Introduction to Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft® Office 2010 gives you rich and powerful new ways to deliver your best work whether you’re at work, home, or school on a computer, Web browser, or Smartphone. Grab your audience’s attention and inspire them with your ideas using enhanced tools, customizable templates, and photo editing capabilities. Work with multiple people from different locations at the exact same time using new co-authoring capabilities. By offering more ways to access your files from virtually anywhere, Office 2010 puts you in control.
The clash of the Titans continue, as Microsoft announced that it will soon be launching Microsoft Office 2010 which will feature broadcast and video editing in PowerPoint, new data visualization capabilities in Excel, and co-authoring in Word. Microsoft is testing a new version of its market-leading productivity suite for Windows PCs that will tie-up with new Web-based Office.

The applications offered by Microsoft will be similar to those offered by Google, a suite of lightweight online applications. Google's online spreadsheet and office related applications has been gaining popularity. To counter that Microsoft plans to take Office online, with a new series of free Office Web applications. "Office Web Applications, the online companion to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, allow you to access documents from anywhere. You can even simultaneously share and work on documents with others online," says Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview Website. The ad-supported web-suite will be available to more than 400 million Windows Live consumers at no extra cost.

Google has been struggling to match the reputation of Microsoft office, as its own suite failed to perform up to their expectation. But Google is offering free version of this suite, thus attracting more than 15 million customers. Since then Microsoft has been under pressure to provide more free applications.

Microsoft is also set to announce the launch of its internet-based operating system, called Azure. This will see it give tough competition to Google in the business of selling computing resources over the internet and by allowing developers to buy capacity to run their applications based on the amount of storage, bandwidth or any other resources that they use.

Microsoft has also announced that it will reduce the number of office editions from eight to five. The Microsoft Office suite will be available in the first half of next year. So far, the company has made no announcement for an Office suite for Mac systems.

Effective Cold Prevention Strategies

Wash your hands - The world we live in is filled with viruses and bacteria that can make us ill. Your hands are no exceptions. Wash your hands often to keep them clean. If you cannot wash them, at least use some hand sanitizer, such as Purel.

Drink hot fluids, especially in the morning - The rhinovirus incubates in the back of the throat and spreads in the upper respiratory area because it's cooler than the body temperature. Rhinovirus can't survive at 98.6 (hence it doesn't travel far down into the bronchi or the lungs). By drinking hot fluid (such as hot tea and lemon) you can prevent the virus from incubating.

Keep your hands out of your face - We have already discussed the germs and viruses on your hands. You cannot wash them continuously, so in between washings keep your hands out of your face. Your face is an open portal to your insides. Keep the germs away from your portal.

Drink water - Drinking more water is my answer to everything. Water will help clean out your body and keep it clean. It will also keep your body functioning at 100%. You should drink at least (eight) 8oz glasses of water everyday. This will also help you lose weight.

Eat your fruits and vegetables - There are phytochemicals and antioxidants in fruits and vegetables that can help strengthen your immune system and prevent diseases. You should eat at least four servings of vegetables and two servings of fruits every day.

Multivitamins - If you are not eating all of your fruit and vegetable servings, you should take a multivitamin to ensure you are getting all of the vitamins your body needs to function properly. Take a simple one-a-day multivitamin everyday.

Stay warm - Being cold weakens your immune system and makes your body more susceptible to illness. Look at the day’s temperature at weather.com before leaving your home. Wear layers in and out of your home when it is cold.

Relax and rest - Stress weakens your immune system. You can reduce your stress levels by relaxing and getting more sleep. Sleep is essential to maintaining a healthy immune system. Sleep will also boost your recovery time if you become ill.

Getting a cold can derail your nutrition and activity plans. However, if you follow the strategies I laid out for you, you can prevent this from happening.

Let's make the web faster

There are plenty of ways to make websites run faster. In this section, you can discover performance best practices that real web professionals employ in their everyday work. These practices have improved the user experience for millions of users and we hope they are going to be useful for other web developers.

CSS: Using every declaration just once

Using every CSS declaration only once is an effective way to reduce file size of style sheets. It’s not a trivial optimization technique though: Watch over the cascade and adjust your editing workflow.

