Category: Office

Posted on

Office JS Public Preview is here!

Office365DevPodcastLogo_01

After months, years maybe, it is finally here: The new cross-platform Excel and Word JavaScript API’s in Public Preview!

Up to now the development of this was happening behind the screen, not available for the general public. At first with little snippets, test scenarios and try-outs to find the best way to work with this, not only on Windows platforms but also the other platforms like iOS or Android.

Until now the Office JS API’s were mostly limited to Office365 interfaces but not targeting file content. This now is changed, at least for the first and still somewhat limited version.

What this means is that you now get the option to actually interact with the file contents. For now only on Excel en Word and only for a small subset of the Object Model as you know it from VBA and/or VSTO, but it is a start.

As its now open into the public, go ahead, and take a look at the public preview of Office.js API’s in Office 2016 and try some of the samples to get an impression on how this works:

Increase the productivity of Users’ with enhanced Office.js APIs in Office 2016

I will go into some more detail in future blog posts. Hopefully a start to get the full object model available but now on multiple platforms!

Posted on

Want to upgrade but what version of Office am I using?

Office%20graphic

Now Office 2016 is available you want to upgrade, but you are not sure what version of Office you are currently running. In my blog post yesterday I already provided a couple of links where to go if you upgrade from Office365 Personal/Home or Business. But to do so you need to know what is installed on your machine today.

To help you a bit with this Microsoft put all the version information for the various versions into one location:

What version of Office am I using?

Now identify your version and upgrade to the right edition.

Posted on

#TheNewOffice

TW_OfficeSocial_Office2016_AnnouncementPost_Confetti_Collaborate

Today September 22 not only autumn kicked in, but it is also the day that Office 2016 is officially released:

The Office Team Blog: The New Office Is Here

There is a lot worth mentioning about this version. It now has the option to collaborate, work together in one (or more) documents at the same time. You see little markers appear when the other is editing parts of the document you are working on. Try it!

Too many things to go in to detail here right now: Skype for Business integration, Office365 Groups, Office365 Planner, Windows 10 integration, Office 2016 for Mac, Sway, mobile apps on Windows Phone, Android –and– iPhone, Enterprise features, new Visio 2016 and Project 2016

Go download the bits, and start working with it. Another Office Milestone … enjoy!

Links:

How do I upgrade to Office 2016 if I have an Office 365 subscription?

How do I update Office to Office 2016 using Office 365 for business?

Office graphic 

Posted on

Back to Blogs … Installing Live Writer 2012

I lost my blogging tools in the process of testing Windows 10 and or reinstalling machines. I now finally came to install Live Writer back on my machine.

I am working on getting my way around Office365 Development. It appears that developing using VBA and VSTO Add-ins is soooo year 2000, time to move forward Winking smile.

Well, the real story is that in my day job I’m still on VSTO but it probably doesn’t come as a surprise if I say that Microsoft already spent at least four years (plus) by now on creating a new Add-in platform that is ready to target X-Platform (Windows, IOS, Android) development.

They still have a long way to go, many items within the current (COM) object model still needs to be addressed, but as time is moving forward the Office Development Team is making great progress in adding new features every day hopefully in the end getting in par with the VSTO capabilities. And let’s be real, the Office365 scope of today is so much bigger than the scope of the ‘old’ Office.

Anyway, I got rebooted, and if you can read this I was able to get Live Writer 2012 installed and to be ready for future posts.

Oh, and this is how I installed Live Writer – in case you want to join me and start your own blog:

[Thanks to Stefan to help out here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_stranger/archive/2015/07/24/installing-windows-live-writer-on-windows-10.aspx]

Posted on

How to Install Office 2013 SP1 on Office365

OfficeSymbol_thumb4

A little while ago Office 2013 released its Service Pack 1 and I explained where to download the Service Pack. On your Windows RT machine there was no option to download an installer to update Office 2013 like you do on a regular Windows machine so I added an additional post to explain how that is done.

