Archive for the ‘How-To’ Category

Just opened a Excel Sheet (Created with Excel 2003) in my 64-bit version of Excel 2010 (beta) and received the following error : Compile Error : The code in this project must be updated for use on 64-bit systems. Please review and update Declare statements and then mark them with the Ptrsafe attribute.
I never received such an error (maybe because Excel 2010 is the first 64-bit Excel?), so I started to feed Google a part of the error message. The first hit brought me the solution.

So I added the PtrSafe attribute to the Declare function which changed the lines in this : Declare PtrSafe Function….. After I saved the sheet, closed it and reopened it again..the error just disappeared!

I’ve been a user of Office 2010 since I received the invitation for the Technical Preview. So when I heard that I could download the Beta version of Office Professional Plus 2010, I checked TechNet right away and downloaded the 64-bits version (I was also using the 64-bit Technical Preview version).

Because I had Outlook configured with Exchange, etc I tried to ‘upgrade’ my Technical Preview version, but that one failed. A message appeared telling me that I had to uninstall all the previous versions of Office 2010 before I could install the beta version. So I did…

Office 2010 Beta was installed in a few minutes, but when I launched Outlook I ran into some issues (probably because of the Technical Preview key that was still in place?) with the product key. The following message appeared :

When I pressed the Change Product Key button to enter the Beta key I received from TechNet nothing happened! I found out that when I start Excel (or maybe any other Office app) and clicked the Change Product Key a change product key screen appeared (see image below) and I was able to activate Office 2010!

 
Now I could enter the key and click Continue to apply the changed product key. Strange enough Office 2010 didn’t go online and activate immediately, but when I restarted Outlook the activation wizard appeared and when I tried to activate Office 2010 it just activated fine!

Buy and Download
If you want Windows 7 you can not only buy the physical media in the store of your choice, but you can also buy (and download) the ISO files at your online Microsoft Store! In an earlier blogpost I described how you can create a bootable USB stick to install Windows 7 from.

To help everybody out who isn’t technical enough to run diskpart and make a bootable usb stick from the command prompt Microsoft created a tool : Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. With this tool the only thing you have to do is to download the ISO and the tool. With a few mouse clicks you create a bootable USB stick from the downloaded ISO file!

Click Read More to see how the tool works!

Read the rest of this entry »

Just earlier today Nick Simons announced on the Office Web Apps blog that they’re expanding the Office Web Apps Technical Preview! So if you want to try the new Office Web Apps….just click here to sign-up.

Note : If English isn’t the default language in your Internet Explorer and you receive the error below, just set English to your default language. IF you’re not sure how you have to do this, just read the instruction below.

The item can’t not be found error message in Dutch.

Change your default Internet Explorer language
To change your browser language open Internet Options in Internet Explorer and click Languages (on the bottom of the dialog screen)

Add English (United States) [en-us] to the list and be sure that English is the first in the list (see image below).

Close the browser (very important!), reopen the browser and click the link again. User the Windows Live ID you want to use for Office Web Apps and you should now see the License Agreement. Accept it and you’re ready to use Office Web Apps.

Ever since I’m using Windows 7 with the new taskbar (or the so called Superbar) I was wondering why it isn’t possible to simply pin your Recycle Bin to the taskbar. If you try to pin it to the taskbar it is just added to the existing Libraries/Explorer pinned application (see image below).

It is possible to pin the Computer icon to the Windows 7 taskbar, so I imagined that it it probably should also be possible to pin the Recycle Bin to the taskbar the same way. I did some research and….it is possible!

Just follow the steps below to pin the Recycle Bin to your Windows 7 Taskbar.

1. Right click on the desktop and select New –> Shortcut
2. Enter the following info in the Type the location of the item: field : %SystemRoot\explorer.exe /E,::{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E} 
3. Click Next
4. Enter a name for the shortcut (Recycle Bin for example )
   
5. Click Finish. By default the new created Recycle Bin icon isn’t the correct one. We’ll change it in the next few steps.
6. Right-click on the just created icon and select Properties
7. Click Change Icon
   
8. Enter the following location in the Look for icons in this file : %SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll
   
9. You can just select any icon you like, but the original Recycle Bin icon is also available. Select an icon and click OK
10.   Click OK
11.   Now just drag the just created shortcut to the taskbar to pin it there.
    
12.   Done!