Monthly Archives: October 2010

Nadyne, travel

the window vs aisle debate

4 Comments

I saw a link on Upgrade: Travel Better to a travel survey that attempts to understand the differences between those who sit in the window and those who sit in the aisle.  I’m firmly in the window camp — in fact, I vastly prefer the starboard window to the port window.  This is a result of an old injury to my right shoulder, sitting in the starboard window seat means that no-one can accidentally bang my shoulder.

Aside from protecting my bionic shoulder, I like the window because I like looking out the window (especially on evening flights returning home from Redmond — I love watching the sun set from the plane.)  The window seat is easier to nap in because I can lean on the window.  When I get aisle seats, I’m forever getting whacked in the head by someone who isn’t paying attention with their bag or their coat.  I’m even writing this blog post from seat 16F on Virgin America using their in-flight wifi.

For the most part, I match the aisle dweller much better than the window dweller:

  • I am married.
  • I have given a speech to more than 100 people (and I wonder how big my audience will be at Exchange Connections next week!).
  • I habitually check email — it’s a Big Deal if I turn off email sync on my iPhone.
  • I view “roughing it” as “staying in hotel that isn’t a very good Westin or W”.  I’m not sure that it would be possible to convince me to go camping.
  • I have subscriptions to Rolling Stone, Food and Wine, and Wine Spectator.
  • I have lots upon lots of books.  I’m currently reading Being Geek.
  • I’ve voted in every federal, state, and local election since I turned 18 (and filling out my California absentee ballot is on my to-do list for this weekend when I get home from this trip).
  • I have Premier status on United, and I’m a member of several other airline programmes (including my current favourite of Virgin America — love them!), and I have elite status with both Starwood and Hyatt hotels.
  • I don’t like camping, and I haven’t been on a cruise either.  The concept of a cruise mostly isn’t very attractive to me, although I would like to go on an Alaskan cruise.
  • Yes, I’ve eaten caviar, and will do so again.
  • I have a total of three college degrees, one of which is a MS.
  • I can’t stand Ikea.  I’ve been in Crate & Barrel lately, but all of their sofas are either tan, a slightly-padded rectangular box of boring, or a sectional (or all of the above), so I’m in the market for a brightly-coloured sofa that has a nice shape, is comfortable, and is emphatically not a sectional.
  • I mostly find New Yorkers fine, although I refuse to drive in Manhattan.  That’s not really about New Yorkers, though, but rather about being in a city with both useful public transit and lots of cabs everywhere.
  • I just got my passport renewed, and am headed to Sydney for the holidays so that it will get its first stamps.
  • I have two AmEx cards (one business, one personal).
  • I have a well-stocked bar, I have several Riedel glasses for different varietals.  On my last trip to Sydney, I brought back four cases of wine after a couple of days visiting wineries in the Hunter Valley.  I just finished the last bottle from one of those cases last week.
  • I’ve been on the internet since 1993 (and BBSes before that).

So where do I match up with my fellow window-seat lovers?  Well, I am female, and I’m 34 so I’m just barely still in the right age range.  I use a manual toothbrush.  I bake frequently (including peppermint-mocha cupcakes earlier this week).  I don’t wear a wristwatch, although I do admit to coveting a co-worker’s Lego watch.  The aisle profile is much closer to me, but I avoid the aisle if at all possible.

What about you?  Where do you fit into the great window/aisle debate?

Office:Mac 2011, user experience

the design of the new Office:Mac icons

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Along with all of the other changes, Office:Mac is sporting new icons for all of the applications.  We worked with Frog Design to create these visual elements.  Frog posted about redesigning an icon to talk about what went into creating the new app icons, and Fast Company Design has a discussion of it too: How Frog created the Mac icons for Microsoft Office 2011.

App icons are important.  They’re one of the first things that you see when you install an application.  They live in your Dock, and you see them every day.  It’s important to get ’em right, and I think that Frog did an awesome job.  I’m terribly biased, but I especially like that lovely goldenrod O that has been a constant companion in my Dock for months.

Office:Mac, user experience

TechFlash interview with Eric Wilfrid and Takeshi Numoto

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I just saw that my boss, Eric Wilfrid, and his boss, Takeshi Numoto, have an interview in TechFlash today: Mac and Windows: Microsoft’s two Office teams getting tighter.  I especially like Eric’s question about how MacBU manifests its independence:

The pride is absolutely there in tailoring an Office experience for the Mac and for what Mac customers would expect. In 2011, you’ve probably seen the full-screen view in Word. That’s an experience that my team came up with based on Mac customer needs and something that we could do really, really well on the Mac. I think that you can expect to see us continue to do that, where there’s an experience piece of Office that really makes sense on the Mac, whether it’s full-screen view or the way we do the ribbon or the new dynamic reorder. We’ll continue to have a different voice that matches our customer needs.

And that is exactly why I do what I do!

Office:Mac 2011

Office:Mac 2011 is available in stores today!

21 Comments

Today is an awesome awesome day, for Office:Mac 2011 is now available at your favourite local Apple retailer.  I’m in an airport right now, but I’m going to see if I can make some time to check out an Apple Store to see my product on their store shelves.

If you don’t have your copy yet, you can purchase and download it online from us.  The Apple Store and other retail stores have it today, and the fine folks at Amazon are happy to set you up too (either the single-license or three-license version of Home and Student Edition, or the single-license or two-license version of Home and Business Edition — and since you simply must have Outlook:Mac, you really want the Home and Business Edition!).

Eric Wilfrid, our GM here in MacBU, has written a blog post to kick off today’s retail launch: It’s here – get your copy of Office 2011 Today! Once you’ve gotten it and had a chance to try it out, I’d love to hear what you think!

