10 great technologies to secretly install on Mom's PC

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

She's your mom. She's risen to every challenge, not the least of which was raising you to be the fine, upstanding PC enthusiast you are today.

Yet despite all of Mom's successes, you're still the go-to techie in the family. With Mother's Day just around the corner, it's your turn to streamline her desktop, protect her precious data, and put a smile on her face. Just install these apps and gadgets on Mom's computer, and surprise her with a much better PC experience on Sunday morning.

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Garage Series: The Great Race--did rolling out Office just get faster?

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

In this episode, the intrepid Garage Series hosts explore the change in guard of compatibility tools. Conducting the great race of Office installs, they catch up with Office engineer John Hoegger about Microsoft's own global implementation of the new Office. Watch as they examine user training, compatibility and pushing out the bits to answer whether or not rolling out Office just got faster.

Be sure to mark your calendar for new episodes, and especially to tune in to Garage Series Live! on Wednesday, April 3 at 9am Pacific Time, for lessons learned on real world deployment with Paul Thurrott from the Supersite for Windows, along with early adopters and Office engineers to discuss lessons learned and deployment secrets for the new Office, including live Q&A.

Learn more at www.microsoft.com/garage where you can discover additional resources and check out the complete archive of all previous Garage Series shows.

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Adobe Creative Cloud – A Great Choice for Students

No doubt you’ve heard about Adobe Creative Cloud – still wondering what all the buzz is about? In a nutshell, it’s about having all the tools you’ll ever need for going from creative concept to production of A-grade visual projects, winning portfolios or stunning websites. With a special $19.99* monthly membership for students, you get access to all of the Creative Suite 6 tools, web hosting services, fonts, and cloud storage for syncing and sharing creative files. There are lots of reasons to love it:

Get Noticed: Deliver powerful presentations, a personalized web portfolio or a unique Facebook cover photo that everyone is raving about. Because Creative Cloud membership allows access to every Creative Suite 6 tool, the possibilities are endless. Feel a bit overwhelmed? Check out this collection of tutorials to help you get started.Build Job-Ready Skills: According to a U.S. News & World Report article, one of five skills everyone needs to have on a resume is knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite. As you experiment and create eye-catching projects with Adobe solutions, you’re building experience with the latest industry-standard tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Now your resume will stand out from the crowd! Check out Adobe’s How-to Channel for more helpful videos and tutorials.Receive Instant Upgrades: No more annual upgrade purchases. Cloud members have access to exclusive updates from Adobe, at no additional cost. When a new release comes out, it is automatically available via the Cloud. For example, we recently added several new features to Illustrator CS6 and just included an iPad publishing service, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition, for making digital editions of magazines and yearbooks.Enjoy a Great Value: Creative Cloud membership is now available for students at $19.99 per month – that’s less than a night out with friends! The CS6 Master Collection would cost you about $800!

 So what are you waiting for, check out Adobe Creative Cloud here!

*Limited time only, offer ends November 4, 2012

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And the winners of the great white shark VLOOKUP is...

JP Pinto!  Congratulations!

His contribution was one of the seven selected by Bill Jelen as the most innovative, while VLOOKUP weekreleased.  He won a copy of that book Bill Jelens Microsoft Excel 2010 in depth. You can find links to all seven posts and the results of voting in our summary of the VLOOKUP week postsee.

JP Pinto post cascading validation lists will show you how you select and use VLOOKUP function, create a set of drop-down lists, the "", Cascade so that the choices in a second list depends on depending what you, a first list choose. You can restrict the choices these lists, displayed to the user in list boxes.

JP Pinto blogs on Excel-User.com, where he writes Excel articles for common users to help improve their skills.

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OneNote mobile apps work great with OneNote Web App

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Today, the OneNote team announced an exciting new offering:  OneNote Mobile for Android is now available in the Android Market app store!

OneNote mobile apps are available on a wide variety of platforms, including Windows Phone 7, iPhone, iPad, and now Android. They all work together with OneNote on your desktop and OneNote Web App in your browser.

Once you've gotten started with OneNote on your device, you can log in to SkyDrive to see a list of your notes, or view and edit them on the web. You can even share notes from your phone with friends, classmates, colleagues, or co-workers.

To share a note, just right-click on the file in SkyDrive and select "Share." This is one of my favorite features, because with one click you can share notes you've taken in classes, for travel plans, recipes, to-do lists, or even a shopping list, like the one we showcased at CES last month.

 Thanks,

--Jenni French
Sr. Product Manager, Office Web Apps

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Writing - Open Source Software-10 great free Communication tools

Live Writer: we have already mentioned A great tool for Blogging…and it's free? (Video)

Sure, I work for Microsoft. Yes, use our tools. And Yes, I'd like some love of them really, really. I use Windows Live Writer 2011for blogging. It is a free tool from Windows Live, and I'm using it to write this post. Why love I it? Let me count the ways:

See summary of the Office blog team MOM 2.0 coverage from New Orleans here.

--Doug Thomas

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