I ran into a strange issue today when attempting to add Excel 2007 macro shortcuts to a Quick Access toolbar saved in a shared template. I could add the buttons and save them to the template, but as soon as I closed and re-opened Excel the buttons disappeared. Standard built-in Excel functions worked just fine when saved to the shared template.
Even if I added a few built-in buttons, and just a single macro link, the buttons would all disappear the next time Excel was closed and re-opened.
Turns out there’s a glitch in the way Excel stores the macro name in one of the stored XML files in the template. To correct this I needed to extract the template file (just rename the Excel macro-enabled template to a zip file then extract as you would any other compressed file), then remove the path information from the CustomUI.xml file. Specific steps can be found in the thread here:
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-3834831.php
Hopefully this will be corrected by Microsoft. Of course with the new Ribbon bars that may be easily edited in Office 2010 this may be less of an issue.
As a part of ITP’s ongoing commitment to being on top of the latest in technology and business practices we attend the latest in business conferences. Yesterday was entirely devoted to the cloud (cloud computing) and what it means for your business. The staggering statistic that’s facing IT companies is the Gartner prediction that 20% of companies in the next 5 years will have NO traditional IT.
That was balanced by Microsoft and HP’s presentations about hybrid cloud computing. They state what seems most likely to me, that people will need to protect certain data and that will still be on premise but that some data and some services/solutions can be delivered from the cloud more effectively and more cost efficiently today.
After session after session from the bleeding edge companies providing cloud and grid resources the takeaway most interesting to me at the end of the day came from Microsoft’s Matt Thompson, Platform Evangelist. He said (paraphrasing) that the cloud is still young and we have not yet seen the greatest innovations and that even Microsoft’s Azure (his baby) can use tunning and that service companies like ITP will be the ones that will help bridge the gap for our clients and the computing resources now available on demand from great companies like Microsoft.
Side note: Matt also said he loves his iPad. Between Matt’s comments and reading the announcements by Steve Jobs live as it came through from WWDC that the new iphone will have Bing on it. I started getting warm Apple and Microsoft thoughts, maybe we can all get along.
I’ve been noticing some amongst my clients about the web browser they’re using. Long established as the predominant browser in the market, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) is experiencing more competition than ever these days. As a long time fan of Internet Explorer I recently switched due to some frustrations with performance – specifically with the newest iteration, IE 8. Mostly my problems revolved around the way IE 8 presented text (often so small that it was unreadable) and errors experienced with certain java functions certain sites required. This isn’t to say that other browsers don’t have problems – quite the opposite, actually – but I found I didn’t mind the problems other browsers had as much. Anyhow, the three most popular browsers today (in my opinion) are IE, Google’s Chrome, and, Mozilla’s Firefox. I’ve decided Google Chrome works best for me. So what do you think? What browser to you use and why?
Applications, Tips and Tricks | jwilets | 
June 11, 2010 8:41 pm | 
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