a new location. Most files and folders previously in ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft and in the ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/ folder are now migrated to ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/.
That includes the various Script Menu Items folder, the templates for Word Excel and Powerpoint, and the Preference folder for Office that previously was in ~/Library/Preferences (and that often contained the custom dictionaries).

In a sense, I welcome the move. That’s the recommended location for these items for Mac OS X, but there is one problem:
The folders that are relocated there are re-created, not moved.
This essentially means that AppleScripts placed in the Script Menu Items folders for instance, will no longer show up in the Script menu in their respective applications.
You have to move all your custom scripts, files and templates from the previous default location in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/ to the new one in ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/.
The ~/Library/ folder being invisible in the Finder in Lion, you might have to use Command-Shift-g in the Finder to trigger the Go To Folder window (where you can enter this path to see the content you need).
You can also use the Script menu in any of the Office applications to select About This Menu… and then click on the Open folder button.

After correcting these little issues, I cleaned-up my MUD to eliminate useless duplications and it now looks like this:

As you can see, user data remains in the MUD folder. I wished they actually had moved these files to a location under ~/Library too, where people are less likely to mess with it, but that’s a different story…
You might also find data folders for various other Microsoft products like Messenger and Lync (or Communicator).

Of note: If you use the Excellent SpamSieve in Outlook, and move the SpamSieve scripts, make sure you edit your Rules to point to the new location.

By default, SpamSieve still installs the scripts in the old location, but the author is usually really responsive and I’m sure future versions will correct that.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with the product. I’m just a satisfied user. I just heard about it when it was in public beta, tried it and immediately liked it, but as with anything, your mileage may vary.

Spanning Tools for Mac is a set of utilities that have been created by the authors of Spanning Sync.

The tremendous potentials of Sync Services are obvious to all. Being able to share data between applications, between computers or with additional devices (iPhone anybody??) is wonderful, but for a lot of us, it sometimes turns in a living hell: Data corruption, duplications (endless duplications), loss, syncing stops altogether or a process related to syncing systematically crashes in the background.

Syncing is “less than stellar” for many. While third party applications could be buggy, most now agree that Sync Services have issues and are prone to corruption and we are all desperately waiting for a fix from Apple.

There are several options out there to help you deal with SyncServices issues. I strongly recommend reading the article about SyncServices Troubleshooting on the Entourage Help Website.

The Spanning Sync folks have a lot of experience with Sync Services and quickly identified several sources of corruptions and syncing problems. Then created a set of tools that will analyze your address book and calendar, looking for corruptions or potential sources of troubles and offer you to fix them. This suite offers three applications:

A calendar and contact cleaner, each targeting the corresponding databases on your Mac, and Sync Tune-Up, for more generalized and drastic solutions (more about that later)

The two “Cleaner” applications follow more or less the same approaches. You can chose what to check in the preferences and then let the applications do their magic.

For instance, if I take the Calendar Cleaner, I have the choice between nine potential sources of problems:

Once the scan is done, the application lists all problematic items, with a detailed description of the problems.

You can then decide how you want it fixed, and let the application do the rest.

The Contact Cleaner is similar and scans for a dozen of possible sources of problems.

The third application, Sync Tune-Up, takes a more generalized approach. A first panel lets you unregister an application from Sync Services, and a second one offers you to 1) disable SyncServices 2) force a fresh sync and 3) go nuclear and trash all Sync Service data from your Mac to force all applications to repopulate it all from scratch. Not something you should consider lightly, but when you’re desperate…

This set of utilities is shareware: $19.99, with $5 off for Spanning Sync customers.
Some might argue it’s a bit on the pricey side, but it has literally saved my bacon multiple times and corrected nasty issues I was having both with Entourage and MobileMe more than once. For me it was priceless. Read the rest of this entry »

My post on Archiving your e-mails with EagleFiler is out on The Entourage Help Blog

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Mon billet sur « Sauvegarder ses e-mails avec EagleFiler » est disponible (en anglais) sur « The Entourage Help Blog »

(L’application n’est pas localisée à ma connaissance, aussi je ne poste pas ce billet en français – mais je vais contacter l’auteur pour lui faire la suggestion )

Now I usually don‘t post here too often about applications that are not in direct relationship with Office, but I thought I could make an exception
I spend a lot of time at work crunching numbers in Excel or other applications (Prism is my friend).
Very often, I just want to run a quick calculation. I used to be a heavy HP48 user, but my calculator dies a while ago and I learnt to live without it.
I recently got an iPod Touch I started looking for a decent scientific calculator that would also support the RPN notation.

