I was in a meeting the other day and the Marketing Manager of the company had a Microsoft Word 2007 document on screen and his laptop was connected to a projector.

The problem was the text in the document was too small to read easily.

Now in Microsoft Word 2007 you have a couple of ways of dealing with this.

One is to use the slider (at the bottom right hand side of the screen)

This control just zooms into your document. if you have a long slim document you still have to scroll up and down.

The problem with using the slider is unless you have a mouse connected you end up making big jumps from 100% to 164% but with a mouse you can gently move the slider in 8% increments until you find the desired zoom.

The other is to view the entire document on screen. This feature now lives on the View Tab> Full Screen Reading. As shown in the Clip at the top of the post..

In Word 2003 you can find the same feature in View > Full Screen.

Every time I use Dell Technical support I write up my experience both good and bad. Hopefully this will help potential customers of Dell’s equipment get a feeling for the aftercare that is on offer.

I had a case of an Dell Optiplex GX280 Small Form Factor desktop. The fan on this machine was running fast and loud. There was a batch of Optiplexes from Circa 2006 that had this problem but it could take a long time to manifest.

So I called Dell Technical Support. The UK based technician was very helpful and said if I did a quick bios upgrade first and if that doesn’t cure it they would send an engineer. I received an e-mail with the link to bios file within moments.

I got the end user to install the Bios Update and we monitored the machine for half an hour. The problem persisted. So I replied by e-mail to the Dell Tech with the site address and got a quick confirmation that an engineer would be dispatched.

The problem has now been resolved and in this case Dell Technical Support gave an excellent service.

To read the other Dell Technical Support Reviews Click Here

Long Zheng a tech blogger has got a hands on review of the Dell Latitude XT.

This is Dell’s first foray into the Tablet PC.

For my money the XT is a little too thick but a welcome entry into the Dell Latitude family.

Review Link: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080118/dell-latitude-xt-tablet-pc-review/

For those interested in the Latitude XT might also like to check out this 6m video.

Other Links:

Dell Blog About it: http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/12/10/37905.aspx

Dell have their own tech video concentrating on the touch capabilities of the XT. The video runs 9m long.

If you need to purchase some royalty free images for use on your website or other activities like printed brochures a great site to checkout is http://www.istockphoto.com

They have in excess of 2 million images organised into categories.

For a brief time they have a offer of 20% off your first order.

You need to visit the via this link: http://www.istockphoto.com/twitstock

I heard about this offer on this podcast: http://www.twit.tv/128

A bit off topic for me however…

The above is what the FTSE100 has done in the last month in the UK. I know very little about the stock market. However I do understand graphs. This is bad yes? Biggest day loses since 9/11.

A lot of visitors to this site are from other countries. Let me share some real world data about living in the UK.

What things cost:

1 Litre of Milk: .79pence (it was recently found supermarkets colluded to fix the price of milk.)

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7004054.stm

1 Litre of Unleaded Fuel: £1.03

15% This was the price increase announced by British Gas last week (they supply Gas and Electricity).

Bank of England Interest Rates in 2007:

Q1-2007:5.22% / Q2-2007:5.40% / Q3-2007:5.74% Q4-2007:5.69%

House Prices are falling(21/01/2008): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7199162.stm 

TAX: January is pay your tax time in the UK for the self employed people like myself. Depending on what you earn you have to give the government between 26%-40% of your profits/earning.

Conclusion

I was thinking of a new British tourism tag line

Britain: Great unless you want to Eat, Drive and Stay Warm.

Please feel free to have a moan about your country in the comments.

Normal tech blogging will resume tomorrow.