Microsoft Office 2010 Gotcha

I have a nice new shiny toy: an Asus G73JW laptop with an Intel i7-740QM quad core processor, Windows 7 Pro (64-bit), 17.3” LED display, 8 GB of RAM, a 80 GB solid state primary drive, and a 500 GB secondary drive. Of course, the bad thing about getting a new system is the time it takes to get it set up just so, but I have a checklist I work from to make the setup straightforward. Things were going great until today. Emailing from Stonefield Query using MAPI (which means it goes through Outlook) and reading Excel spreadsheets using the Excel ODBC driver no longer work.

Rick Schummer blogged about issues with a client who upgraded to Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010. My issues aren’t the same, but are related: I foolishly chose to install the 64-bit version of Office rather than the 32-bit version, and now my 32-bit apps no longer work with it. I guess this falls into the DOH! category. Hopefully if you’re setting up a new system or upgrading an existing one, you’ll be a little smarter than me.

Previewing PDF Attachments in Outlook 2007

One thing that’s always annoyed me about Outlook is that there’s no built-in previewer for PDF attachments on emails. I always had to double-click the attachment to write it out to a temporary file and then open the application (Adobe Reader or whatever) to view it.

If necessity is the mother of invention, annoyance is the mother of Google (or Bing or whatever) searches. Tim Heuer’s Foxit PDF Preview Handler sounded pretty good, so after installing Foxit (ya gotta love a tool with “Fox” in its name), I installed Tim’s previewer and voila, PDF preview in Outlook. Thanks, Tim!

Outlook 2007 RSS Feeds Not Refreshing

I’ve had this happen several times over the past couple of years: suddenly, Outlook no longer refreshes RSS feeds. The only solution I’d found to make it start re-reading the feeds was to select each one and click Send/Receive (or press F9). When you have more than 100 feeds, that’s time-consuming and painful.

Fortunately, Alun Jones found a faster (but still lame) way: just select each feed and it’ll refresh next time send/receive occurs. Hopefully MS will fix this.