Category: Solution Architecture

My Tools: Word Outlining

Jimmy and GrandadI pondered for a little while how I should start this series of posts on the tools that I use. I only pondered for a little while, for some reason I settled quite quickly on the outlining capabilities with Microsoft Word.

Most of my working hours used to be spent editing reasonably large documents. A significant proportion of my time creating documentation. Many of these documents already have a defined structure, but I don’t think in linear defined structure, I think non-linearly. I have never written a document by starting at the beginning of the document and writing until I have finished, my brain just doesn’t work that way.

There are a lot of people who are exactly the same as me.

The information that I need to complete a documents is rarely available when that I start it. Most of the time it’s not until I start the document that I know what information I actually need.

These two major factors mean that it is inevitable that I work on different parts of the document at different times; adding something here, adding something there, moving something from one section to another section, adding new sections, removing sections.

When I work with other people I watch how they do things to see whether there is something I can learn. I’m always amazed at the small number who are using outlining.

I don’t know how I would cope without it, the alternative is lots and lots of scrolling.

Using Word Outlining

For those of you who don’t know what outlining is I thought I would give a short overview of how to use it.

Outlining mode in Word is accessed via the View controls in all version of Word.

Word then strips away all of the document formatting and gives you a structure of the document with each sub heading indented to show its level within the overall document.

You can open and close sections by clicking on the “+” and “-” at the start of each heading.

Sections are moved up and down a level by using the controls at the top of the screen (click on the arrows) or by using Tab (down a level) and Shift+Tab (up a level) with the cursor at the start of the heading.

To enter text inside the section, within the body, you need to choose the “Body Text” level alternatively you can use the incredibly useful key command CTRL+Shift+N. CTRL+Shift+N sets the paragraph style to be “Normal”.

The other really useful capability is the ability to only show sections at a particular level, do this by selecting from the drop down list in “Show Level”.

You can also drag and drop whole sections around the structure.

I find that keyboard shortcuts are really important for outlining because outlining is about the content and not about the style. Moving a mouse around takes away the focus, keyboard shortcuts retains the focus.

The outline viewing mode is very minimalist, more so in Word 2007 than any other, and this again helps to keep the focus on the content.

Sometimes when i am reviewing someone else’s document I view it into outline mode to see whether it tells the story from a structural perspective. It’s often the best way of noticing that whole sections are missing.

If you haven’t used outlining and you write documents, then you should.

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Older Users Take Longer – 0.8% Longer per Year.

Wordworth DaffodilsWhile I spend my last few hours as a thirty-something I was delighted to read a piece by Jakob Neilsen worryingly titled “Middle-Aged Users’ Declining Web Performance“:

Between the ages of 25 and 60, the time users need to complete website tasks increases by 0.8% per year.

In other words, a 40-year-old user will take 8% longer than a 30-year-old user to accomplish the same task. And a 50-year-old user will require an additional 8% more time. (Mathematically inclined readers will note that this increase is linear, not exponential.)

But it’s not apparently all bad:

Does this mean that people in their 40s or 50s can’t do their jobs? Not at all. There are many other ways in which people get better with age.

Individual differences swamp the tiny age-related difference in the 25- to 60-year-old group. Users are extraordinarily variable in their use of websites and intranets.

I have a 5-5-5 rule for task times while using websites: Across a broad range of studies, our data shows that

  • the slowest 5% of users are
  • about 5 times as slow
  • as the fastest 5% of users,

meaning that the slowest users need 400% more time to perform the same tasks. The 0.8% difference caused by each year of aging pales in comparison.

So, a fast 50-year-old will beat a slow 30-year-old every day — by several hundred percent.

Hopefully, I’m not one of the people in the slowest 5% 🙂 Time to refocus my efforts on “My Brain“.

(No this is not an April Fool)

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Simple Change Saves and Costs a Fortune

Jimmy and Grandad go to find the snow (or lack of it)I’ve been thinking a lot about all of the little things that make life simpler in tiny little ways, and also all of the things that do the reverse.

