Book Review: Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Plain & Simple

The book is what it claims to be - a simple, pictorial, plain English guide to Outlook 2007. It is suitable for folks who are completely new to Outlook 2007 or have some exposure to previous versions but find the new UI a little daunting.I have used different email client tools at different times. I...

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The One Click GMail Help Layer UI Pattern

I know GMail & Google Reader have some cool keyboard shortcuts like "c" to start composing a mail etc but never realized, there was a "?" shortcut. It displays the list of all important shortcuts instantaneously on a transparent layer over the web pages.I feel this is an interesting UI pattern as...

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HOW TO create an Excel 2007 Macro

I have recorded an Excel Macro in the past but never coded one until recently. I was prompted by a question in an online forum posting to learn, implement and respond to the query with a working code sample.The requirement was to automatically copy the previous day's worksheet to a new worksheet and...

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HOW TO implement a Store Locator for a website?

The folks at Wotton.org have put up a simple online app that makes it easy to put up a Store Locator for your website in no time with Google Maps. The advantage of showing it in an online map is that it can utilize the Driving directions feature that can be useful to visitors of that website.The app...

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Road maps of Indian cities on the Web

Creating road maps for India is a tough job. It's a bustling country full of idiosyncrasies. Not just street names even city names can change overnight based on popular or political sentiments. In the past decade, names of four major cities Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Bangalore have been changed to...

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HOW TO tune your Windows PC

There are numerous background services in Windows that get started while you boot up. They jostle for resources and depending on the computer configuration they may impede the speed of your own applications.I have found that turning off some unwanted background services speeds up performance fairly...

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HOW TO create a Ribbon-less pre-Excel 2007 look

One of the machines I work on has a 15 inch monitor with 800 X 600 resolution. I occassionally use Excel 2007 & the ribbon almost takes up one third of the real estate. I was excited to find the Excel trick of hiding the Ribbon and having a minimalistic UI with just the Quick Access Toolbar, in...

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HOW TO test your webpages in different versions of IE

We do not live in a perfect world. Web developers have to live with the differences in the way browsers render their web pages. It is prudent to verify that the page design & functionality does not break by running the pages in all the popular browsers & their prevailing versions.It is not possible...

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Virtual TechDays 2008

"I was born intelligent, Orkut ruined me" - spotted on a T-shirtDevelopers and IT Pros have to constantly learn new technologies, tips and tricks of the trade to excel at their workplace. The affordability of faster Internet connectivity has made e-learning on the Web a nice alternative to books.Virtual...

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HOW TO merge two HTML tables with Javascript

While trying to reply to this unusual question on merging two HTML tables to generate a new table dynamically with Javascript, I ran into a nice tutorial on doing the DOM. The tutorial had simple code snippets with elaborate explanations that made it easy to extend them for my requirement with little...

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Is this just the start of a new Browser war?

...creating clean code that validates and works on many different browsers will be an important skill for webmasters and web designers. - Matt CuttsJust days after Microsoft released IE 8 Beta 2, we have Google Chrome making an entry into the browsersphere.Google Chrome is a new open source browser...

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Keyboard shortcuts common to Firefox & IE 8 (Beta 2)

The trouble with giving advice is people want to pay you back. - Alfred NeumanI'm glad most of my favorite keyboard shortcuts in Firefox 3 and IE 8 (Beta 2) are similar. Here is the list including some IE specific shortcuts:CommandShortcutBackBackspace or Alt+Left ArrowForwardAlt+Right ArrowNew tabCtrl+TUndo...

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Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 2) - a promising, bold new version

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is out and I took it out for a spin.I had dabbled with IE 8 Beta 1 on XP2 VPC (Virtual PC) Hard Disk Image. I'm glad Microsoft has provided a VPC (Disk Image of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 or a .VHD file on Windows XP SP3 (of 464.6 MB size) soon after it's release. I tried...

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