Office365 or other subscription based Office installations are also a bit different than the other installations to update your installation. These installations are mostly offered using the so called C2R installations where C2R stands for “Click-to-Run” installations. C2R installations are completely different than MSI installations, you can read more about it here. So how do you update a subscription based Office installation?

When using Office 2013 as part of a subscription the service pack is not offered via Windows Update or standalone installer. In this post I will show you this other installation option: how to install your Service Pack 1 on a subscription based Office installation in the steps below.

  • Start an Office client application such as Word
  • On the top in the Ribbon, Click File
  • Click and go to the Account Tab
  • There you’ll find an Office Updates section:

    clip_image001

    Here above you see the Dutch localized version but the idea is the same. To the left of the Office Updates (Yellow highlighted section there is an Updates Options button (here in the Dutch version called “Bijwerkopties”. From there you can select to check and update your Office version. Right after clicking the update option you’ll get a notification dialog that will say a new version is available or in that is the case saying the latest version already has been installed:

    SNAGHTML6c6abed
    Again, for kicks I show you the here -Dutch- message box, not much different than the English one however … it told me there are Office Updates available and asks me if I wanted to install the update now.

  • Click Yes to continue installing the Service Pack 1 from here.

There you have it, I explained to you in this blog post that there is a slight difference between the installation options between the subscription based and the installed base Office version. To recap, here are once more the four options on how to install the Office 2013 Service Pack 1:

Confusing? A little bit if you ask me, especially if you are like me and have several different options to facilitate, but I guess most people just have one or two of these options in place. It seems that over time more and more people will shift to the subscription based option either in the context of Office365 or the Office Home program where you get five installations on a ‘family’ subscription for under hundred dollar a year.  

Showtime: Walking with Dinosaurs 3D

Walking with Dinosaurs 3D

The “Showtime” section on my blog is a reminder, mostly for my own reference but maybe helpful for other film enthusiasts as well, to remember what movies I’ve seen lately, what it was about and how I rated it in general.

Supposedly a spin off from the BBC series this is an animation feature where the viewer is brought back to the time on earth when Dinosaurs were around. I went to see this movie with my ten year old son and besides entertaining it probably also provided some learning moments as the movie explained some details around the existence of the Dinosaurs, differences between the various species and their natural enemies. As said, the movie was entertaining, some humor added and 3D effects on top to make it more impressing. Personally I like the ‘fun’ animation features like the Ice Age series a bit better that the more realistic animation feature like this one but I got the impression that for kids it was entertaining enough to earn a minimal Seven out of Ten.

Posted on

New Office REST APIs and Developer Tools for Visual Studio Update

Tonight (here in Europe that is) Somasegar announced on his blog that the Visual Studio Team and the Office Team released a “number of significant updates for developers building apps that interact with the Office ecosystem”.

All of the updates are more or less related to building Apps for Office/SharePoint and the Cloud. If you need full integration (interacting between Word and Excel, building compound documents, Ribbon interaction etc.) I think you still need to use the ‘other’ option, VSTO. The downside of –that- however is that it won’t be as mobile a you’d like to see. You win some or lose some, depending on the technology you decide to use.

Back to the updates… Announced today were the new Office 365 APIs for consuming Office data and updates of Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio (not to be confused with Visual Studio Tools for the Office System aka VSTO, that is a complete other thing) and “Napa”.

Go and read the blogs for details on all of this,  no need for me to repeat all of it Glimlach

  • The Office 365 Platform blog
  • The Visual Studio blog

    • This year I’ll try to deep dive on this a bit more to get into the subject of replacing your current Add-ins with Apps for Office/SharePoint – Can you or can’t you? Where are we at the moment. Everyone wants to move their Add-ins into the Cloud, but is it even possible today? More on this later …

Showtime: Philomena

Philomena

The “Showtime” section on my blog is a reminder, mostly for my own reference but maybe helpful for other film enthusiasts as well, to remember what movies I’ve seen lately, what it was about and how I rated it in general.

Philomena is a movie nominated for 4 Oscars and a whole slew of other rewards. You wouldn’t expect that by just watching the trailer of the movie.