A few weeks back my employer changed the default policy for attachment forwarding. In the past email was forwarded with attachments by default, now it’s forwarded with the attachment stripped out. It was a really simple change, I even read about it in the communication material. The business justification was quite simple – save on some storage. I’m sure we were using lots of storage that we didn’t need to use because of redundant attachments floating around the place.

A nice sound direct cost reduction opportunity, who could argue with that.

I’ve been using (and support) email systems since they weren’t capable of handling attachments. All of that time attachments have been forwarded by default. If someone sends me something and I know that someone else needs to see it – I forward it, all of it. It’s obvious.

And there in lies that challenge – a direct cost reduction opportunity v my expectation.

I have already lost count of the number of times I have had to resend something that I forgot to send “with attachment”. I know that the default has changed – but I can’t make the change in my working practice. The cost of these mistakes is huge, it’s not just my time resending the item, it’s the time of the people who receive the denuded email. They have the thankless task of trying to get back in contact with me so I can send them something that they can use.

The other day I watched Emily struggling with cut and paste. I showed her how to use ctrl+x, ctrl+c and ctrl+v. She can’t get over how much easier it is for her to use. I thought about the amount of time she was wasting and wondered about the people using the 1 million+ desktop devices that we look after as an organisation.

I’ve recently been involved with a customer who was suffering from performance problems. One particular senior person was suffering the worst. An engineer looked at the contents of the device and noticed running software to synchronise to just about every hand-held device that has ever been produced. This person only uses a BlackBerry and don’t synch it with their laptop, they synch over the air.

It’s been an issue in the industry for a very long time – how to make people efficient. We don’t seem to be any further on. I suspect that I could save an organisation millions, and make a lot of people very happy by giving them small amounts of efficiency coaching.

One of the ways that we normally measure efficiency is to measure something and then improve it. But even there we don’t seem to be in a good shape. I’d quite like to be able to measure who long it take an application to start across an organisation – but there are scant tools available. I’d quite like to be able to measure how long it takes a desktop device to start-up and become usable – again, scant help tools available. As we are moving beyond reliability being our biggest issue, perhaps we’ll start to focus our attention on performance, real end user performance.

We definitely need to start assessing changes on the basis of overall end user cost, as a minimum. This should be offset against the direct cost savings.

Concept of the Day: Disconnect Anxiety

Jimmy and Grandad go to find the snow (or lack of it)Sometimes I feel I’m turning into a grumpy old man before my time and all that I am doing is raising the ills of IT. Unfortunately today is no exception.

Today’s ill is disconnect anxiety:

Disconnect Anxiety refers to various feelings of disorientation and nervousness experienced when a person is deprived of Internet or wireless access for a period of time.

If you are reading this blog you have probably experienced this anxiety and you are not alone. The Solutions Research Group has done some research in the US and the numbers are quite startling:

Overall, our research finds that 27% of the population exhibit significantly elevated levels of anxiety when disconnected. In terms of profile, 41% of this group are 12-24, 50% are 25-49 and 9% are over the age of 50.

A secondary group of 41% exhibit above-average levels of anxiety occasionally, depending on the situation.

The balance, 32% are below average in their anxiety response when unable to use their cell phones or the Internet. This group is disproportionately older than average (i.e., majority being 50+).

Or to put it graphically:

They went on to do research to try and understand why and how the anxiety was manifest. It’s a good report and links in nicely with a number of the things I’ve said previously about ADT and the machines taking over.

Perhaps that is why laptop free meetings are such tense affairs these days – everyone is experiencing disconnect anxiety.

Personally, I’m only occasionally anxious about being disconnected.

The summary of the report is here (pdf).

Hat tip to Endgadget.

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The Great Big Monitor Mystery and the Multiple Monitor Mystery

Jimmy and Grandad go to AmericaThere is clear research that giving people more screen real-estate makes them more productive. This has been recently highlighted by the Wall Street Journal. Numerous studies have shown similar results before (here, here).

