Office 2007 is the most revolutionary Office suite from Microsoft in a long time, if not ever. The main Office applications ship with a radically new User Interface (UI) that breaks with basically all UI design tenants established over the past decades. The new file formats in Office 2007 are open, XML-based, free for anyone to use, fully documented and are going to be standardized by an international body. The new Office comes with PDF and XPS writing support, a completely new graphics engine, a new charting engine, Office themes, and many, many more major and minor improvements.

The move from Office XP to Office 2003 felt to me as if nothing had changed besides some cosmetics. The move from any previous Office version, or any non-Microsoft Office suite, to Office 2007 is a completely different animal. All Office books, training material, courses, etc need to be redone from scratch. All users need to relearn where their familiar features can be found in the new UI. Then there is the struggle with the new file formats that alone is any administrator’s nightmare. And if all of that isn’t enough, Office 2007 also comes with a new set of default fonts. So if you open up Word 2007 and just start typing, the result won’t even look the same as in any previous version.

For users and administrators, Office 2007 is the upgrade from hell. It requires a massive relearning and retraining, as well as a complicated rollout and implementation plan. Is it worth the trouble? Absolutely.

Documents created with 2007 look stunningly professional. The new open file formats will allow business to easily integrate Office documents into their electronic workflows reducing their cost and allowing them to offer new products and services easier than they could before. The new UI gives users the ability to use features, they never knew existed before. Users can now achieve things faster and better than before, hence increasing their productivity. It also feels more logical and natural to use. For example, after having used it since November 2005, I resent every second that I have to use Office 2003.

Nonetheless, not everything is shiny with Office 2007. Power users and add-in developers often just feel left in the rain. The 100% customizable Office 2003 UI has been reduced to one that is barely customizable without third party tools or learning an HTML-like language. Access and usability of more advanced features frequently used by power users has been made harder and more difficult with the new UI. The time investment required for a power user to relearn Office is immense. For example, it took me at least a month of almost exclusively working with 2007 to feel comfortable with it. The new UI also comes with a completely different customization model, which means that add-in developers now need to support two vastly different models if they have to support more than one Office version. Or, at the very least, change their add-ins from the pre-2007 model to the new one.

The move to 2007 will come with a lot of sweat and tears. It won’t be easy and it will be a hell of a ride. At the end, I firmly believe though, the ride will have been worth it. My blog and website will help you along. I will cover all aspects of customizing Office 2007. I will also talk about OneNote 2007. In-between the two, I’ll throw in some tidbits about other parts of Office 2007. So…stay tuned

Patrick Schmid

With B2TR out of the door, Office 2007 is at a point where any kind of documentation should be stable and applicable to the final product. B2TR however brought one final revision of the Ribbon UI and RibbonX. Due to that, all examples, screenshots and add-ins posted on my add-in are outdated. I took the opportunity and started an overhaul of my website:

1. The normal and comment RSS feeds are now redirected through FeedBurner. This will allow me to finally know how many of you are subscribing to my blog via RSS.
2. I placed RSS icons in prominent spots across my page in the hope that this will get me more subscribers. The links to the RSS feeds were buried at the bottom of my page previously.
3. If you would like to subscribe to my blog via email, you can do this now too.
4. I submitted my blog to Technorati.
5. I reduced the number of blog posts that appear on one page, as the pages got rather crowded and long.
6. My B2TR issues blog post is very popular. To make sure everyone visiting my website can easily find it, there is now a link to it on the top of my page. This link will stay there until RTM.
7. The sidebar has been slightly changed as well. I reduced the number of blog categories and blog months shown there to make it less crowded. In addition, I introduced two sub-points for Office 2007 and highlighted the Office 2007 items
8. There are a number of new and changed pages that have basically no content on them right now (Customize Office 2007, RibbonX, OneNote 2007, Office 2007).
9. I fixed a number of CSS-related issues. The page should now render fine and almost the same way in IE6, IE7, Firefox and Opera. Thanks a lot to FrontPage MVPs Cheryl Wise and Murray Summers, as well as Windsun for their fantastic help (gross understatement, they told me what to do, I followed their instructions) with this in the Expression Web MS newsgroup.

