How to print Word document without comments

I am currently using Word 2010 and tried to print a document the other day, but it contained comments that I did not need. One big disadvantage with Word now a days is the amount of options and it's become hard to find options with the tab page menu bar. Eventually I found how to do it.

From 'Review' tag menu, change 'Simple Markup' to 'No Markup' or 'Original'.

Beware 0203 2907142 Microsoft Phone Scam

I had a phone call today from someone claiming to be from Microsoft, the phone display the number as 'unknown', which was a bit suspicious. The person did not speak very good english and said something about the phone call was about hackers of your Windows operating system. I explained that we did not use Windows, which he did not understand at first. I asked him for his telephone number and he said it was 0203 2907142.

I told him again that we did not use Windows, then he decided to hangup.

This was clearly some sort of scam to try to get me to go onto my Windows PC and then the caller would have most likely have gained access and then I would have been in real trouble.

Be careful, do not give any information to anyone claiming to be from a company that would like access to your PC.

Hopefully countries and governments will get together and seriously punish these criminals, not sure where the money goes to from these scumbag scammers, but it would not surprise me if it did not end up in serious criminals and terrorist bank accounts.

Death of Windows?

I have been using and developing software for Microsoft Windows for over 15 years now and have been a fan until the last couple of years. It seems Microsoft keeps making basic bad decisions in the way their software works and the latest offering is Windows 8, which is confusing and chaotic and shows they need to make some better decisions in the future to survive. Here are some reason why I think Windows is a dying operating system, after using it for a very short period.  

• It's feels like an incarnation of the previous version, with more features, but not as user friendly.
• The way you use it seems confusing with options to run in 2 different ways depending on what you are doing.
• The new design does not wow and is pretty boring, I did not like using it and it is not intuitive enough. It seems to also seems to break some UX design rules, including hidden controls, ugly icons and everything is very boxy and flat.
• Search is still slow, Microsoft really needs to sort this out, iOS is far better and easier to use.
• From using it for a short time it made me feel that I should stick to Windows 7. 
• Messages are sometimes unfriendly, condescending  and techie. 

I think it is a case that in the future Microsoft will see that Windows 8 was a bit like ME and Vista and will need to get it right with Windows 9. These are the features that I think are required in the next version of Windows.

• Improve startup and shutdown times.
• Get rid of the 2 personalities of Windows 8 and Windows 7 desktop, and make it feel like a single OS.
• Don't hide features and expect users to explore to find hidden treasures, it's not a game.
• Get the search working properly so its quick, easy and finds the results, look at how Google and Apple do it.
• Needs to be more intuitive.
• Make it more innovative and include support for future technologies like Kinect, 3D and voice recognition.

Microsoft is in a difficult position at the moment with not just Windows, but their Office suite and their new XBox looking like it might be overtaken by the PlayStation 4, which from the specs is a superior games machine. I think they will need to have a good look at themselves, their competitors and the market place and come up with some great new products to survive, and there is a good chance they will.

How to insert a horizontal line in MS Word

I'm not a great fan of Microsoft Word, over the years it has become too busy and harder to find the feature or option you are looking for. A good example of this poor design is how to add a horizontal line, here are the steps for Word 2007, it is similar in other versions I have used.

1. Select the 'Page Layout' tab page along the top.
2. Click on the 'Page Borders' button.
3. In the bottom left corner there is a button to add a 'Horizontal Line'. Highlighted on the image with a red box.

This seems a strange place to put this feature and I think it should go in another area of the software.

Outlook.com delete inbox messages

Just went into my Outlook.com account, which had about 17 pages of messages in my Inbox, I then deleted a few messages (approx 5) and all of a sudden I noticed that the number of pages had gone down to 3!!!

After looking into it the all messages have been put in a sub folder off the deleted directory called POP. I do not know why this has been done, but I think it might relate to the rubbish Outlook.com app on my Android phone. Lately Microsoft just keep causing me problems.

Outlook.com Android App Needs Fixing

I've updated my apps on my Nexus 4 phone and it removed the Hotmail app and updated it to the Outlook.com app. This was a big mistake, here are the reasons why this app is so awful.

• The font size from where the email came from is to large, this needs to be a setting.
• The background is white, with Hotmail it was black and looked better, this also needs to be a setting.
• Sent a single email to myself, 1 appear as expected on the web site, but I received 2 on the phone.
• Email from the app does not include the message signature.

Overall this app is very simple and does not feel as if it has been finished, Microsoft really should have done more testing and finished it before sending it out. I think it needs far more settings to enable the user to customise the look and feel. Poor show again Microsoft, please fix this app ASAP.

How to unprotect an Excel workbook

I have an Excel workbook which is protected by a password, so that when you try to open it in MS Excel it requires a password. I needed to transfer this file so it was an Apple Numbers file. Numbers cannot open Excel files that have password protection, so I needed to find a way to unprotect the document open it in Numbers and then save the document as a new Numbers file.

The help in Excel did not give me a solution, but eventually I worked out how it is done, and it is not a case of removing the password protection, here is how to do it.

1) Open the Excel file and enter the password.
2) Click 'Save As' to open the save as dialog.
3) In the bottom left hand corner click on the 'Tools' button.
4) Select 'General Options'
5) This will open a password dialog which will allow you to remove the password and save the file.

This solution makes sense and that once you have added a password on a file the only way of removing it is to save it as another file with the password removed.

Is Windows 8 doomed to fail?

Recently I had a quick play with the new Microsoft Windows 8 operating system and was disappointed. The reasons why I felt disappointed are as follows:

• Without a touch screen to scroll to the left or right there is a naff scrollbar, it would have looked a lot better if they had to large buttons on each side like in Google Chrome.
• Some of the live tiles look annoying with constant movement.
• You cannot see more than 2 applications at the same time, this is clearly designed for tablets, but what about users with large monitors.
• The 2 application view does not allow a 50/50 split, there is always 1 application larger than the other.
• The old style Windows 7 option, seems to run a virtual machine, but is not as good as Windows 7 and the integration with the main operating system is clunky.  

Overall I got the impression this OS has been designed with the tablet in mind and I think if you are going to run it on a PC stick with Windows 7. The history of Microsoft OS seems to hint it is not going to be a good OS, see my list of OS and what I think of them below, hopefully Windows 9 will be the next good OS.

Windows history showing a trend.

• Windows 3.2 - Good OS
• Windows 95 - Not bad, but not great and seemed a bit buggy
• Windows 98 - Great OS and worked very well
• Windows ME - Rubbish
• Windows XP - Very Good OS
• Windows Vista - Dreadful, problems starting up and shutting down.
• Windows 7 - Good OS and runs really well 
• Windows 8 - So far, not good.