So where it the mystery?

I work for an organisation that supports hundreds of thousands of desktop and laptop devices for its customers. As far as I know not a single one of those customers is beating our door down to provide large or multiple monitors to their staff.

These studies show significant productivity gains with a potential return within weeks. The equation would appear to be quite simple – spend £150 and get back hundreds of hours each year.

I’ve talked to a few customers about the research and the response was lukewarm at best.

If someone said to me that I could work 10% fewer hours if I spent £150 I think I would be quite interested.

So why such a tepid response from customers?

There are a number of possible reasons but two of them stand out:

  • They don’t believe it.
  • They don’t care.

If you have been around IT for any period of time you will have been involved in a project that promised significant productivity gains but delivered little, or was perceived to deliver little. No one believes it anymore, the level of cynicism is just too high. I have some sympathy for this point of view.

I suspect that it’s difficult to measure the real productivity benefit of screen real-estate for most knowledge workers because it’s difficult to baseline their productivity in the first place. There are, however, all sorts of ways of getting some level of understand and the cost of running a pilot deployment, for instance, could be quite low. So why don’t they?

I suspect that lack of belief isn’t the primary reason for the lack of interest. I think that the primary reason is that they don’t care, and the reason they don’t care is that it’s not their problem. Most IT organisations that I speak to are focused on managing the cost of IT rather than the value of IT. Productivity is a value – an extra monitor is a cost. These IT organisations don’t get the credit for adding to the productivity of the organisation, they just get beaten-up for adding to the costs.

Perhaps we need to abolish IT organisations, and turn them into productivity organisations.

A Technologist for 25 years

Jimmy and Grandad watch Mr. BenI’m soon going to be 40 (yes really). I wanted to write this posts before then so that it didn’t sounds like I was writing as a forty-something. For some reason it seems better it seems better to be looking back as a thirty-something.

I’ve been a technologist now for over 25 years. My love of technology started with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum which I received as a Christmas present at the end of 1982. I was dazzled by all of the potential. I had a friend who had the older ZX81 and we used to spend hours getting games to work (it took so long that you rarely actually played them) and writing some code. Once the ZX Spectrum arrived, though, I was off writing code day and night. One of my ‘O’ levels had a computing element and I submitted the code that I had written which I printed out on the silver thermal paper that the ZX Spectrum printer used. The teachers were amazed.

I’ve still got the aged ZX Spectrum in the loft.

After 25 years I’m now seeing things from a whole load of different angles. I often feel a bit like Sting who once wrote:

I never saw miracle of science
That didn’t go from blessing to a curse

For many of the technology advantages that I see I am also seeing many curses.

Miners compensation has recently made a return to the press in the UK. People suffered serious injuries over many years – mainly through ignorance. I look around me at work and I see all sorts of medical conditions that concern me. I see people who are clearly impacted by attention deficit trait. I see people who have a posture that has been impacted by years sat at a keyboard. The volume of people off work with stress is alarming. How long will it be before we start to realise what we have been doing to ourselves over all these years.

And then there are all of the ecological issue – particularly power consumption.

But beyond that I worry whether we are really doing any good at all.

I’ve talked before about teleconferences and their impact upon productivity. I’m sure that in many cases the impact has been a wholly negative one. On Monday evening I had to be at home to cater for a set of people who were coming around for diner. It was all planned in my diary, I was unavailable for work. But then an urgent teleconference was called – right in the middle of when I was most required. I should have stuck to my principles and said no, but I didn’t, I joined the call. The result was that I was sat at diner with the phone on speaker-phone rushing my food down. If the technology had not been available it would never have been an issue.

