I have been working with the Microsoft QA team on the Excel Services issue i blogged about earlier. It turns out to fix the problem, install any custom fonts used by our excel spreadsheet that will be consumed through Excel Web Services on the server. After you install the fonts on the server, an IIS Reset is required for it to take.
After doing so, Bold type fonts will render correctly.
Thanks MS QA for your help on this!
S.
Love this feature i stumbled across Sarah Perez’s (Chanel 10 Blogger) site… http://cid-781010de23482939.profile.live.com/
She shows a way to add Windows 7 Search context’s to the Windows Explorer.
I took her example of how to search the Microsoft Support site and updated it with BING (she was using live), then found another one for Twitter and finally created my own for MSDN searches.
You can grab them from my skyDrive here:
http://cid-4320f28e64229e18.skydrive.live.com/embedrow.aspx/Public/Windows7SearchAdd-ins
Just download them, and open them up. Windows will ask you if its ok to register them and voila! You get search power right from Windows Explorer:
I just wanted my Messenger to hide the way it did in Windows Vista and XP.
Right now, when you minimize Windows Live Messenger, it takes up a lot of space in your taskbar.
So here’s a trick i found out when testing some code for Windows 7…
If you set the properties of an application to run as an older OS, it will allow the app to behave like it did in the “old” days.
So find your Messenger in your “Start Menu” and right click on it and select “Properties”
Then from the Compatibility tab, set the mode to “Windows Vista”
Make sure to Restart Messenger and you done.
Now when you close your messenger window, it will run the way it did in the background accessible from your notification area.
The last thing you might want to do is tell Windows 7 to always show the icon so you have it always ready to go…
From the Control Panel, click Notification Area Icons and set the Windows Live Messenger to “Show icon and notifications”.
Cheers
S.
Strange, but when you publish an Excel sheet to Sharepoint and view it with Excel Web Services, cells formatted as “Accounting” show as follows:
but when you change the format in Excel to “Currency”, it shows correctly:
Could it be some kind of spacing issue with the rendering of the “$” within the web page?
Today, we got a strange error when trying to open a published Excel 2007 Workbook in on Sharepoint with Excel Web Services. The Excel web part returned an error saying "External References (links to other workbooks)" we in the file and could not be opened. The 12 Hive log files had the same error and did not help any further with what the issue could be.
Looking at the file’s external links properties in excel showed nothing.
I ended up renaming the xlsx file to a zip, and unzipping the Excel file… scanned the workbook.xml file and found a reference to an “external reference” that did not show up in the Excel interface:
Searching for the unique id in the rest of the zip file, i found it lead to a “Named Range’ that pointed to an external file.
Voila, went back into Excel, removed the Named Range….
Republished the Excel file and it worked.
MS should update the sharepoint error message saying a formula, or named range is referencing an external file. Would have helped.
Cheers
S.
Finally…Without having to install any extra codec products (like KLite or Shark007 Codec Pack) Windows 7 play all of my home video files taken with the variety of cameras and camcorders we have used over the last 10 years. What a joy to finally watch all our home movies right on Windows 7 as well as our XBOX 360 without any “conversion” like we had to back in the Vista/XP days.
I love Windows Media Center. Great job team. Gets better every release.
ps… the “play favorites” has become a family favorite feature.
I’m happy to report that the install of Windows 7 RC went very well on my Dell XPS 1330. I’ll write more about i
t later, but I did not have to install anything specific from the dell website. I just did a clean Windows 7 RC install, ran windows updates after the install which added fingerprinting, video display, and memory card (SD, etc) support. Other components installed during the initial install (Bluetooth and the embedded Dell Webcam).
Its so much faster than the Beta.
Only issue, Norton 360 3.0 seems to have issues where there were no issues with the Beta.
More later…
ps
MS has gotten really creative with their wall papers and account pictures
I tried this technology a few years ago and did not have much luck with it. 
It was a D-Link Powerline system that converted your standard power outlet into instant network cabling. It just didn’t work and was unreliable.
A little while ago, we added a Powerline-based security-IP camera to our network from Logitech. Its a really cool system and easy to setup. Web cam plugs in outside directly into an outlet. Then you plug another box right beside your PC/Server (one side into an outlet directly and the other into a USB port) and blamo, you got a direct network connection from the security camera right to your PC/Server.
I figure i’d try Linksys’ second generation Powerline systems to connect my Windows Home Server 2003 to our network. It was working over a Wireless N Network well, but was chewing up valuable Wireless bandwidth, plus, the Linksys Wireless N USB Adaptor would give up about once every two weeks under load requiring the server to be reboot (yuck).
I swapped out the Linksys Wireless N USB card on the server with a Powerline AV Adapter Kit HD (PLK300) and its been working great for a few months now.
This diagram shows how it uses your power plugs as a network.
The specs could be a bit better (like a faster HD option or dedicated video card) but considering its form factor and target audience, its a really nicely though out notebook…
I still would not give up my Dell XPS 1330 🙂
stevenCwong 