Entourage, Office:Mac 2011, Outlook

identities in Outlook:Mac and Entourage

In the comments thread for Q&A: where can I buy Office:Mac 2011?, a commenter named Mark discussed the differences between identities in Entourage and Outlook, and said that the changes would mean that he won’t upgrade to Outlook.  Here’s part of his comment:

I, as well as others I know, share a computer with a partner. The main reason we use Entourage instead of Mail, was the ability to easily switch identities, so that each of us can separately check and view the various personal and business accounts we have.

In Entourage, the identity is where all of your data is stored: accounts, preferences, your data, everything.  The identity is an implementation detail that most applications wouldn’t expose, since most people have little reason to care about how this kind of thing is stored.  However, back when Entourage was first introduced, there was another purpose for exposing the concept of the identity: multiple people who share the same computer.

Longtime Apple users will know that the ability to quickly switch between accounts wasn’t originally part of OS X.  So in the case of email, if multiple people wanted to share a computer but keep their mail separate, it was pretty difficult.  Entourage’s identities allowed for this to happen.

But the introduction of fast user switching in Panther changed things.  Instead of having a single user account, it’s very easy now to have multiple user accounts for different purposes.  Each of those different user accounts can then run Entourage or Outlook to get their mail.  Switching between users is quick and easy.

As we worked on Outlook, we made the decision to continue to support multiple identities, but not to make it quite so obvious.  We don’t need to expose this implementation detail to the world.

Personally, I also have a shared Mac at home, for me and my husband.  For our shared Mac, we have a shared account (named Tipsy) which has all of our shared stuff on it: Netflix, Quicken for our joint finances, iTunes (and then we have playlists for syncing with our individual iPhones and iPods), iPhoto, etc.  Then we each have our own personal accounts for storing our own information.  For us, this is more about ease of access than privacy; he has his own organisational scheme and I have mine, and so we don’t force each other to figure out the other’s scheme.  If I need to access my stuff on our shared computer, I just quickly switch into my user account to get it, and then I usually return it to our shared account when I’m done.  We use different desktop backgrounds for the individual accounts so its easy to see which account is currently the one that has focus.

For my work computer, I also maintain different user accounts.  I have my primary user account, which is where I spend most of my time.  I’ve also got a demo user account, which I have populated with a bunch of demo documents and a couple of test Exchange accounts.  I often use my demo account when I’m giving presentations too, so that I don’t have to worry about whether I’ve logged out of Communicator.  If I’ve got Outlook running in both of my user accounts, it feels faster to switch between my user accounts rather than the old Entourage model of switching identities.

Office:Mac 2011, Outlook, Q&A

Q&A: Can I import my .PST files into Outlook:Mac?

19 Comments

Dean asked:

I am converting from Office:Windows 2010. Do my current .pst files work on Outlook:Mac 2011? If not, how do I convert from Office:Windows to Office:Mac?

Yes!  If you have a .PST file from Outlook for Windows (created using Outlook 2003 or later), you can import it into Outlook:Mac.  Just transfer the .PST file from your Windows computer to your Mac (such as putting it on a thumb drive), and then go to File -> Import in Outlook:Mac.

For full instructions for how to import your .PST file into Outlook:Mac, read this help file: Import a .pst file from Outlook for Windows.

Excel, Office:Mac 2011, Q&A

Q&A: does Excel:Mac 2011 have pivot tables?

5 Comments

Via email, I got this kinda perplexing question:

i heard that the new excel doesn’t have pivot tables – why are you keeping macs out of business???

I’m trying to figure out where this came from, and I’m not quite sure.  Excel 2008 already had pivot table support (to get started with pivot tables in Excel 2008, check out Create a pivot table report in the Excel help, and there’s a Lynda.com tutorial for it too).  My only guess about this confusion is that someone might have misunderstood Walt Mossberg’s review, in which he noted that Office:Mac 2011 doesn’t have all of the features of Office 2010 for Windows, such as pivot charts in Excel.

In Excel:Mac 2011, we made a big investment in improving matters for our power users, which includes some great improvements to pivot tables.  If you’re an Excel guru, check it out and tell us what you think.  I think that Excel gurus will especially appreciate the performance improvements.

Office:Mac 2011, Q&A

Q&A: why do I have to quit my web browser when I install Office:Mac 2011?

9 Comments

Via email, I got this question:

I installed Office 2011 last night.  I had Safari and Firefox open, but was forced to quit them during the Office install.  Why?

During the installation of Office:Mac, we install fonts.  Web browsers, since they’re heavily reliant on fonts, don’t particularly like it when you change fonts out from under them while they’re running.  If you install a font that the browser is using, then it’s likely to not display that font properly until you restart your browser.  To avoid this kind of issue, we simply ask you to close down your browser for a couple of minutes.

On a related note, Jim asked this in the comments thread in my post about latest Office 2008 and 2004 updates:

Why does the update to Office insist that I quit Safari????

Our updater uses some of the same code as our installer, and that’s one of the pieces we reuse.  We reuse that particular piece of code because an update could include font updates.

MacBU, Nadyne

user research at MacBU

1 Comment

Inspired partially by yesterday’s post, which included a mention of how I imported all of my existing data into Outlook, I decided to clean up my oh-so-messy Documents folders. We won’t discuss how much stuff was in there that I haven’t needed in years.

In that folder, I found a presentation that I gave earlier this year at the San José State University student chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.  This presentation gives me an excuse to try out embedding a PowerPoint presentation that’s stored on SkyDrive in my blog, so here goes: