Miscellaneous Office-related links

I'm in Paris, getting ready for another MOSS deep-dive lab this week, and I just went through all my RSS feeds. Here are a few cool things I came across from the last couple of days ...

Speaking of MOSS, Bill Simser posted a link the the European European Sharepoint Conference's web site, which is -- of course -- a public-facing MOSS site. Maybe the hardcore Sharepoint developers can tell at a glance, but it fooled me. Nice work.

Bart Gunneman (one of my buddy Wouter's colleagues over at InfoSupport) has a great post on how to set up a laptop for MOSS demos and development with Office 2007 Beta 2 TR.

Brian Jones posted some nice photos of Norway on the way back from the Ecma meeting last week, along with a few links to Open XML resources including the Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM). For everyone who has asked me about a tool for bulk conversion of old binary-format Office files to the new Open XML formats, that's a part of the OMPM called the Office File Converter -- check it out at the link above.

Some of the people I've talked to about Excel 2007 rave about the increase in row and column limits from 65,536 and 256 to 1,048,576 and 16,384, respectively. If you're working with huge spreadsheets, this change can really simplify your life because you can just leave everything in one big worksheet now instead of getting clever with strategies for splitting and merging worksheet data. Are there other limits you'd like to see increased in Excel? David Gainer has a post entitled "Your turn one more time - limits" where you can let the Excel team know what you'd like to see changed.

This last one reminds me of the old and oft-repeated (and perhaps apocryphal) story of a system that crashed whenever more than 30 users were working at the same time, and a naive middle manager who said "why can't we just change the line of code that says 30 to say some larger number?" David's post lets you be that middle manager, and the Excel team gets to change that line of code. :-)