I’ve been reading this blog for a while and thought it was about time I dropped you a comment to let you know how useful it’s been for me.

Offline, amoung my friends and family, I’m fairly vocal about my opinions of Microsoft. Having been exposed to computers from a very early age, I’m pretty unforgiving when things are done, imo, badly. However whenever MS or it’s employees something right, I like to tell people that too. Not murmur though the side of my mouth “yeah, I guess that was ok.” Instead show it off as an example, “Microsoft, more of this please, it’s great.”

And as such, you blog falls into the latter category. I’ll give you a quick example why.

My girlfriend is currently studying on a course where they hand out more than a few xls files with VB built in. From your blog, I was able to say that she didn’t need to dual boot her mac, buy winxp and win office, she could buy office for mac and run them on that. I was also able to warn her not to upgrade to the new version of office, when it comes out. You also took some time to explain why VB support wouldn’t be in the next version of office, which was fantastic.

I mean, when the new version of office comes out, if she’d bought it and loaded it, only to find it breaks her work, that would have been a huge pita and money wasted too. So thanks for the heads-up and thanks for the insight.

And while I’m on the topic of things MS does well, let me take the time to credit a fantastic product.

I have to switch from using a mac at home, to using xp at work. This often causes pain and frustration, however, one product I love on the PC, is OneNote. Bearing in mind, that I’ve never used MS Office for mac (Sorry, I have no need for it), I think it’s the best product that MS has come out with. I really think they should plug it more, it’s a great product.

Hmmm, I say I have no use for Office for mac, but are there any plans to make a notebook I create on the PC, readable is, say Word on the mac? I understand, with all the other note taking products available for the mac, that it doesn’t make sense for a make version of onenote for the mac, but if I could use word to access and update my work notebook, well you’d have one more Office for mac customer!

Just a thought.

Anyway, thanks for the blog, thanks for the insight, please keep up the great work!
NS