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Fourier Analysis Tool Just About Useless.

For the first time today, I tried out the Fourier Analysis tool in the Excel 2003 Analysis Add In pack.

And, boy, was I disappointed.

The output is a list of complex numbers, in A+Bi format. This list is as long as the input dataset. And the input dataset is inconveniently limited to 4096 samples. So, I ended up with a list of 4096 complex numbers. "Data reduction in its finest," commented a fellow analyst.

Nowhere in the help documentation was the significance of this output explained. Help contains a list of seven book titles that discuss the algorithms used in the Analysis pack. And the entry "About statistical analysis tools" has exactly two sentences that basically tell you that the Fourier Analysis tool works by "using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)." Helpful? Not exactly.

The help file wasn't lying: the tool performed the FFT. And did nothing more. Then it spat the raw, complex-valued output into my workbook.

Fortunately, Wikipedia's entry on the DFT gave me the information I needed to convert each complex number into an amplitude at a particular frequency. Which is what I expected the Excel tool to do in the first place.

I'm including the Wikipedia DFT link here, just in case anybody else should ever try to accomplish DFT in Excel, instead of in Matlab like God intended.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiscreteFouriertransform

So, I've identified a problem. Here's my proposed solution:

		   Generate output (or provide an option to generate output) as frequency/amplitude pairs.  This will require adding a place where the user can specify the length (in units of time) of his dataset so that the frequencies come out in units of 1/appropriate time units.
	

		   Include some meaningful help information.  For example, state that the amplitude of the kth number in the output data is the amplitude of the frequency component given by 2Pi*k/N.  Here N is the number of samples in the input dataset (identical to the number in the output set).
	

-MSE
PS - What gives with the lack of line wrapping? It works on the Wikis home page...

Handle long URLs properly

The most annoying longstanding deficiency in Outlook is its inability to handle long URLs in all circumstances. Apple Mail, for example, which complies with RFC1738, adds a space into the middle of long URLs to break them across two lines. (RFC1738 states: "In some cases, extra whitespace (spaces, linebreaks, tabs, etc.) may need to be added to break long URLs across lines. The whitespace should be ignored when extracting the URL.") However, Outlook does not ignore the space... instead, if you click on one of these URLs, just the first part of the split-up URL is passed to the browser.

The Outlook developers may disagree with the RFC and feel that Apple Mail's implementation is flawed, however, the fact is that Outlook is the dominant mail client worldwide, so it is imperative that Outlook's long URL handling in a variety of circumstances be improved. -- danwarne

Comply with rfc2445 in Outlook 2003.

http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/ticket/1988

Create a facility to do vertical line graphs in Powerpoint

We're increasingly being asked by clients to do line graphs in this format and I know of 2 global research agencies that have received the same request. At the moment, this can only be done by 'fudging' a scattergraph. It is time consuming and you have to enter all the data labels manually. It would save 100s of man hours for those of us who don't get a say in these things... --

Remove Outlook from the Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition

I am of the belief that Outlook isn't required in the student and teacher edition of Office and would be better replaced with Access. Though i find Outlook an amazing tool and extremely handy i just fail to see the point in it in this package, at school, college and uni i was taught Access never Outlook (of course word, excel, powerpoint also came into the teaching scheme). -- Jaz
Keep Outlook, add Access. Much better. -- ZippyV

Outlook - one click create task, meeting request, and asignment from mail

Some time we got the mail from the boss or coworker that trigger some task, meeting request, or assigment, it's very convennient if we could quickly create task, meeting request, and asignment from the mail we recieved, so I suggest that ưhen created, content of the mail should be retained or forwarded, addressed in TO: and CC: box should stransfered to TO: box. TanNg

Outlook - Tag bar

Category is very usefull feature, but to categorize an items we should make 4 mouse clicks, what disrupt me to much, so that I rarely use category feature. There is the way to overcome this: one click categorization with tag bar. To quickly categorize items, flaging, or other action, I would like to have a TAG BAR with customizable action in it (auto display frequenlty used action), so that I could do one click tagging my mail. The best placement of the Tag Bar perhaps is vertically between 1st and 2nd column in 3 pane view, so that I dont have to move mouse too far to take action. TanNg

Problems when Installing SPS2003 with a non-standard language setting

Today we found out, that when installing SPS2003 (English Version) on a W2003 Server (Standard Edition, English Version) with german keyboard layout, the use of special characters ($"§ ...) in the account-password leads to logon problems. It seems that SPS2003 ignores the language settings of the system keyboard and uses the standard US-Setting which causes a logon problem and an "unexpected" end of the installation procedure. - Dubmaker & Stitch 2.0

Download progress bar for Outlook attachments

What would be good in Outlook is if a progress bar was shown whenever you were downloading attachments from a remote Exchange box (i.e. if you are on dial-up or a LAN). Sometimes users double-click attachments to open them, wait a few seconds and double-click again - thus effectively downloading the attachment twice. Visual feedback would show that the software is doing something. -- sbc

SOC ATOMICUSERDATA

Preface

Not sure what the rationale is or will be behind these types of decisions, but I thought I would make a suggestion here so that someone might consider my suggestion for it's merit anyway.

Scenario

When saving user information in Office, perhaps in preparation for computer maintenance, moving to another computer, reloading, upgrading, or what ever reason you may have.

(repairing broken development environments due to exhaustive developer experiments with VSIP) (Blog post coming soon, for some reason unknown to me posting this to C9 is taking precedence over posting to my Blog today)

There is plenty to consider. There are so many steps in fact that in my opinion (and experience) it is too easy to overlook a piece of important information. It only takes once and you could forever lose a piece of information stored on your computer that you would never have thought to backup.