The movie is about a woman who got pregnant at a very young age and therefor was put away in a Catholic convent where her son was born. Shortly after that her son was taken away from her for adoption.

Journalist Martin Sixsmith started to follow Philomena’s story and together with Philomena he started their search for her long lost son who appeared to have been adopted by an American family. On the search they travel to the United States where they tried to find his current location.

The story of a mother searching for her son changed from a series of facts into an emotional piece of art where spectators in the audience had a hard time to keep it dry. In a silent moment you could hear a soft crying from all directions. The producer managed to touch the hearts of many with this drama. Nine out of Ten, highly recommended !

Posted on

How to install Office 2013 SP1 on Windows RT

OfficeSymbol

In my previous post I published the fact that Office 2013 just had just released their Service Pack 1 and explained where to download the Service Pack. On your Windows RT machine however there is no option to download an installer to go ahead in updating Office 2013 like you do on a regular Windows machine. How would updating be provisioned on Windows RT?

Look no further, here are the steps to install Service Pack 1 on your Windows RT machine:

In this case you are looking for an update to be found in Windows Update. So go to the start screen and:

  • swipe in from the right and click on Settings
  • On the bottom right click on “Change PC Settings”
  • Find “Update and Recovery” and click the link
  • Select Windows Update
  • This will show you all available updates, look for the update that says “Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office 2013 (KB2850036) RT
  • Put a checkmark next to the update
  • Click the Install Button

    • That’s it … you only need to reboot after installing the update and you are good to go to work with your fresh updated Office 2013 RT.

Showtime:Last Vegas

LastVegas

The “Showtime” section on my blog is a reminder, mostly for my own reference but maybe helpful for other film enthusiasts as well, to remember what movies I’ve seen lately, what it was about and how I rated it in general.

This movie does not lack the big names to bring it to a success story, but is that enough? The story is all about a ‘gang of four’ being friends since childhood. They are now well over sixty and Billy (Michael Douglas) decided to take a shot and marry a thirty year or so younger girl and calls his buddies to arrange a bachelor party in Las Vegas (where coincidentally this week is the big SharePoint Conference 2014).

Things never have been very smooth between Paddy (Robert de Niro) and Billy. I won’t go into details to avoid spoiling the plot in details so take this for a fact. The four friends Billy, Paddy, Archie (Morgan Freeman) and Sam (Kevin Kline) need to solve things around this issue.

It’s an old men movie, kinda slow and the ‘big names’ in the movie aren’t making it much better. Events are somewhat predictable and won’t give you the thrills you would expect from the title “Last Vegas – It’s going to be legendary”. It wasn’t that legendary if you ask me. Six out of Ten.

Posted on

Office 2013 Service Pack 1

OfficeSymbolMicrosoft just released the first Service Pack (SP1) for Office 2013. As an Office SME, I have been developing solutions and worked with the product since the early versions waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back years ago, I’m always interested in what is going on in that area.

Getting information from the Office developer/development team is not easy these days, in fact … it never was… It has been a bit better, at the time they used to have Office Developer Conferences, in early years you even only were allowed to attend on invitation. The Office team is not one of the teams that shares a lot of information before going public on things. The Developer Division is completely the opposite and shares information whenever they can. In my opinion a much better way to work with your customers, get early feedback and make sure you stay on track – keep the train on the rails your customers are on. I know the Office team is just huge and also know the SharePoint Conference is targeted as replacement for the Office Developer Conferences but there is a huge difference between client applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and many more and SharePoint. SharePoint is mostly a Server environment.

Even if you are in the Office Beta process there are only one or two drops to look at and this does not make it easier for a full time Office Developer to get pain points addressed. Identifying bugs (often not in the product itself but in many cases caused by all sorts of ‘undocumented’ collisions or limited documentation) can be -very- time consuming and tedious at times. It would really help if that improved a bit…

Oh well, so much for the rant, back to the Service Pack…

Besides a cumulative rollup of previous fixes released earlier, up to approximately somewhere around January, it also include a whole slew of other fixes found in the product.

