Getting ready for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Launch

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Happy New Year 2007!

I am little late to the party (again) and in fact this is my first blog entry of the year. Things are quite busy here in Office-land. We are getting ready for launch and finalizing details on new content that we will continue to publish this year. As always, we have more surprises for you.

Some I can't tell now, but here's two I can disclose now.

Office 2007 client developer reference available soon!

We will publish finally the Developer Reference documentation and object model diagrams for the following programs:

  • Access 2007,
  • Excel 2007
  • InfoPath 2007
  • Outlook 2007
  • Project 2007
  • SharePoint Designer 2007
  • Word 2007

You will be able to find them inside the Office Solutions Development node of the MSDN2 library. I will let you know when they go live.

New Office Talk column series about the 2007 Microsoft Office system

Starting this month, Frank Rice and I will start a new Office Talk column series where we will be discussing lots of tips and tricks to develop applications with different Office products and technologies. Frank is an Office expert and an excellent programmer writer, so I am very happy to work with him on a new column series. We hope we can help answer some of the most frequently asked questions we have seen in the newsgroups.

In some more weeks I will be able to talk about the other surprises.

I also want to list some cool things posted recently in blogs and MSDN you should not miss:

VSTO for Mere Mortals

The book VSTO for Mere Mortals from Kathleen McGrath and Paul Stubbs is available for customers now. If your company has tons of VBA applications, this book is the best guide ever. In my own words, "Kathleen and Paul are great technical evangelists who enjoy sharing their knowledge and passion for VSTO. With this book, VBA developers have access to a great guide that will help them understand essential concepts of managed code and best practices to migrate VBA solutions to Visual Basic 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office. This book goes beyond an introduction to VSTO and helps you evolve your current Office development knowledge and dive into the new world of VSTO 2005 SE and the 2007 Microsoft Office system."

Kathleen is creating a new video screencasts series that demonstrates Office development concepts as described in the book. You should visit Kathleen's blog.

Making Sense of Your Data in Excel 2007 – AutoFilters

Check out this great post by Frank Rice where he discusses how to work with AutoFilters and sorting from the UI and programmatically.

New Office Live Screencasts

Have you seen the new Office Live screencast series posted by Don Campbell? He did an awesome job putting these together. View these screencasts to get ideas for exciting solutions you can develop for Office Live customers. You can find more about Office Live here.

Clippy: Memories from the past

If you have a sense of humor (I do) and want to have some fun, please watch this little comedy about Clippy. I think it's hilarious and yes, those were the days… so glad Office help has evolved J.

Enjoy,

~Erika