I work with a lot of customers who use office productivity software. There ability to produce content has gone through the roof. Once upon a time a document would have a single title page. Every document I receive these days has at least 3 or 4. Why? Because they can, lots of reiteration of the same information that someone thinks is important. I’m currently looking at a pile of paper over 1″ high. I need to review the contents of these document today. There are only a few things that I need to know, but I will have to trawl through the entire pile to be sure that they have been designed in the way that I need them to be. We seem to live in an age where the adage “never mind the quality – feel the width” has become a mantra. Why? Because it takes longer to say things precisely and succinctly than it does to blurt it all out. And the really demoralising thing is this, I know that most of these documents have been produced to get a tick in a box. They have been produced because the process says that they need to be. No one knows what the real purpose of the document is, they just know that they need one.

And then there is the issue of Internet usage and the risks that are involved.

But then I take a look around me and also into my own life, and I wonder?

Am I just being a grumpy old so and so?

I think about Jonathan and his dyslexia. He is coming up to taking his GCSE’s. In the past his hand written notes would have been ignored as too difficult to deal with. He would have been regarded as slow and a problem student. Today his typed notes and course work are usable and show his rich intelligence.

I think about the photographs that we took in Venice recently and the way that we could make them available to many friends. They get so be a part of my experience in a way that they never could have been before.

I think about the updates I get on twitter about colleagues who are hundreds of miles away. I get to be a part of their day in a way that I never could have been before.

I think about the GPS in my BlackBerry and how useful it is to be able to see a satellite view of where I am.

I think about my iPod and the podcasts that I listen to. As a tool of learning I’m constantly amazed at the knowledge that I can carry around and ingest on the move.

I think about the emails that I exchange with my brother as he works on a cruise liner somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. It takes weeks to get post to them.

I think about the way that I can go into a shop and talk to them about a purchase and check the price of the same goods in hundreds of other places before I decide to buy.

I think about the mountains of information that I consume every day. Thousands of blogs from hundreds of people. A breadth of information that was unthinkable in the days when I had to buy a paper to know anything about the world.

Sting may have said: “I never saw miracle of science. That didn’t go from blessing to a curse” and I think, to a certain extent he is correct. Each one of the benefits has a draw back. But Arthur C Clarke said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I think I am missing a little bit of magic at the moment, but I suspect that it won’t be long in coming.

Keeping a clean machine – so difficult

Jimmy and Grandad go to AmericaI’ve recently started afresh with a completely clean new machine. The aim of this machine is that it will eventually become my production machine.

I’m only adding things to this machine that I actually use. I’ve not made any pre-judgment on what I use, I have decided that I will start with a blank machine and add things as I need them.

My aim with this has been twofold:

  • I wanted to see what software I actually use – not just what I think I use.
  • I wanted to see how long it would be before I collected something that I will never use.

Today I received the first piece of software that I will never use – Adobe Photoshop Album Start Edition. How did I get it? I installed Adobe Reader. Just like that I now have software taking up resources on my device, and not just disk space, it also loads Adobe Photo Downloader. 2MB of memory stolen, just like that. I am now kicking myself. I nearly didn’t go with Adobe Reader, I nearly installed the Foxit Reader.

And now, to uninstall this software (that I never wanted in the first place) I have to close down all of my browser sessions because presumably it’s installed some extensions in there that I will never use either. And for some reason, that is bizarre in the extreme, I’m also having to close my Lotus Notes session.

This free software that I never wanted is proving to be very expensive (in terms  of my lost productivity) indeed.

last night I spent an hour at a friends house cleaning up a PC that had collected so much tat and rubbish that it was becoming unstable.None of the software was malicious, I’m sure that it would all be useful to someone, but it was all tat. Is there any wonder that people get to the point where they hate PC’s.

It’s like junk-mail, only worse and like junk-mail it needs an industry answer. In the UK we have a service that allows people to opt out of most forms of junk-mail call Mail Preference. Organisations that continue to send junk-mail get heavily fined. Perhaps we should start to do the same for software.