Case in Point

Outlook 2003 (Part of Office Professional EE Specifically) One would typically create backups of the Outlook Data Files backup.pst and account settings for each mail (or exchange) account. And well one would expect that to just about do it. Well yesterday I changed some things around. This due to my over-confident-developer-attitude I had to re-work my desk. (Details to a Blog near you coming soon). Well one investment I have into Office is my "OPTIONS AND CONFIGURATIONS SETTINGS". These include things like, how frequently to check my mail, and more importantly my "BLOCKED SENDERS LIST AND EMAIL RULES".

While I am sure that a Files and Settings Transfer Wizard like that found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=293118

Could be well made for Office, this is not what is needed. Here's why. The goal of the move in most cases is the fix, clean, or upgrade the system. In all three cases the registry is paramount, meaning we desire it to be changed or needs to be new. In some case's connectivity is the issue. The target system is the same host partition as the source.

What is needed.

Consider a separation of concerns with respect to conceptual programming methodologies such as extreme programming, TDD or oop and usability. What we need is usability. And when programming complex systems today (I am guilty of this myself), we tend to divide and conquer, rather than consider an impact of a particular design consideration.

One such SOC (Separation of concerns):
That of User Data and Application Data. The registry is a good thing, use properly it has made the world (environment) a better place. IMHO, The registry is not the place to keep USERSPECIFICDATA, and therefore should be limited to SYSTEMDATA, APPLICATIONDATA, CONFIGURATIONDATA, and ADMINISTRATIVEDATA.

Finally the product suggestion
The .pst or DATA FILE should be engineered to be a comprehensive USER_SPECIFIC and SINGULAR file containing all information objects related to that users experience. It is the opinion of this developer that every application should contain such a file thereby permitting each user total control of that which matters most to him or her, their "data".

Impact

While some redundancy will no-doubt occur with the above described SOC the impact is far reaching in that each user will have total influence of his or her "file", minimizing opportunities for mistakes by that user, or a more global mistake by an administrative type, this would even help the over-confident-developer who runs as "admin".

Respectfully --Jamie

Chats

There should be chats like the Windowsxp/expertzone chats --Jaz

Outlook Rules

When using Exchange and Outlook, rules are stored on the server whether they are server executable or not. There also is a limit to the size of these rules. Why not only save the rules that will execute on the server on the server and leave the client side to be as big as possible. -- Molly

Better Automation from Managed Code

I expect managed versions of the Office apps to be a long time coming if they ever come at all. In the meantime consider creating a set of managed wrappers for each application or at least Word, Excel, and Access.

The PIA's for Office are very difficult to work with, especially from C# which doesn't support optional parameters and the Office APIs are full of them. Working with the shell and ROT when required is maddening. You can actually put Explorer into a death spiral very easily and rebooting the machine becomes neccessary as the loop is so tight you can't even kill the processes with Task Manager or issue a kill from the shell.

Currently, if I need Office automation from .Net, I interop to VB 6.0 and automate from there. I hate that!

Provide guidance on VSA. Is it dead or just being rethought? It took four versions of Office before we got a common VBA editor. Please don't put us through that again!

Thanks -- Doug

Default toolbars in Office

Show Standard and Format toolbars in two rows by default. Current screen resolutions are enough to display toolbars in two rows. Add more buttons to toolbar when higher resolution detected.

Newsgroups in Outlook

Office Outlook should support NNTP newsgroups. Outlook Express has it. Office Outlook should be better than OE, but it isn't because OE supports NNTP and Outlook doesn't.

Microsoft Query (in Excel)

Just a visual comment...the user interface/query builder tool looks out of place with the rest of the product. Why not at least make the table graphics look similar to Access? -- jsrfc58

Microsoft Office Express

Ditch the horrible Microsoft Works suite and create a "Microsoft Office Express" suite geared towards home users. It should be the same apps people are familiar to (Outlook / Excel / Word) but have a limited feature set. For example, home users probably don't need/care about document collaboration, outlook form editing, templates, VBA support, track changes / etc etc etc. I'm imagining this as the Office equivalent to the new "Visual Studio Express" suite. Everyone hates MS Works and Office is the defacto standard.

Add a isometic grid to Visio

It's about time we could more easily create cool-looking isometrtic diagrams using Visio. The 90 degree grid thing looks pretty lame these days. --richardb20

Scale Message Loading Time better with large quantities of inbox items

When you have say, 2000 emails in your inbox with a fourth of them being unread, loading new emails becomes very sluggish (5-10 seconds on a modern computer) and it is necessary to move the items to a new folder to get instanteous load times. Please improve message loading time in a future version of Outlook. Microsoft's SQL 2005 technology might be able to help with this. --Shining Arcanine

Standardise font and style selection for all Office apps

After all this time, it be really nice if all Office apps used the same font snd style selection as Word. The differences drive everyone crazy -- richardb20

Standardise table layout in Word and Powerpoint

After all this time, it be really nice if all Office apps used the same table layout tools and behaviours as Word. The differences drive everyone crazy -- richardb20

Consolidate the Options settings in Outlook

After the years, Outlook has accumulated lots of different multi-tabbed dialog boxes for setting options. Can we please have an alternate user interface (alternate rather than replacement - because I know there are millions of users out there who can't cope with new replacement UIs:)) - perhaps omething along the lines of the Outlook 2003 | Help | Customers Feedback Options...| dialog box. - richardb20