How gzip compression works

This article first explains how gzip compression works in a transaction between a web server and a web browser. Then, we look into what gzip actually compresses, so that you can leverage compression in your markup.

HTTP caching

Web pages can load much faster on repeated visits if the resources come from the cache. Learn about two groups of HTTP headers that make all the difference.

Improving website performance with Page Speed

It is often possible to make the contents of a web page take fewer bytes without changing the appearance or function of the page. Reducing the number of bytes a client has to download makes the page load faster. In this tutorial we look at three ways to reduce the size of web content.

Minimizing browser reflow

Reflow is a CPU-intensive and user-blocking part of the browser rendering process. This article discusses some coding best practices to minimize reflow for your web pages.

Optimizing JavaScript code

JavaScript can make your webapps dynamic and active, but the interpretation on the client can introduce its own inefficiencies. Here we discuss some tips to optimize your JavaScript.

Optimizing web graphics

Optimizing your web illustrations, icons, and graphics is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to decrease your page load time. In this tutorial, we discuss image file formats and optimize some real Google graphics for faster download on the web.

PHP performance tips

This article provides a few easy tips that can help you to speed up your existing PHP scripts by making some simple changes.

Prefetching resources

In some cases, it makes sense to download files before they are necessary, so that they are instantly available once requested. When the resources required for a page can be loaded in advance, the user-perceived network latency for that page can be significantly reduced or even eliminated.

Properly including stylesheets and scripts

Correctly ordering external stylesheets and external and inline scripts enables better parallelization of downloads and speeds up browser rendering time.

Reducing the file size of HTML documents

HTML has some tags that are optional and can thus be omitted. In HTML 5, a shorter DOCTYPE and a few other techniques help reducing file size and load time of your HTML documents too.

UI messaging and perceived latency

To the typical user, speed doesn't only mean performance - it means the ability to use your website efficiently. Learn how to deliver effective UI messaging, a crucial part of keeping your users engaged and productive.

Color Picker - Innovation has no end

Color Picker is an innovative design of a concept pen that can scan colors from anything around and instantly use the color for drawing. After placing the pen against an object, the user just presses the scan button. The color is being detected by the color sensor and the RGB cartridge of the pen mixes the required inks to create the target color. This superb device will help people to observe the changing colors of nature. With color picker, all range of artists will be able to cerate a more sensorial and visual insight of their surrounding nature’s colors.

Toby got bronze medal

Two Young Lions to represent UAE at the 2009 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival

At a ceremony at Dubai Media City, the official Cannes Advertising Festival representative announced the winners of the seventh 2009 UAE Young Lions creative competition on Wednesday, May 13 night.

Executive Director of Dubai Media City, Mr Mohammad Abdulla and Ian Fairservice, Managing Partner of the Motivate Group, representing Cannes Lions, presented the awards.

Mohammad Abdullah welcomed and congratulated those participating and judging the competition. Ian Fairservice said,” We are proud of the high quality of work presented by UAE’s young creative professionals from the advertising industry. This is the seventh year we have hosted the event and it gets better every year. This is reflected by the superb work created at the Young Lions competition.”

Seventeen teams from the UAE competed, each consisting of a Copywriter and Art Director both 28 years old or below. Whilst three winners were announced, all the contestants pinned their hopes on the top award of representing the UAE in the International Young Lions Competition at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in the south of France this June. The Cannes Festival continues to be the largest gathering of worldwide advertising and marketing professionals, and the industry’s most prestigious awards event.

The teams had 9 hours to produce work of global quality standards based on a brief from Make-A-Wish Foundation UAE. The mandate was to produce an A3 print ad/poster to generate public awareness on the Foundation’s activities and objectives in the UAE.

The winning teams were as follows:

GOLD: Bilal Kerbaj and Mohamed Sami Ali from Fortune Promoseven Abu Dhabi were the front runners, scooping the Gold award, and will proudly represent the UAE at the Cannes Competition in June.

SILVER: Timsy Vadhani and Omar Bitar from Euro RSCG Promopub claimed the Silver prize.

BRONZE: Carlos Khoury and Toby Charles Gomez from AGA Dubai were awarded the Bronze.