I am completely in love with Microsoft office 2007. Every now and then I discover new little things in 2007 that just leaves me totally amazed. This blog entry is a result of one such feature in Word 2007 called "Prepare" (document).

And if you are some one like me, you will add comments to it as you go, you will have track changes enabled, you may have started this document by making a copy of another document and that would have retained some old metadata. And then when you finally send this to someone, you will send all this information along with it.

Imagine if this were your resume! Imagine you copied this from a friend and started working on it and he/she had put his/her name in the "Properties" document.

Imagine you are preparing a document for a customer. Then you send it to your team for review. You gets lots of comments which you probably don't want the customer reading. And you send it with all the comments in the document!.  If the customer is smart, he/she can choose "Show markup" and read those comments and possibly figure out some of your strategic moves.

But now there is the ultimate solution to this problem! And that's where the "Prepare" feature of Office 2007 comes  into play.

1. Check for properties (Go to Office logo button->Prepare-> Properties)

Make sure your document properties are clean

2. Inspect your document ( Go to Office logo button -> Prepare -> Inspect Document)

This is the killer. The deal breaker. Whatever you wish to call it. It will inspect your document for all hidden data and warn you about the same.

Upon inspection:

 3. Mark as final ( Go to Office logo button -> Prepare -> Mark as final)

This will drive home my point. It will finalize the document and make it read-only!

I was amazed by how simple Office 2007 makes this for you. And you of course do more things, "restrict document" , "add signature" etc.

Is it a special wireless camera that does it ? No. But it the memory card inside the camera! Yes, Eye-Fi  has developed this awesome memory card with Wi-fi inside it that lets you upload pictures to Windows Live Spaces or more websites as well to a specified folder on your PC without ever worrying about connecting a USB cable.

Upload to PC :The Eye-Fi card talk through the wireless router/hub to your PC and uploads it to the specified folder

Upload to Spaces: The Eye-Fi card talks through the Wi-fi router/hub to the Eye-Fi service which talk to Windows Live spaces and other social networking sites.

I am not surprised that Eye-Fi has already won top accolades from MacWorld, PCWorld, Yahoo etc!

NDTV is running a poll asking "Who will win the Australian Open?" But they are not leaving much choice for the readers!! The only answer I seem to be able to give is "Can't say"

Lot of people seem to disagree though :P

via ndtv.com

Paid Search
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adCenter.Microsoft.com

The insanely(some exaggeration) popular live search maps vista sidebar gadget is back. It is more secure and it was developed by none other than our popular neighborhood blogger friend LiveSide.net. Check out more gadgets from LiveSide at LiveGadget.net 

Go ahead install it. Get live traffic and never get stuck.

LiveSide also pointed out that more cities (Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Toronto) have been added by Microsoft Virtual Earth with live traffic information.

With that the current list of cities supported by Live Maps Traffic are:

Atlanta
Boston
Chicago
Dallas/Ft Worth
Denver
Detroit
Houston
Indianapolis
Las Vegas
Los Angeles
Milwaukee
Minneapolis
New York
Oklahoma City
Philadelphia
Phoenix
Pittsburgh
Portland
Providence
Sacramento
Salt Lake City
San Antonio
San Diego
San Francisco
Seattle
St Louis
Tampa
Toronto
Washington DC

via liveside

What will Gates do next? Really funny video showing the lighter side of Bill Gates. This was aired during Bill G's last keynote @ CES 2008.

  

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip  

Some time in November I had discovered that Live gives an instant answer if you search for a particular day, telling what happened on that day in history. For example, if you search of January 1, the first answer will be about January 1 in history.

Looks like the guys in MSN have created a new property called "Pop of the day" using this capability of Live Search.

The main page shows a calendar and it goes back up to November 2007 (that's probably when it was launched). Every day a new day on the above calendar is available for viewing. For example, today January 1 is prior to that is enabled. Tomorrow Jan 2 and so and so forth. Clicking on each day bring up a popup as below:

It also lets you pick a day in the year and that will take you the live search results page for that day.

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Check it out!