I truly just thought you could move documents in and out of Word with liitle issue. Little did I know...

Do you create really long documents in Word? If so, you probably know that Word doesn’t always play well with them. It’s usually smarter to split your long documents into multiple Word files.

But, then, how do you make sure the pages are numbered correctly and easily create a table of contents and an index for the whole document? That’s where Word’s master document feature can help. It allows you to combine multiple Word files into a single Word file.

A master document is a Word file that contains links to a set of other, separate Word files, called subdocuments. The content of the subdocuments is not inserted into the master document. The master document only contains links to the subdocuments. This allows you to edit the subdocuments separately. Any changes made to subdocuments are incorporated into the master document automatically. If there are multiple people working on a single document, a master document allows you to send different parts of the document to different people to work on.

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So this guy is not a fan of MS world... like at all. 

Nearly two decades and several text-handling paradigms ago, I was an editorial assistant at a weekly newspaper, where a few freelancers still submitted their work on typewritten pages. Stories would come in over the fax machine. If the printout was clear enough, and if our giant flatbed scanner was in the mood, someone would scan the pages in, a text-recognition program would decipher the letters, and we would comb the resulting electronic file for nonsense and typos. If the scanner wasn't in the mood, we would prop up the hard copy beside a computer and retype the whole thing. Technology was changing fast, and some people were a few steps slow. You couldn't blame them, really, but for those of us who were fully in the computer age, those dead-tree sheets meant tedious extra work.

Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone's archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It's time to give up on Word. 

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Next year... okay... I'm good with that.

A leaked Microsoft roadmap shows that the next version of Office won't ship until the first quarter of 2013, according to the Dutch developer who found the document.

Maarten Visser, the CEO of Meetroo and a decade-long Microsoft partner, stumbled upon the roadmap a week ago after clicking on a link posted on Microsoft's Dutch website. The PDF was not password protected.

"I'm always curious about the roadmaps," said Visser in a YouTube video he posted yesterday. "For me, since we build SharePoint applications, the release of SharePoint 15 is an important thing. The better I know when this will happen, the better I will be to ready my products before launch."

Visser's Meetroo is building project management software that relies on SharePoint.

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Patch, patch, patch, etc... then patch some more!

As expected, on Tuesday 10 April Microsoft released six security bulletins that address a total of 11 vulnerabilities in its products, eight of which are considered to be critical. Four of the bulletins address critical holes in all supported versions of Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), the .NET Framework, Office and SQL Server, as well as Microsoft Server and Developer tools. All of these bugs could be exploited by attackers to remotely inject and execute malicious code on a victim's system via a specially crafted file.

One critical bulletin, MS12-024 notes a privately reported vulnerability which could allow attackers to modify existing signed executable files. Another, MS12-027, is an issue in Microsoft's common controls, used in numerous Microsoft applications, which can be exploited when a user visits a malicious site or opens an email attachment to allow remote code execution. An Internet Explorer bulletin, MS12-023, affects all supported versions of IE, closes 5 holes, one when printing a specially crafted HTML page and four when IE accesses deleted objects in various situations. The rating for these holes is either critical or moderate depending on the combination of operating system and IE version. Finally, MS12-025 closes a vulnerability in the .NET framework which allows attackers to "take complete control of an affected system".

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