What can you expect from this website and blog going forward?

1. I started my blog to talk about the Office 2007 UI and customizing it. Over time, it ended up becoming a mix of topics, which it will continue to be. Some will be more personal in nature (such as my friend’s cool wireless device or my hard drive upgrade story). Some will be news (such as the release of B2TR). Some will talk about Office 2007 in general. Some will talk about OneNote 2007 specifically. And last, but not least, some will be about customizing Office 2007 and RibbonX.
2. If you are new to customizing Office 2007 and RibbonX, my blog is not the best guide to learning it. The RibbonX posts are not really linear in order, nor is it easy to find the posts that you should start reading with. If you are using this blog as a reference, then it is equally hard to find your away around. Posting the content as a blog though makes it easy for me to write the content (as I can do that in OneNote) and it makes it easier for you to not miss anything new. In order to improve the navigation of previous posts though, the Customize Office 2007 page will become the starting point for anyone interested in the topic. I will provide links to all blog posts related to that topic on that page. Everything RibbonX will be linked to from the RibbonX page. So whether you are looking for a getting started guide on RibbonX, a RibbonX reference or just a list of add-ins you can use to customize Office 2007, that section of my website will get you to what you are looking for quickly. I hope this new organization structure will make your life easier on my website.
3. Over the coming weeks, I will repost all relevant customization blog posts with updated content, examples and B2TR screenshots taken under Vista. As I repost them, I’ll integrate them into the new organization structure. I will also make sure that all posts are fully accessible. Some of my earlier posts are not, as alternate titles for images are missing.
4. I am fairly active in the Microsoft community newsgroups. A side effect of that is that I often end up giving the same answer multiple times. From now on, whenever I think that a particular answer I gave would be helpful for a lot of people, I’ll convert it into a blog post and integrate it into the relevant Office 2007 page on my site.
5. I love OneNote. Hence I’ll be featuring OneNote specific posts on my blog going forward.

Let me know what you think all of this by commenting on this post. Also, let me know if there is any specific content you’d like me to blog about in the future.

A friend of mine here at Lehigh has been experimenting with wireless LAN adapters for years now. What interested him especially was trying to connect to access points outside the normal range of a standard wireless adapter, whether built-in or not. A standard wireless adapter is omni-directional, which means it can communicate with a wireless access point that is anywhere within a circle with around 300 feet radius (~90 meters). His experimenting started in his dorm room, where he tried to connect to an access points in a building in line of sight using a wireless adapter and a parabolic dish. The idea being, that a directional wireless adapter would have a significantly larger range than a standard omni-directional ones.

Years after those first experiments, he doesn’t have the parabolic dish anymore. Instead, he has now his own start-up that just brought an iPod-size directional wireless adapter to market, the Wi-Fire.

The Wi-Fire is a USB device and comes with drivers for Windows XP. For Vista RC1, you can download the drivers from Windows Update. Being a directional WLAN adapter, you can connect with it to access point 1,000 feet (~300 meters) or more away while it doesn’t require more power than a built-in omni-directional WLAN adapter. As you can see in the picture, it is rather small. It is sturdy though, as it has easily survived in my full laptop bag.

I personally use it in my favorite restaurant off-campus. With my tablet, I get shaky reception of my university’s WLAN there. With the Wi-Fire, I can eat while checking my emails, posting in the MS newsgroups and reading the news without having to repair my WLAN connection every 5 mins. I’ll be travelling in a few weeks, and I’m already curious to find out which free WLAN of some airport lounges I’ll be able to hop on to

If you aren’t a mobile user, but have an ISP nearby that provides WLAN (e.g. your university campus), but you are just outside the range of it, then the Wi-Fire might be what you need to get a good connection.

If you are interested to find out more about hField’s Wi-Fire, check it out now.

Important: Office 2007 Beta Ending Soon

Important: Please do NOT email me asking for assistance. Please post all your issues directly into the appropriate Microsoft community newsgroup.

Important: With RTM downloads now available, do NOT mix Beta and RTM!

For RTM issues, see my RTM issues post. 

Now that B2TR has been released, the first issues are cropping up. You should read this BEFORE installing B2TR.

