Games Gadgets n Technology

Arguably, the most widely used productivity suite in the world, Microsoft Office is now available in its newest avatar – and this time around, it’s got a complete makeover
MATTHEW FORDAHL

With each update to its Office suite, Microsoft has piled on features aimed at boosting users’ productivity and goosing sales of the world’s most widely used collection of programs for handling documents, spreadsheets, e-mail and presentations.
Office 2007 for Windows-based PCs, launched Tuesday alongside the company’s new Windows Vista operating system, is no different, except for one feature, called “Ribbons”, that makes it vastly easier to figure out what these programs have to offer.

RIBBON ME THIS, RIBBON ME THAT

Most of the suite’s applications – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook – have done away with the old, familiar menus and toolbars. In their place is the Ribbon – a horizontal strip of screen real estate populated with tabs and icons grouped by function.
Want to add clip art to a Word document? Just click on the “Insert” tab and choose the “Clip Art” icon, which, incidentally, is hard to miss. Creating a complex formula in Excel? Click on “Formulas” and pick your poison – all broken down by type.
It’s also dynamic: When handling a photo in Word, the Ribbon presents the tools suitable for that task. No more clicking on the “View” menu, choosing “Toolbars” and then figuring out which of the tiny icons might be of use.
The Ribbon ranks among the most significant improvements to Office to date. It’s not the first software to break out of the “File,” “Edit,” and “View” mould, but it’s the most convincing alternative I’ve seen. Other programs will surely follow suit.
The Ribbon isn’t customisable and can’t be repositioned, though it can be minimised. There’s no option to switch back to “classic” view, and it isn’t universal – the old menus and toolbars can be found in parts of Outlook, for instance.
It took me a few weeks to get used to it, but after trying out Office 2007 for a couple months, the Ribbon has revealed features of the suite that I didn’t know existed.

ONLY CHANGE IS CONSTANT

The Ribbon isn’t the only enhancement. In many of the programs, when text is selected, a faint “Mini Toolbar” appears above it. Hover the mouse pointer over the toolbar, and you can change the formatting of the selected text. For those easily annoyed, it can be switched off.
Office 2007 also stores documents in a new format – one more compact and safer than before. Colleagues who haven’t upgraded must download a free converter program to open the files. You can also save files in the older formats with Office 2007 – important because the converter isn’t available yet for Apple’s Macintosh computers.
There’s also a new way of adding graphics magic to your documents – once everyone upgrades. “SmartArt” allows you to easily insert graphics that can be easily edited and repositioned. If the typed-in text doesn’t fit, it automatically shrinks the size of the font so that it does.

IN CONCLUSION

Of course, a big selling point, mainly for businesses, is how the Office programs work together. Microsoft is updating its servers that act as the glue, enabling easier sharing of documents and information.
But is Word, Excel and PowerPoint necessary for the average consumer or student? Actually that depends on what you’re used to. Microsoft has seen increasing competition lately from Web-based and open-source software. All those work fine for basic word processing and number crunching. And you can’t beat the price – free.
Office 2007, however, goes a step further: It not only helps you produce the content but also present it in ways unequalled by its rivals. At least, not without a lot of work.


OFFICE 2007 HIGHLIGHTS



WORD


Even the most boring document can be spiffed up quickly in Word 2007 by applying several new themes. And you can get a preview simply by hovering over the theme with the mouse. Word also has a new tool to instantly strip away any metadata, such as snarky comments thought hidden, that might have been attached as notes by people reviewing your work.



EXCEL


The popular spreadsheet can now handle a grid of 10,48,576 rows by 16,384 columns of data – a 16-fold increase in one direction, 64-fold in the other. Improved charting functionality supports 3-D, transparency and shadows.And when working with a large table, it keeps the headers in view when you scroll down.



POWERPOINT


There’s good news for those of us who dread meetings where speakers rely too heavily on PowerPoint: A boatload of new templates helps jazz things up. It’s easier to create the presentations, too, thanks to SmartArt and themes. A boring bulleted list, for instance, can be transformed into a diagram – such as timelines – with a click or two.


OUTLOOK


Outlook 2007 now supports “Instant Search,” to find old e-mail in seconds. Also, it displays a to-do bar that highlights the tasks you should be doing, precluding the need to fish for some function on the Ribbon. It offers many more options for categorising messages. And yes, it also supports Really Simple Syndication feeds, so you can catch up on the latest news and blogs.

The flying car of science fiction may be reality by 2010. An Israeli company envisions its creation – the X-Hawk – saving thousands of lives in urban rescue operations

Rafi Yoeli has a solution to saving people from burning high-rises, flooded cities or rescuing soldiers trapped behind enemy lines: A flying car.
Yoeli already has gotten a rudimentary vehicle off the ground – about three feet – and hopes to see a marketable version of his X-Hawk flying car by 2010.
Although his dream might seem farfetched, US-based Bell Helicopters is taking a serious look, teaming with Yoeli’s privately held Urban Aeronautics to explore X-Hawk’s potential.
Think of the people trapped in the World Trade Centre. Think of ground patrols in Iraq blown up by roadside bombs. Think of citizens stranded in 26 July Mumbai floods.
X-Hawk and its smaller version, Mule, might one day offer the same capabilities as helicopters, but without the serious operating limitations – like exposed rotors – that helicopters face in urban terrain.
As of now, there isn’t any aircraft that can operate optimally in urban environments. Yoeli is trying to address that need by designing a kind of vehicle that can get close to buildings and skyscrapers, and provide some type of relief for people stranded in them.

THE MACHINE

X-Hawk – currently just a full-size mould in Urban Aeronautics’ headquarters in the Israeli town of Yavne – looks like a futuristic space car, with its streamlined design, two fans rising from the rear and cockpit-style driver’s seat.
But Yoeli envisions X-Hawk and Mule as more of a truck, pulling up to dangerous combat or terror arenas to ferry in personnel and supplies and ferry out people at risk. Like a similarly sized helicopter, X-Hawk will be able to take-off vertically, fly up to 155 miles an hour and as high as 12,000 feet and remain aloft about two hours, Urban Aeronautics says.
But encased fans will replace the exposed rotors that keep helicopters from manoeuvring effectively in urban areas or dense natural terrain. And a patented system of vanes is designed to afford the vehicle greater stability. Urban Aeronautics says vehicles will be able to sidle right up to a building.
“The X-Hawk also will be quieter, offering a stealth advantage over helicopters,” said Janina Frankel-Yoeli, the company’s vice president for marketing. “But because the rotor diameter is smaller, the new vehicle will use about 50 per cent more fuel.” Rafi Yoeli expects an unmanned Mule prototype to be flying in two or three years and in production within five. He projects a manned X-Hawk will first hover in 2009 and hit the market within eight years.

THE MAN

The 55-year-old designer says he’s been fascinated by flight since childhood and got into the flying car business after two years at Boeing, five at Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd and 14 at a company he co-founded to develop unmanned airborne vehicles and helicopter applications. His initial fantasy was a flying sports car. But because of all the regulatory issues that would have to be resolved before masses of commuters could start whooshing through the sky, he tucked that dream aside to develop something that could hit the market earlier. The company headquarters are dominated by a large, white-domed flight simulator and the proof-of-concept vehicle that Yoeli says he built in his second-floor living room so he could spend more time with his family. What’s compelled Yoeli on this project is the urge “to get up vertically,” without needing a runway or a rotating mechanism overhead. “You sit in a traffic jam, and everyone gets this urge: I want to get up now, and over this,” he said. “You need a certain kind of machine. I think X-Hawk can do it.” AP

SAN FRANCISCO: US President George Bush is no longer Google’s top response to Internet searches for “miserable failure.”
Queries for French military victories no longer take one to “defeats.” And Russian Internet users that type “enemy of the people” into Google are not directed to a biography of that nation’s leader, Vladimir Putin.
The California-based search colossus says it has finally defused such “Googlebombs”, that is, search term results rigged by clever outsiders to make comic or critical commentary.
“By improving our analysis of the Web, Google has begun minimising the impact of many Googlebombs,” Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini of Google wrote in a company Web log.
Googlebombs, also referred to as “link bombs”, provide links to unrelated sites under the guise of solving the query. For example, searches for “failure,” “fiasco,” and “miserable” in various languages resulted in links to various countries’ current or former leaders.
“Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us,” Moulton and Carattini explained in their blog.
“But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true.” To deactivate Googlebombs, Google engineers developed a search algorithm to neutralise them. “Computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in several languages,” Moulton and Carattini wrote. “That’s what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages.” Google ranks search results based on a mathematical model that factors in key words and popularity of Web sites. While Google has known about link bombs for years, it had previously expressed reluctance to defuse them individually because it didn’t want to tinker with the objectivity of its Internet search model. Google, however, cautioned that some link bombs will slip past the algorithm net, which will be tightened based on feedback from searchers. AFP

LONDON: Fancy trying your hand at creative writing but can’t quite find the time? Tired of scribbling away all by yourself?
British publisher Penguin may have the answer – a Web-based, collaborative novel that can be written, edited or read by anyone, anywhere thanks to “wiki” software, the technology behind Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia.
The novel, “A Million Penguins,” went live on Thursday and its first lines are already being written, edited and rewritten by enthusiasts on www.amillionpenguins.com.
Penguin, which embarked on the project with a group of creative writing and new media students, says it is using the novel as a test of whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a “believable fictional voice.”
“This is an experiment. It may end up like reading a bowl of alphabet spaghetti,” Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing at Penguin UK said, adding there were no plans as yet to publish the completed work.
“We are not making any predictions. It would be utterly fantastic if we could, at the end, create a print remix.”
So far, the first chapter includes Carlo, a troubled man walking his dog, and “on the other side of the globe” a seductive murderer, Tom Morouse, “known as the Tango poisoner.”
The experimental novel, which Penguin says is the first “wiki novel” to be started from scratch by a major publishing house, will be online for at least six weeks.
But it warns budding artists that the work is not a talent search and insists it expects a variety of tones and abilities.
“In an ideal world we could throw in a sense of plausibility, balance and humour,” Penguin’s blogger, Jon Elek, wrote in an entry earlier this week.
“That’s asking a lot, and in truth I’ll be happy so long as it manages to avoid becoming some sort of robotic-zombieassassins-against-African-ninjas-inspace-narrated-by-a-Papal-Tiara type of thing.” REUTERS

TOKYO: Researchers have developed a device based on the videogame – Whack-A-Mole – that they believe will help senior citizens who have lost their physical coordination.
The new gadget, invented by Kyushu University and game machine maker Namco is an exclusive pastime apparatus designed for the elderly in which the players stomp on snake heads popping up in rapid succession on the floor and try to outscore others in play.
The device helps invigorate players as they use their toes and muscles in their thighs while playing the game, researchers say.
The objective is to enable elders who have lost some of their physical mobility to enjoy moving their bodies and restore body movement functions.
Shinichiro Takasugi, an instructor in the rehabilitation department at Kyushu University Hospital in Japan, initially set up a “Whack-a-Crocodile” machine at a day-care centre in 2000 hoping it would be effective in helping senior citizens to spontaneously enjoy and continue exercises.
He divided those who came to the centre for rehabilitation into two groups – one which used the game machine and the one which did not – and measured their functionality in body movements for a year.
Takasugi said members of the group who used the machine began demonstrating their superiority and agility over those who did not use the game.
He concluded that the users got themselves in shape in the sense of balance and reflexes since they had to stretch their arms and quickly strike the pop-up crocodiles on the head with a mallet while bending forward.