Becoming a Millennial

156. Microsoft Vista and Office 2007

Soon students will be coming to campus with their new computers loaded with Windows Vista and Office 2007.  When to upgrade on a college campus is always an interesting question.

Office 2007 saves documents in the open standard XML format (e.g. Word files will have a .docx extension rather than .doc).  Office 2003 applications will not be able to open Office 2007 files unless the Save As feature was used to save them in the older format.

Our IT department did a test and discovered that Office 2003 and Office 2007 can coexist (except for Outlook) on the same computer.  It may be helpful in labs and classroom computers to provide both versions for a while.

Here is good news for folks who will not be upgrading to Office 2007 for a while -- there is a free "Application Compatibility Pack" from Microsoft that will enable Office 2003 applications to read Office 2007 files.  This will be important for professors who begin to get Word documents from students in the .docx format.

115. Microsoft Office 2007

You knew it was coming.  New releases of Windows and Office are just around the corner.  Within the next 12 months you will be "required" to upgrade to Windows Vista and Office 2007.  For the past several years we have all enjoyed "rest" from the never-ending upgrades.  Windows XP and Office 2003 have served us well.

After the new year Windows Vista and Office 2007 will begin to come standard on all new PCs.  Taylor University, as will most institutions, will make the switch to keep current and maintain compatibility.

Thomson Course Technology has released a short video introduction to Office 2007.  I was encouraged after viewing this.  The new interface is intuitive ... and I think it will be relatively easy to make the switch.  Click here and go to the bottom of the page where it says "View a Sample Movie".

66. Virtual PCs

This is not for the faint of heart, and you might just want to skip this entry. But if you really want to go hard core you can use Microsoft's new Virtual PC software to run Windows XP, Windows Vista (that's the new Windows coming out later this year), and Linux all on the same computer.

One of my IT colleagues sent me this today:

"Been reading your blog ... Have you done much with Virtual computing? Well, Microsoft has now released their Virtual PC product for free download and use. Virtual PC is great for running other OSes on your computer without having to repartition or dual boot.  I have Virtual PCs set up for a few versions of Linux, the new MS Vista, a testing WinXP version, and a DOS one for messing with old software.  Lots of the other people in my group have Virtual PC on their computers as well for testing or messing around with other operating systems and configurations.  Nice thing is you can do whatever you want in the Virtual PC without messing up your own computer.  You can turn the Virtual PCs on and off as you like...reboot them...reformat them, the entire time your production computer isn't altered at all.  Great for testing, demoing, learning, and prototyping ... There is also a Virtual PC for Macs that would allow you to run an instance of Windows XP on a Mac."

Pretty amazing!  Thanks TK for sharing this.