Everyone

• Microsoft is recommending that everyone delete the “Building Blocks.dotx” file in order to have the most up-to-date content in galleries. To do so, use Start, Run, type “%appdata%\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks” and delete the file “Building Blocks.dotx” there. Word will recreate the file automatically once you open it again and drop-down a gallery. Note that you shouldn’t delete the file, if you moved the Building Blocks (galleries e.g.) content.
• The RSS support of Outlook has been significantly improved in B2TR. Due to that, Microsoft is recommending to follow the steps outlined in this MS blog post.

File Not Found / File Not Available

• When you try to open files in Access, PPT, Word or Excel B2TR, you receive the message “File not Found”. Or, your files just won’t open.
  Solution (from the known issues page): Office has an anti-virus API which we call every time we load a file. In 2007 Microsoft Office a change was made to support scanning encrypted macros. In making this change, we inadvertently changed the size of a data structure in the conversation, and Symantec’s Norton scanner returns an error saying this was unexpected. We treat ANY error from the scanner as a critical failure and block opening files. Unfortunately we do that in ALL cases where the scanner is called. In short with 2007 Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh and Norton Antivirus (any version) the user cannot open any files in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access and Project. The user receives an error of File failed to open, File not found, etc.
  We currently only see this with the Symantec’s Consumer Norton AV product. Most corporate deployments do not use this plug-in. We are also checking other scanners to see if they are affected. In the Norton case the best option is to disable the Office plug-in. See Method 2: in this KB for guidance on how to do that.
• When you try to open files in Excel B2TR, you receive the message “File not Found”.
  Solution: In Excel, this could be due to the following checkbox being checked: Excel Options, Advanced, General section, Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE).

File Format Issues / Corrupted Files

• It is good practice to save all files created in the new file formats (docx, xlsx, pptx, etc) in the 97-2003 file formats (doc, xls, ppt, etc) before installing B2TR. If there any issues with your files in B2TR, you are then able to resort to the versions in the older file formats.
• Files created in B1 and B1TR will NOT open in B2TR. You need to save them under a different file name in B2.
• Word files saved in Beta 2 in the new XML file format (dotx, dotm, etc) should open in Word B2TR. If you are having issues with a file, please email it to me right away. As a precaution though, you should save all your Word files in the 97-2003 document formats (doc, dot) in Beta 2 before installing B2TR. This will guarantee that you can still open them in B2TR.
• Files created in Excel 2007 Beta 2 in the new XML file formats should open in Excel B2TR without any problems. If you experience any problems with these files, please email them to me right away.
• Files created in PowerPoint Beta 2 in the new XML file formats should open in PowerPoint B2TR. If you experience any problems with these files, please email them to me right away.
  The only exception is: Custom Colors and Custom Fonts saved as a theme (*.thmx) or presentation (*.pptx) from Beta2 do not show up in Theme Colors or Theme Fonts galleries when opened/applied in Beta 2 Technical Refresh (B2TR).
• When you open Word or Outlook, it complains about “Normal.dotm” or “NormalEmail.dotm” being corrupt or being in the wrong format.
  Solution: The issue should disappear when you open Outlook/Word again. If that isn’t the case, type “%appdata%\Microsoft\Templates” into Start, Run (this is the location for Windows XP), and rename the two files there to something else. This will force Outlook/Word to recreate them from scratch in the correct format.
• When you open Word and when you try to insert an item from a gallery, you get a message that “Building Blocks.dotx” is corrupted.
  Solution: Start, Run, type “%appdata%\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks” and delete the file “Building Blocks.dotx” there. Word will recreate the file correctly when you open it again.
• When you open a new XML file format Word document (dotx, dotm, etc) in Word 2007 B2TR, you receive a message that the file is corrupted.
  Solution: The file you tried to open was most likely created in B1 or B1TR. B2TR cannot read files created in B1 or B1TR. You should open the file in B2 and save it using Save As under a new filename. As an additional precaution, you should also save it in the 97-2003 document formats (doc, dot).
  