Appreciating Office 2007: SmartArt

Jimmy and Grandad go to AmericaThe out and out best part of Office 2007 has to be the new SmartArt capability. There are loads of times that I want to create diagrams that are relatively simple and portray a concept or an idea. Previously I would spend hours creating shapes with text in them that I would then structure into a diagram. These diagrams are essential to the work that I do.

With SmartArt the hours of messing about have become seconds and minutes. This allows me to focus on the message of the diagram, rather than on the look and feel of the diagram.

The ability to switch between different diagram styles with ease is a dream. I’ve started so many diagrams in one way, only to change them to a different diagram as I get further in.

I can see it becoming a new way that people can use to create even messier presentations – but that’s got more to do with a very poor understanding of what a good presentation looks like than it has to do with PowerPoint. Having said that, if I see more SmartArt and less bullet points I’ll be a happier person.

The best software for you is the software that aids the way that you already think, and that’s what SmartArt does for me. So I’m sure that some people will hate it, but I’m not one of them.

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Airports and Airlines – Customer Service Lessons

Jimmy and Grandad go to America

Over two weeks ago now, I was collected by a taxi at my house, we picked up a couple of colleagues along the way (The taxi driver was slightly late because he believed his satnav when it said he could drive down a dirt track to my house).

We eventually arrived at Manchester Airport.

We took our things along to the check-in desk and started to use the new automated check-in system. This change in procedure was new to me, and came as something of a surprise.

Check-in went quite smoothly until the machine decided that it didn’t like my passport, fortunately there were plenty of humans available to sort it out for me. Only after looking at the tickets afterwards did we realise that we had each been upgraded to Business Class for the main leg of our trip from London over to Seattle. In classically British fashion, no-one made a big deal of this, it was just something that happened.

It wasn’t until we were actually on the flight that we realised that we had the joy of Club World with beds. It was a wonderful surprise.

Customer Service Lesson #1 – Nice surprises are a good thing.

After a few days in Seattle and a trip down to San Francisco it was time to come home. It was a bit of a mad schedule and personally I was getting rather tired. We were already booked into Club World on the way home and I was really pleased that it was going to be a good opportunity to get my body clock back onto UK time.

I slept for nearly 6 hours on the way over from San Francisco, which is not bad going for a 9 hour flight.

Customer Service Lesson #2 – People really appreciate innovations when they add to the quality of their experience.

On arrival in London we had a couple of hours to wait before our flight to Manchester, being Club World travellers we had the use of the lounge.

Having reached the lounge I booked in for a shower and went to get a cup of coffee. I was only a couple of sips into my coffee when my shower slot was announced.

A shower proved to be just what I needed, it was wonderful to get clean for the day ahead, it also helped in convincing my body that it really was morning already.

Back from the shower I sat down with another coffee. Everything was well with the world. I was only a short flight from home and time with my nearest and dearest. But things were not going to stay that way for long.

Barely two sips into my coffee and another announcement changed everything. “Due to technical problem flight XX1234 from Manchester to London has been cancelled. Would all passengers please report to the ticket office for re-booking”. My first hope was that the receptionist at the Executive Lounge would simply sort it out for us – but I was wrong. We had to trundle off to the ticket office along with everyone else.

At the ticket office we stood and queued to see what our options were. The person at the front of the queue was clearly very upset and was not getting any resolution to the issues that they were facing. Things didn’t look good. People kept arriving at the back of the ticket office, but still only a single till was open and the person at the front of the queue wasn’t going anywhere.

The air was becoming thick with tension.

After several minutes of little progress it was time for a new announcement. Passengers with bags that had been checked in would need to go and retrieve them from international arrivals before you could re-book – that was us. But we couldn’t just go and get our bags because we needed someone to escort us. After even more minutes some more staff arrived to escort us to international arrivals. We were desperately putting together contingency plans for the seemingly inevitable disappointment.

All of us saw our hopes of getting a flight out of London on a Friday evening steadily transforming into a dim hope.

Customer Service Lesson #3 – Have a clear plan before a problem occurs, don’t make it up as you go along.

