Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Job description work. Sent ideas for web services to the web steering group mailing list. Lunch: soup. Almost finalized job description work for Susie. Sent ideas for web services to Susie. Investigated using RSS feeds in Outlook 2007. Remotely helped Cindy resolve a problem with e-mail. Experimented with SmartArt in Word 2007. My experience was not favorable. After reading an article from one of Microsoft's default RSS feeds saying how easy it was to create a 3D organization chart, I followed the instructions to create my own but I could not figure out how to make it look as nice as in the article. The instant previews work as expected, but two problems resulted. The first problem was that the menu listing the instant preview choices blocked the view of what I was changing, so although I could see the choices, I could not see the effects of that choice because it was blocked by the preview choices menu. I figured out that I could cancel the menu, reposition the view of my document so that the menu didn't block what I was trying to change, and then reinvoke the menu again, but I thought the entire process was supposed to be simple and a timesaver? The instant previews should be smart enough to automatically and temporarily reposition the thing you're trying to change while the instant preview menu is open. (The same kind of problem happens with Chami's HTML-Kit find and replace dialog but it does not happen with the Word 2003 or Word 2007 find and replace dialog.) The second problem I encountered was that the choices available to me all resulted in ugly org charts and I could still not figure out how they got such a pretty result in the article describing how to do it. So I guess the instant preview was a timesaver for me—it let me quickly see that all the choices were not worth using once I figured out how to reposition the view of my document so that it would not be visually blocked. Also I was trying to create an org chart with one person reporting to two managers but there was no obvious way to create that kind of org chart. I figured out I could copy and paste one manager box and move it into position, but it was really hard to copy and paste and position the second connector—it just wouldn't do what I wanted. Later when I autoformatted the org chart, the two original boxes changed but not the new one, and I couldn't figure out why not. When I select a box on the org chart, I expect the Ribbon to display the org chart tools automatically, but it does not—I still need to select the correct tab for the org chart tools. Live previews are available for some things but not all things—it appears to be impossible to see the org chart style gallery as a live preview. It appears to be impossible to see live previews for changing the border or background fill of a person's box in the org chart. This inconsistency is disconcerting because the expectation is set and it's not clear why some things have it and some things don't. It's not clear which have it and which don't. Did research for online backup solutions. I was not thrilled with the response I got from Keith T at mozypro largely because he didn't answer my questions completely and I'm not sure it's worth my time to say, "Did you see all the clearly outlined questions you still haven't answered? Well, could you please answer them?" Chatted with Kyle R in live web chat about sparebackup. Dinner at home with Patrick: lemon chive mahi mahi, mac and cheese with mushrooms and zucchini. I accidentally discovered two keyboard shortcuts in Firefox today. They're somehow related to de.licio.us—I think maybe they got installed because I have post to delicious and my delicious shortcuts in my bookmarks toolbar. Anyhow, the keyboard shortcuts are: Ctrl+> (aka Ctrl+Shift+Period) displays my delicious bookmarks and Ctrl+? (aka Ctrl+Shift+/) displays a popup post to delicious window for the current page. Nifty! Worked on Patrick's myspace redesign a bit. Weight training: plank.