Well the search is over, I found it!
I first tried the lite version (free) then quickly migrated to the full, paid version of PCalc.
PCalc is developped by TLA Systems (they also make the famous DragThing) offers all the functions I’ve been looking for (and was updated today with even more goodness)

• Scientific calculator
• RPN mode with two lines of text (I’d love to be able to squeeze even more, bt I understand that it might not be really practical on the iPhone/iPod Touch screen).
  Conversions, tons of conversions
• paper-tape mode (do all your calculations and have the app summarize the all thing as if you had been using a paper-tape printing calculator – very useful to summarize a long set or inter-related calculations)
• Themes (I like themes)
• octal, hexadecimal, etc calculations (I don’t use this, but many people do)
• etc…

If you are like me and think that the built-in calculator is far too limited for your taste and are on the market for something like that, I encourage you to try the lite version first. Be careful, you might get hooked like me and get the full one ($9.99 — but well-worth it in my opinion).

In addition, the author seems extremely active, responds quickly to suggestions (and Tweets)

Now there is also a regular MacOS X version, but I can’t comment on it since I haven’t tried it (I use the iPod Touch all the times for these quick calculations)

(in French since the application is mostly directed at people who at least understand French)

Antidote RX vient d’être mis à jour en version 8.
J’avais parlé précédemment de cette excellente application permettant de corriger le français en s’intégrant dans de nombreuses applications (dont Office).
Au menu, de nombreuses nouvelles locutions, des corrections de bogues divers et une intégration améliorée à de nombreuses applications.
Les notes de la mise à jour sont ici.

Once in a while, I am send a Word or Excel document with a bunch of pictures in it. Sometimes, I need to get these pictures (usually to modify them, or reduce the file size, etc). There is no really easy way to do this in Office. Of course, you can copy and paste the image from Office to whatever image editor application you want to use, but you never know what format the image was in, etc… It’s usually not a lot of fun.

I was messing around with one of these files today and figured out two ways to do it.
1) Use FileJuicer. This great application can also extract media files from a lot more file formats (and from applications).
2) For Office 2007/8 files, duplicate the file to work on a copy, select the copy in the Finder, press Cmd-I to get the information on it, remove the .docx or .pptx extension and replace it with .zip (Office 2008 files are nothing more than an XML file, with additional folders for embedded data, compressed as .zip and with a specific extension). When you close the Information panel, the Finder will ask you whether you are really really sure, and you can say Yes.You can then double-click it to reveal it’s inner structure… and all the embedded media files in a “media” subfolder

De temps à autres, on m’envoie un document Word ou PowerPoint contenant tout un tas d’images. J’ai parfois besoin de récupérer ces images, de les modifier, les réduire, etc… Il n’existe pas de moyen réellement simple de récupérer ces fichiers depuis les documents en question. Bien sûr, je peux copier et coller dans l’éditeur de mon choix, mais on ne sait jamais dans quel format les fichiers étaient, on a donc tout un tas de difficultés.

Je travaillais à la question aujourd’hui et j’ai trouvé deux solutions
1) Utiliser FileJuicer. Cette excellente application peut extraire tout fichier incorporé dans les documents Word ou PowerPoint (et bien d’autres encore).
2) Pour les fichiers Office 2007/8, faites une copie du fichier, sélectionnez-là dans le Finder, utilisez le raccourcis Cmde-I pour afficher les informations dans dans ce panneau remplacez l’extension .dox ou .pptx en .zip (Les fichiers Office 2008 ne sont rien de plus qu’un fichier XML, avec des dossiers liés pour les données associées, le tout compacté en .zip et avec une extension spécifique). Refermez le panneau des informations et le Finder vous demandera si vous êtes vraiment vraiment certain de vouloir faire ça. Une fois fait, vous pouvez double-cliquer le .zip dans le Finder pour le décompresser. Vous obtenez un dossier avec, dans un des sous dossiers, un dossier « media » contenant tous les fichiers associés dans leur format natif

(en français plus bas)

I’ve been rather silent lately. It’s a bit sad since there was a lot of things to talk about. It’s just that I’ve been really overwhelmed and I just could not find the time to sit down and post here everything that was going on…