Customer Service Lesson #4 – Give people clear instructions, and keep to them.

So off we trundled to international arrivals for baggage collection, but we didn’t enter through any normal route, we entered through the staff security entrance.

It was chaos. A few hundred angry passengers, mixing with staff trying to get to work funnelled through a single security checkpoint with the most officious security staff that I have ever met. They were clearly put on the staff entrance because they were too rude to be allowed out the front with the real customers. The security staff were absolutely insistent that staff had priority, the paying passengers were treated like sheep, and dirty sheep at that.

At one point the security staff called a halt to it saying that there supervisors were not happy with it, an argument between the airport staff and the airline staff ensued right in front of us passengers. After a few minutes the British Airways representative came out and said that the only thing we could do was to go and book onto a flight without our bags and then to declare them as lost. The cries of “absolutely no way” could not have been stronger if they had suggested that leave our children behind.

Customer Service Lesson #5 – Even in the staff entrance I am still the customer and I expect to be treated as such.

Customer Service Lesson #6 – If multiple organisations are coming together to deliver a service I don’t want to see them working against each other. I want to see them working together for my benefit.

The security staff clearly understood that they had a problem and changed their minds, letting people through in groups of three to collect their bags. But only one member of each family. A mother travelling on her own with four children who was just behind me had to leave her children with a staff member to go and get her bags.

Customer Service Lesson #7 – Just because I am the person with a problem, does not mean that you can treat me as a problem person especially when you created the problem.

Talking to the airline representative she let slip her frustrations. She told us how she used to work in Nigeria before working in London – and how Nigeria was far more organised.

Customer Service Lesson #8 – If you’ve lost the support of your staff things are very bad indeed.

She also let on that bags used to be taken to the domestic lounge for collection but the number of cancellations was so high these days that the baggage handlers refused to do it anymore.

Customer Service Lesson #9 – If your service has a problem – fix the problem, don’t make the customers suffer for it.

Having retrieved our bags we were now out in the main arrivals lounge and had to go to the ticket desk there. Our hopes of achieving a rapid return home were diminishing fast as it was now more than two hours since we had started out on our little adventure. Everyone without bags had already rebooked and we were amongst those at the back of the queue. We were fortunate though, we managed to get a flight out in the early evening – with another airline.

With new tickets in hand we go to check-in at the new airline. That’s when the next snag landed. We are too early to check our bags in for the new flights. We can check-in, but we can’t get rid of our bags. We are all in need of another shower, one of our group has got a bad back which is worsening by the minute and we are all more fed up than we were expecting.

Customer
Service Lesson #10 – Have a plan that covers all of the problems and doesn’t leave people stranded.

We make our way into one of the local eateries and order a burger and chips.

The food arrives and has to be some of the worst food I have eaten in a very long time, absolutely no flavour. I know that there is nice food waiting for me in the lounge, but I can’t get to it for another two hours. We can’t even be bothered to complain.

Eventually time passes and we check-in, walk to the lounge, sit there and wait like scolded school boys for our flight to depart. We are beaten.

Customer Service Lesson #11 – If your customer feels defeated – you have lost.

Eventually our flight departs, almost on time. It had taken us 9 hours to get from San Francisco to London (5400 miles) and a further 9 hours to get from London to Manchester (185 miles).

Customer Service Lesson #12 – It doesn’t matter that you give out a free upgrade on the flight out, people only remember the last time they interacted with your organisation.

Customer Service Lesson #13 – When people are paying premium prices (and they were premium prices) they expect premium service.

Customer Service Lesson #14 – Even when it’s “the companies” money that people are spending they still expect good value for money.

Customer Service Lesson #15 – Everyone has a choice, it will be a long time before I choose to go through that experience again.

Customer Service Lesson #16 – It doesn’t matter that you serve someone well for 99% of the journey, it’s the last 1% that makes all the difference.

How many of these mistakes do we make in the IT Service industry? Most of them I think.