A list of fixes can be found here: (Excel Workbook)

For an overview of Service Pack 1 you can read the official announcement on the Office Updates Blog

Service Pack 1 is available through several channels like Windows Update or direct download:

DownloadDownload the Microsoft Office 2013 SP1 32-bit package now

DownloadDownload the Microsoft Office 2013 SP1 64-bit package now

Enjoy your updated Office Suite, it just got to be a little bit better than it already was … Let me know what you think about it in the comments!

Showtime: Free Birds 3D

FreeBirds

The “Showtime” section on my blog is a reminder, mostly for my own reference but maybe helpful for other film enthusiasts as well, to remember what movies I’ve seen lately, what it was about and how I rated it in general.

Free Birds, an animated feature about Reggie the Turkey. He found that turkeys are there to be sacrificed and be the Thanksgivings dinner star. He tried to warn his fellow turkeys but ends up as the annual Pardoned Turkey living in wealth and luxury. Until he meets Jake, or rather Jake finds him, the two of them travel back in time to 1621. The story evolves and allegedly history of Thanksgiving is visualized.

A movie with lots of humor for kids but also entertaining enough for adults. I enjoyed watching the adventures of Reggie and Jake with my daughter on the big screen (no, there are no extra credits for that) so Seven out of Ten.

Posted on

InfoPath, the official message about its future

It has been in the dark for years, InfoPath didn’t get many updates when the latest Office version (Office 2013) arrived and on customer questions there was always the “we haven’t announced any plans or decided change of policy” kind of answer about the future of InfoPath.

InfoPath, if I am honest, never really got off and the adoption rate was low. It was however the foreseen application to build and deploy your forms (often to SharePoint, but could also be used locally). One of the main issues might have been that there wasn’t a free InfoPath forms client to get the adoption rate up.

To me the lack of information about the future of InfoPath always was an indicator that the product was close to end of life. This on the other hand really took a while to be confirmed.

That said, yesterday – out of the blue, there was this Official Office Blog Post to be found on the Office site:
Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms

In this blog Microsoft announced that, quote: “InfoPath 2013 is the last release of the desktop client, and InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Server 2013 is the last release of InfoPath Forms Services”

Existing customers will be supported through 2023 so no worries if you are using this technology. The blog post does not provide any other information on what will be offered as a follow up on InfoPath other than that it will be presented somewhere in Q4 of CY 2014 (this I think actually is Q2 2014 in real life as Microsoft has a broken book year).

My guess is that the announcement of InfoPath vNext will be at SharePoint 2014 Conference (with Bill Clinton as Keynote Speaker!). The SharePoint conference, with the Office Developer Conference disappeared for years now, will be the place to be if you want to know what happens to InfoPath or the other Office products. So… follow the news around the SharePoint 2014 Conference… attend the conference.

Showtime: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

JackRyan

The “Showtime” section on my blog is a reminder, mostly for my own reference but maybe helpful for other film enthusiasts as well, to remember what movies I’ve seen lately, what it was about and how I rated it in general.

Jack Ryan (Chris Pine, took me some time to realize that he also did a couple of the Star Trek features) is sure about it after 9/11, he wants to serve his country by joining the marines and meets Cathy Muller (Keira Knightley) when recovering in  the hospital after a dreadful accident with the militaries. It was somewhat funny to hear Keira talk. Her usual British accent was suppressed and she tried to make it sound a bit more American accented. Not sure if that was intended or maybe she took lessons in talking without dialect Glimlach.

After his recovery he gets the offer and joins the CIA. By doing so he gets involved in James Bond alike scenarios and one of those is that he discovered a terrorist group planning to disrupt the US economy by messing up the trade markets on Wall Street. Jack goes to Russia to sort this out and from there blocking the terrorists from executing their plans.

The movie is a nice “sit, relax and watch” movie. Nothing spectacular to remember though but it was sure fun to watch. Seven out of Ten should do it.

%d bloggers like this: