Monday, January 10, 2011

PowerPoint Crashes when Typing Anything on a Mac Running Windows 7 and Bootcamp

OS X pictureProblem: PowerPoint Crashes when Typing Anything on a Mac Running Windows 7 and Bootcamp 3.2

This problem is bizarre. About an hour ago, I tried to start working on a PowerPoint presentation I started on Friday. Whenever I type anything PowerPoint 2007 crashes. Everything worked fine on Friday. (Ahhh!!!! Sometimes I really hate computers.) I'm using a MacBook Pro running Windows 7 64bit and Bootcamp 3.2.

Solution:
The bug appears to be with BootCamp 3.2 and Windows 7. My HP laptop has no such problem. Only my Mac.

Thanks to some smart folks on the Apple forums, there seem to be workaround solutions to this bug. The problem seems to be with Windows, Bootcamp, PowerPoint, and the keyboard driver.

PowerPoint 2007
For PowerPoint 2007 on Windows 7....
  1. Open Control Panel
  2. Press "Change keyboards or other input methods" from "Clock, Language, and Region"
  3. Press "Change keyboards..."
  4. Press "Add..."
  5. Roll down "English (United States)" (if it's not already expanded)
  6. Select "US"
  7. Press "OK"
  8. Press "OK"
  9. Press "OK"
  10. Close the Control Panel
See Forum Post Here

PowerPoint 2010
Another user performed these steps to fix the problem on PowerPoint 2010.

In PowerPoint 2010..
  1. Go to "File", "Options", "Language"
  2. Under a the heading "keyboard layout" note the hyperlink which says "not enabled".
  3. Click on the hyperlink and select a keyboard layout and the keyboard's language.
  4. Once you complete the process it will say "enabled" under the keyboard layout heading.
This should fix the problem.

I can confirm the PowerPoint 2007 fix worked for me. Given the Posts date back to late November it appears this bug has been around a while.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Get Yourself a DropBox in the New Year

DropBox icon

Do yourself a favor this new year and get yourself a Dropbox.

What is Dropbox?

Dropbox is a virtual hard drive that lives on your computer and in the cloud. If you download and run the installer, a My Dropbox folder is added to your My Documents directory on Windows. Once created, copy and create files in the folder just like any other folder on your system. Your files are automatically synced to the cloud.

That is interesting, but where is the coolness factor? Well if you only have one machine, it is not that exciting. But if you have more than one machine, an iPhone, and an iPad, things get really cool. With Dropbox installed on each of your computers and devices, the files are automatically synced between each computer and device. This is immensely useful for someone like me with a bunch of devices and computers.

Where can I use Dropbox?

Dropbox can be used on pretty much anything. Installers are available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry. By default you get 2GB of disk space for free. For $99 a year, you get 50GB of disk space. Do yourself a favor and check it out.