• One of the most important news is that VBA is coming back in the next version of Office. That means that everybody who relies on VBA (and I know quite a few) will benefit from a rewritten VBA implementation as of Office… 20xx?
• The Office for Mac team blog also announced that the Solver would be back for Office 2008 (free of charge) in mid-September.
• The Office 12.1.1 update came out. This update fixes the creator type code issue that prevented people from opening their files through a simple double-click is gone.
  The problem was related to downloaded files getting (through the application downloading them) outdated creator codes. For some undisclosed reason related to security, Office was refusing to open them. You had to use the Open command in Office. Well this is history now (and so are the scripts I wrote to fix the issue by correcting the creator code of affected files).
  The update brings along the latest Auto-Updater update. This means that if you install Office 208 today, all you need is the 12.1.0 update, then the 12.1.1. You can skip the auto-update update if you have already downloaded these two.
  With the new version I’m not experiencing as many SyncServices issues as I used to. Not perfect, but better…
• Office 11.5.0 is also out. A combo updater (so you can go straight from 10.0 to 10.5) bringing support for Office 2008 XML-based files if you also install the converters.
• Messenger 7.0.1 is out. Not much to say about it.
• Remote Desktop Connection 2.0 final is also out. The new version brings additional bug fixes and also a few improvements over the last beta.
• The EndNote folks released their Word 2008 add-on. A major re-write with serious improvements (seems a lot faster on my Mac). Only for EndNote X1… The installer works well if both Office and EndNote are in /Applications and if the Word startup folder hasn’t been customized. It wasn’t the case for me so I had to perform the installation manually. Not hard, but it’s a bit of a pain.

That’s it for now

J’ai été assez silencieux dernièrement. Ce n’est pas que je n’avais rien à dire, mais j’ai été atrocement débordé et je n’ai simplement pas eu le temps de venir par ici pour poster des nouvelles.

• Une des nouvelles les plus importantes est sans doute que le VBA sera de retour dans la prochaine version d’Office. Une excellent e nouvelle pour tous ceux qui se reposent sur ce language de macro commandes pour Office (et j’en connais un certain nombre). Cette version sera réécrite et on peut donc espérer des améliorations de performances du VBA dans Office …20XX ?
• Le blog officiel des développeurs d’Office a également annoncé que le solveur sera de retour pour Office 2008 gratuitement à la mi-septembre.
• La mise à jour Office 12.1.1 est disponible. Cette mise à jour fixe notamment le soucis lié aux codes créateurs qui empêchait l’ouverture par un simple double-clic de fichiers téléchargés par certaines applications. Ces applications ajoutaient un code créateur obsolète et pour des raisons liés à la sécurité (que Microsoft n’a pas expliquées) Office refusait de les ouvrir ainsi. Vous deviez passer par le menu Ouvrir dans Office.
  Tout ça est de l’histoire ancienne (tout comme le sont les scripts que j’avais écrits pour corriger le code créateur sur ces fichiers).
  Cette mise à jour apporte également la dernière version du module de mise à jour automatique. Cela sous-entend que pour mettre une version 12.0 à jour vous n’avez besoin que de la mise à jour 12.1.0 puis de la 12.1.1. Vous pouvez ignorer la mise à jour de l’auto-mise à jour si vous avez déjà téléchargé ces deux dernières
  Avec cette nouvelle version j’ai beaucoup moins de soucis avec les SyncServices. Pas parfait, mais mieux…
• Office 11.5.0 est également disponible. Une mise à jour combinée qui permet au demeurant de passer directement de 10.0 à 10.5.0 et apporte le support pour les fichiers Office 2008 basées sur le XML pour peu que vous installiez les convertisseurs.
• Messenger 7.0.1 est disponible. Pas grand chose à jouter.
• Remote Desktop Connection 2.0 final est disponible. Quelque corrections de bogues et quelques améliorations par rapport à la dernière version béta.
• Les développeurs d’EndNote on mis en ligne leur module externe pour Word 2008. Une ré-écriture massive du module d’intégration (qui semble bien plus rapide sur mon Mac). Uniquement pour EndNote X1. L’Installateur fonctionne correctement si Office et EndNote sont dans /Applications et si vous n’avez pas personnalisé le dossier d’ouverture au démarrage de Word. Ça n’était pas mon cas, et j’ai donc du faire l’installation à la main. Pas atroce, mais fastidieux. Grâce à cette mise à jour, nombre de chercheurs par ici ont pu abandonner Office 2004 et passer sous 2008.

C’est tout pour maintenant