Taking a Few Days Off

You may have noticed that I haven't posted for the last week.

I wish I could say that I've been on a fabulous vacation, but in reality, I spent two weeks on the road, talking to people about the Office 2007 UI.

That trip, combined with an extremely busy time trying to help finish up Office and getting it ready to ship, means that I've had less time to write as of late. So, I decided to take a little break after the flurry of posts around the release of Beta 2 Technical Refresh.

I'll be back posting regularly in a few days.

In the meantime, if you're looking for some reading material, check out the new Word team blog. They've posted six articles over the last two weeks; hopefully they'll keep up that pace and write much more about one of Office's most-used programs.

Many of you have also written to me asking where you can get support for Office 2007 Beta 2 TR. The best place to ask a question or get help with a problem is in the Office Discussion Groups on microsoft.com. There's a group for just about every program and area in Office, so give it a try if you're having a problem.

Probably the most common problem I've seen reported is a known issue in B2TR: a dialog box on the launch of Word stating that "Building Blocks.dotx" is corrupt, followed by many of the Word galleries being empty.

Fortunately, it's easy to fix this. Close Word, navigate to the "%appdata%\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks" folder and delete "Building Blocks.dotx." You can find the solution to this and many other common problems on Patrick Schmid's blog.