MS Office 2003 No Longer Available

Microsoft released Office 2007 in January of this year. They indicated that Office 2003 would be available until June. It's now November and we are finally no longer able to find Office 2003 in the distribution channel. This means that from this point forward Office 2007 is the only version of Office that we are selling.

Although the Office 2007 interface is quite a bit different than previous versions of Office, most users should be able to use it without much difficulty, other than a search for the location of certain functions that might have moved.

Office 2007 file formats have changed as well. The new file format is much better but it does cause compatibly issues with older versions of documents. This will cause problems for employees or outside people that share your documents. However, there is a switch that can be turned on to save files in the older format. This will impede some of the new features of Office 2007 but will insure your documents can be read and updated by all users.

We can provide an overview of the Office 2007 changes for our Clients. We have also been posting Office 2007 tips on our Answers website. This should not be a major issue for most users. We have been using Office 2007 since the beta versions and find it to be a very good upgrade. It's time to move forward!

Some Email Tips

We get lots of questions about email.  One of the most asked is "Why do I get so much spam?"  There are several reasons of course but there some that you may not be thinking about.  Here are a couple.

First, some Domains are just more prone to spam due to the nature of the business.  If you do business around the world and your email addresses are used by companies around the world, you will be more prone to spam.  If you sell products and/or services to your local market you will be less prone to spam.  Generally, there isn't much that you can do about this except to filter your email as well as you can.

We see companies that put email addresses on their websites.  This is one of the easiest ways for spammers to target you.  There are automated programs called bots that scour the Internet just looking for such addresses.  There are ways to handle information requests from your website that will minimize if not eliminate this issue.

We also see users using both Out of Office Messages and Delivery Receipts with their email.  While these functions can be very nice, they are another easy way for spammers to get your address.  You see, spammers will often send a bunch of spam to random addresses that they don't know are valid.  When they see an Out of Office Message come back they know they have a live one.  This known valid email address is like gold to them.  They can sell it to other spammers and make good amounts of money.  Then before you know it, your on their lists.

And of course using your real email address to fill out forms on the Internet is asking for trouble. The fix for this is to use a disposable email address on these forms if you need to fill one out.  That way you can kill the email account should you start seeing lots of spam come to it.

Spam is a pain in the neck.  And unfortunately, it's here for a while.  Spam filters do help.  They actually capture the majority of the spam.  If you see 10 spam items in your Inbox, you can be pretty sure that the spam filters have blocked an additional 90 to 95 from getting to your Inbox.  Taking some precautions can help.