Gartner Predictions for 2008: A Lot of Green

That's a Big Lens - where are Jimmy and Grandad?It’s a thing that Gartner does every year – predict.

I’ve not done an assessment of how accurate their predictions tend to be. In some senses the accuracy of the predictions isn’t the issue, it’s that fact that people listen to their predictions. This produces a mind-share effect that probably makes some element of the prediction come true even if the detail is off.

This years predictions have loads in them about green issues, more than anything else I think:

By 2009, more than one third of IT organizations will have one or more environmental criteria in their top six buying criteria for IT-related goods. Initially, the motivation will come from the wish to contain costs. Enterprise data centres are struggling to keep pace with the increasing power requirements of their infrastructures. And there is substantial potential to improve the environmental footprint, throughout the life cycle, of all IT products and services without any significant trade-offs in price or performance. In future, IT organisations will shift their focus from the power efficiency of products to asking service providers about their measures to improve energy efficiency.

By 2010, 75 per cent of organisations will use full life cycle energy and CO2 footprint as mandatory PC hardware buying criteria. Most technology providers have little or no knowledge of the full life cycle energy and CO2 footprint of their products. Some technology providers have started the process of life cycle assessments, or at least were asking key suppliers about carbon and energy use in 2007 and will continue in 2008. Most others using such information to differentiate their products will start in 2009 and by 2010 enterprises will be able to start using the information as a basis for purchasing decisions. Most others will stat some level of more detailed life cycle assessment in 2008.

By 2011, suppliers to large global enterprises will need to prove their green credentials via an audited process to retain preferred supplier status. Those organizations with strong brands are helping to forge the first wave of green sourcing policies and initiatives. These policies go well beyond minimizing direct carbon emissions or requiring suppliers to comply with local environmental regulations. For example, Timberland has launched a “Green Index” environmental rating for its shoes and boots. Home Depot is working on evaluation and audit criteria for assessing supplier submissions for its new EcoOptions product line.

We already recommend server equipment based on its power consumption, this has more to do with powering the data centre than any green credentials, but its a trend I see continuing.

It’s certainly true to say that “Most technology providers have little or no knowledge of the full life cycle energy and CO2 footprint of their products.” I’ve tried to find out on a couple of occasions and failed miserably.

(Spot Jimmy and Grandad in the huge lens)

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Appreciating Office 2007: Shadows

ParaglidingThere are a lot of things that I am starting to really appreciate about Office 2007.

The first one is probably the most cosmetic, but it’s making a real difference and that’s shadows.

I have always been stunned by the lack of flexibility in shadows in earlier versions of Office. Let’s be honest, they didn’t even look like shadows. I’m not sure what they looked like, but it wasn’t a shadow.

The new shadow capabilities in Office 2007 are far batter. They now look like, and behave like shadows.

The options in 2003 were so limiting as to make them unusable:

What can I do here? I can make the shadow bigger, I can change the colour, and I can make it semi-transparent. And the result:

Even the drop shadows in Live Writer look more like a shadow than that.

In 2007 it’s all changed:

The presets in there own are enough, but I now have the ability to adjust so much more: transparency, size, blur, angle, distance.

Now that actually looks like a shadow.

I’m not sure how much fiddling I will do with these new options though, because the Quick Styles do a pretty good job on there own (another post, another time).

And that’s just shadows on objects, shadows on text has radically changed, and definitely for the better (another post another time).

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A Time to Acquire – Those Busy Lawyers

Early Morning View from LatriggIt seems to have been a very busy period for those acquisition lawyers (they are obviously hoping for a good quarter ). Some of these purchases have the potential to significantly change the IT landscape. Here are the ones that I have noticed:

And that’s not including the spate of acquisitions at the end of 2007, including IBM’s purchase of Cognos.

All of these things take a while to work there way through, but there are some interesting moves ahead.

(Seems a bit ironic to be writing this as stock markets around the world are tumbling – but that’s the way it goes sometimes.)