Installation of B2TR

• There is a minimum requirement for 2.0 GB of free space on the Windows
  partition in order to install the client patch. This is a hard requirement
  that is needed because of the large size of the client patch (nearly 500
  mb), and the way that Windows Installer patching works. Some of this space
  will be returned after installation, but no more than 500 mb can be expected
  to be returned after installation. If you do not have enough disk space on
  this partition, you should take steps to increase the amount of free space.
• If you have tampered with the \MSOCache folder or it is damaged in some
  way, you will be prompted for the source files. Do not move or delete this
  folder.
• The B2TR patch cannot be uninstalled. The only way to revert your installation back to Beta 2 is to remove Office 2007 completely and the reinstall Beta 2.
• Once you have installed the B2TR patch, you cannot install any Office 2007 Beta 2 programs anymore.
• If you downloaded the German language pack for Beta 2 English, then you have to download the full German B2TR patch as well. Otherwise, the German spell checker will crash in Outlook and Word. In addition, you need to get the German B2TR SLP patch as well. The SLP specific patch does not include the German spell checker which is contained in the full German B2TR patch. If you want to, you can also extract proof-de-de.msp from the full German B2TR patch and install it and the German SLP patch only.
• See this KB article for troubleshooting B2TR installation issues.
• B2TR and all B2TR downloads (e.g. PDF add-in) are compatible with Vista RC1. If you want do a clean install of Vista RC1 with Office 2007, then install RC1 first, followed by Office 2007 Beta 2 and then B2TR. If you have a current installation of Vista Beta 2 with Office 2007 Beta 2, then install B2TR first followed by the update to Vista RC1.
• Do not install B2TR on Vista Beta 2, if you are not planning to immediately upgrade to Vista RC1. B2TR is designed for Vista RC1 and you will probably not be able to use Office 2007 B2TR under Vista B2.
• If you find yourself unable to remove Office 2007 B2TR or to reinstall Office 2007 Beta 2 after removing it, please contact me via email.
• If you have OneNote 2007 installed, please read my OneNote B2TR post as well.

Instant Search, BCM, PDF, XPS, Add-Ins, Expression Web, Links in Outlook, Misc

• Instant search for Outlook and OneNote is not available in Vista Beta 2.
  Solution: You need to upgrade to Vista RC1.
• All add-ins written for Office 2007 don’t work anymore, and/or give error messages.
  Solution: Disable those add-ins for now and wait for updates from the developers. Microsoft changed a lot. The new control ID list is now available for download (posted by Jensen Harris and linked from his blog). You can now also get the new customUI.xsd.
• BCM Beta 2 is not compatible with Outlook 2007 B2TR.
  Solution: Download BCM B2TR
• After installing B2TR, files cannot be saved in PDF or XPS format.
  Solution: Due to a legal disagreement with Adobe, Microsoft is providing XPS and PDF functionality only as downloadable add-ins (PDF, XPS, PDF and XPS).
• Windows Desktop Search 3 Beta 1 is not compatible with Outlook and OneNote B2TR.
  Solution: Install Windows Desktop Search 3 Beta 2.
• Expression Web Beta 1 can be installed after the B2TR patch has been applied.
• In Outlook 2007 B2TR running under Vista RC1, you receive the error message “This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator” when you click a link in Outlook.
  Solution: FireFox seems to be responsible for this. Check this blog post for steps on how to resolve the error.
• Word 2007 crashes moments after opening under Vista RC1. Your default printer is a Dell 5100CN network printer.
  Solution: Make a different printer your default printer.
• If you have a completely corrupted Ribbon after installing B2TR, remove all Office 2007 applications and reinstall them again as Beta 2 followed by B2TR.
• You cannot use Word 2007 as Outlook 2003’s email editor. Outlook 2003 was not designed to work with Word 2007. This is not a bug. This is by design.

I’ll keep updating this post with new information.

If you can’t find the solution to an issue here, please check the official known issues list.

You can download B2TR here. All B2TR downloads are available on the Microsoft download page.

Hint: If you have subscribed to my blog with Outlook 2007 B2TR and would like to be told by Outlook whenever I update this post, then go into Tools, Options, Other, Advanced Options and check “Any RSS Feed item that is updated appears as a new item”. This will ensure that this post is marked as unread by Outlook after I posted an update.

