Part 3.1 Office 2007

I've learned the best way to learn how to apply for jobs: post one yourself and read the resumes.

Well, I'm not quite at that stage. I am compiling the resumes. Here are a few hints:

1. Send your resume and cover letter in PDF format. That's the easiest and most universal. Everyone can open PDFs, on any system, and they are pretty much always compatible with everything.

2. If you wish to send a second format, send a .doc or a .rtf.

3. Do not send weird formats from open-source software. Hell, I am a huge proponent of such programs, but they have their time and places. Sadly, cross-platform resumes are not one. Create them in a non-Word program and save them as PDFs.

4. Give people options. Send a PDF, a .doc and post your resume online.

5. If you have Office 2007, good on you. MAKE SURE TO SAVE YOUR RESUME AS AN OLD .DOC FILE! I can not stress this enough. If you send it to someone who does not have the latest version, they will not be able to read it.

Now, as to why Microsoft did not make this backwards compatible, I'll never know. Nor will I understand why they didn't, I don't know, send out a patch to everyone using Word. (Find me someone who would say, "no, I'd rather not be able to open files people send me thank you" and I'll find you a fish with a bicycle.) But, no, they have a "pack" (read: "patch") you have to download yourself, and for some ungodly reason a wee extension which should be a few hundred kbytes to convert xml to an older .doc format is 28 megabytes! And you have to restart for it to take effect.

It does, surprisingly, seem to, I don't know, work.

Part 16: Presenting with notes

Setting up projectors is hopeless. I think a clip from an article sums it up well:

A functional Presenter View has been included in Microsoft's PowerPoint 2007 ($95 upgrade at Amazon, for PowerPoint alone). Microsoft finally gave professional speakers software that allows us to have private, online notes synchronized with each of our slides.

But before you go running to install that product you should know three very important things: First, if you are a PowerPoint 2003 user seeking to get this feature you will be saddled with the significant cognitive overhead of having to learn PowerPoint 2007, with very marginal benefits for the vast majority of those who already know and are good at using PowerPoint 2003. PowerPoint/Office's 2007 ribbon interface is quite irritating to learn for PowerPoint 2003 users (there are third party plugins to get the classic 2003 interface but they don't help all that much). Second, remember that Microsoft doesn't allow PowerPoint 2003 and 2007 to exist on the same computer. They force you to install only one or the other on your machine. Third, don't think you can use PowerPoint 2007 on your laptop (for display) and your familiar 2003 on your desktop (to create and edit your presentations) without the following limitation. If you create anything in PowerPoint 2007 on your laptop, even using the 2003 compatible file type, it often won't display properly in PowerPoint 2003, and sometimes vice versa. So you if you install PowerPoint 2007 on your laptop to use its Presenter View you really shouldn't use your laptop to make or edit slides (unacceptable for most of us), or as I said, they won't display properly in PowerPoint 2003 (you'll get random font, size and italics changes when you try to import slides from your 2003 into your 2007 slide decks, lots of fun).

Bolds theirs, italics mine.

Where to start? Well, first it takes Microsoft years to figure out something which should be intuitive: that people want to have notes on the computer and slides on the projector. Trying to set it up in Office is hopeless, even when you are projecting on the computer and the screen it refuses to detect the second display.

Second, the updated version of their software was so braindead and not the least bit backwards compatible, so installing it results in a cascading litany of issues; enough that it is not even worth it.

Third, even this workaround doesn't necessarily work.

I only spent an hour trying to set the computer up to try to do this today. After failing miserably, I sauntered off, glad that it wasn't me making the presentation.

Part 3: XLSX my tuchus

Someone in the office wants to save excel spreadsheets on a different drive. They right click the files in explorer and choose "save as" and then it only lets they save it as an Excel 2007 file, with an .xlsx extension name. Other people who try to open them with older versions are thus up a creek. But, when you choose save-as from explorer, you can't save it as a good, old .xls file. Why? Who knows. But for a company which spends millions of lines of code making their OS backwards compatible, this is horrid. I used it to make the point that when we next upgrade our computer systems we should have a real upgrade to a real operating system. I'm just glad I'm not using windows. Did you see the bit in the NYT about Microsoft execs inside emails about how Vista was not nearly ready for market?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09digi.html

And this

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0226/050.html

is a great pan of Vista. Which I hope to never have the pleasure to use.

my dad responds

I saw the Times article, well done. The Forbes article sounds like you
could have written it. Our product has to support Vista in our next
release. I cringe at having to support our support of Vista.

That change to file formats in Office 2007 (not just in Excel) is a
real pain. Most people here still haven't upgraded, and I wind up
having two copies of everything. MS was under pressure from the
European Community to move to open formats, but you can't convince me
that anyone is going to adopt their new ones just because they're in
XLS. OS X is so far ahead of Vista that it's like the lead Toyota has
in hybrids.