Steve Hansen

speakTECH acquires the OfficeZealot.com site

2007-10-16T19:46:00Z

Office is so much more than the client tools that many of us started with and while we have done our best to keep up with the demands, OZ really needs some new blood and additional muscle to grow its feature set and deploy some much needed updates. That said, I'm pleased to announce that Aaron Sloman and the speakTECH ( http://www.speaktech.com) team will be taking over the site.

This will be the first time in OZ's history that a firm of respectable size and resources will be at the helm and it should be a very positive development for the site and the Office development community.

While there won't be any major changes to the blogging services for bloggers and regular visitors, speakTECH will be making investments in the site such as new servers to improve performance, updates for the blog feeds, and the introduction of multimedia and some new Office development bloggers.

Aaron is a super guy. He's an ex-Microsoftie, working there for about 8 years (.NET/eBusiness team for about 4 years and CMS/SharePoint for about 4 years). About three years ago, Aaron and some peers started up speakTECH and have since blossomed into a team of about 100. speakTECH is based in California and focused on Office and .NET development.

As for me, I'll continue my consulting and development activities through my firm, Dakota Technology Group (http://www.dakotatechgroup.com).

Google Docs + Microsoft Excel = poorman's Excel Services (kinda, sorta)

2007-10-04T01:42:00Z

Take one cup Google Docs, one cup Microsoft Excel and add a dash of programming. Observe.

Excel 2007 Calculation Bug

2007-09-26T16:35:00Z

Question: When does 850 * 77.1 not equal 65,535?

Answer: When you're using Excel 2007.

A bug in Excel 2007 (and Excel Services) is causing issues around calculated values of 65,535 and 65,536. Calculations that evaluate to the values may incorrectly display 100,000 as the result (although internally, Excel stores the value as the correct result). Microsoft is officially calling the bug a "display" bug (see the link to David Gainer below) rather than a calculation bug. To the average end-user, it doesn't really matter what you call it because this boils down to a trust issue. As in, I trust that Excel always shows the correct results of calculations. The "don't use it until after SP1" crowd is collectively saying "I told you so".

This bug does not affect prior versions of Excel.

Like Simon, I'm a little surprised this issue hasn't gotten more attention. I thought I'd wake up today and see it on eWeek, Seattle P-I, etc. I guess everyone is still busy playing Halo 3. Anyway, here are some good sources of information on this issue:

Simon Murphy has a few posts in addition to the link earlier, see bug announcement and bug test code,
David Gainer (Microsoft) explains the bug.
Slashdot
Excel Newsgroup

Halo 3 Premier Party

2007-09-25T15:44:00Z

I went to the Halo 3 Premier Party at the Microsoft offices in Bloomington, MN last night and had lots of fun. My first impression was "damn those graphics look sweet!" There were times playing/watching battles in Valhalla that it seemed as though I was watching a movie. The Spartan Laser proved exciting - very effective against vehicles. The Gravity Hammer is a lot of fun - gives you that satisfying brutish feeling you get dispatching foes - similar to the chainsaw gun in Gears of War. Everyone seemed to be having a great time.

After the party I went to the Wal Mart in Faribault, MN and waited in the long line to get my copy. Should be a good first day of sales for Microsoft!

Mother Nature 1, Office Zealot 0

2007-09-19T15:02:00Z

Storms went through the Minneapolis area Monday night and scored a hit on Office Zealot. The timing couldn't have been better as I was in Redmond with numerous peers and had to scramble to get back to Minnesota to rectify the situation. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to talk to or say goodbye to numerous people that were attending the event and if you are one of them, please accept my apology. To the readers and bloggers of Office Zealot I also apologize for the downtime. Normally when there are hiccups, I can fix things remotely or am in close proximity to the hardware in case of failure - this time I was on the opposite side of the US and given the nature of the failure I couldn't do anything about it until I got back to Minnesota.

This was the first time that I've experience an event that surely would have been much worse if it wasn't for power surge protection. A surge protector that was powering numerous switches and a battery powered UPS took a huge hit for the team.