Note: All the examples and add-ins posted on this blog do NOT work with B2TR. I’ll be updating them in the coming days/weeks.
Last updated 2006-09-29 12:08 ET

Here are some release notes from Daniel Escapa:

• It is a patch update, that means that you _must_ have Office 2007 Beta2 installed on the system.
• The patch for OneNote will include the patch for all of Office so you don’t need two downloads.
• Since it includes both products (as well as others) it will be big! ~495 megs (English version) so be ready with your downloads
• It will be free, no charge for the download
• Make sure that you install the newest version of WDS so that search works great in OneNote & Outlook
• Make sure to download the PDF+XPS addin if you want to publish to those formats
• Per usual you can open notes created in OneNote 2007 B1, B1TR, B2 & B2TR but once you open the notes in OneNote 2007 B2TR they will be updated to the newest version of the OneNote 2007 file format. You will not be able to open B2TR files in B2, so if you are really cautious you might want to make a backup of your files before opening OneNote 2007 B2TR for the first time. I don’t do this but then again I am not that cautious as some of your are and I don’t store my class notes in OneNote : )
• If you open for the first time since OneNote 2003 then it should take of upgrade automatically however if you ran OneNote 2007 Beta2 at any point then the first boot reg key will still be set.
• Log bugs for issues that you have!

WDS3 Beta 2: http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archive/2006/08/22/713234.aspx
XPS & PDF add-ins: http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archive/2006/09/14/752951.aspx
Office preview site: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx
Log bugs at: http://connect.microsoft.com/onenote/
There are a few more very important things:

• The patch itself cannot be uninstalled. You can only remove Office & OneNote 2007 in their entirety, but you cannot revert back to the Beta 2 level.
• Once the patch is installed, you cannot install any Beta 2 program anymore. That means if you e.g. only have OneNote 2007 Beta 2 installed, but want to take a look at the rest of Office 2007 later on, you will have to install Office 2007 Beta 2 before you install the B2TR patch. Once the patch is installed, you basically can’t add any 2007 programs to your computer.
• Keep the beta 2 downloads and the B2TR download somewhere on yourharddrive. Any reinstallation will require you to install Beta 2 first, followed by the patch.
• You should focus on reporting bugs that are showstoppers. Microsoft is aiming to lock down OneNote 2007, so only bugs that have serious negative impact for users will be fixed.
• Synchronize all notebooks first before installing B2TR. You will have to install the patch on all your computers with ON 2007 as well before you can really use ON again.
• There have been important changes made to OneNote 2007 synchronization. These changes affect you if your OneNote notebooks are contained in a folder that is held offline by Windows XP Offline Files. This is mainly the case, if your OneNote Notebooks folder is contained in a redirected My Documents folder. If you are in this situation, then OneNote B2TR will no longer synchronize your notebooks with its ownmechanism, but rather leave it up to Windows Offline Files. That means, that you no longer benefit from the ability to edit the same section at the same time on two or more computers and have all the changes merged. Instead, it is a file level synchronization. Microsoft had to take this step, as they couldn’t get ON synchronization to work well with Windows Offline files. I suggest therefore to use the following approach for upgrading to B2TR:
  1. Make sure that all notebooks are fully synced (open ON and press F9 on every computer, then wait till you see all notebooks with a checkmark) and there are no errors.
  2. Before installing B2TR (on all computers), uncheck Tools, Options, Synchronization, “Disable Windows Offline Files”. Don’t reboot yet. This option has been removed in B2TR, which means that the changes it makes to Windows can’t be easily undone after B2TR is installed.
  3. Close all notebooks on all computers.
  4. Reboot all computers.
  5. Install B2TR on all computers.
  6. Move the .one files on the server (the computer that holds the non-offline copy of them, prob. your desktop) into a new folder that is not kept offline anywhere. For example, I moved my “OneNote Notebooks”folder to the root of one of my drives, as it was beforehand under My Documents. Share that folder in Windows.
  7. Open ON on your server. It might create the ON default notebooks. If it does, just close them all.
  8. Open ON on your other computers, open all your notebooks and adjust the destinations for the filing rules (Tools, Options, Outlook Integration and Send to OneNote).
  9. Now you should be all set to go with B2TR and still enjoy the benefits of the great ON synchronization mechanism.