I was upgraded to Office 2007 at work yes­ter­day. My cubi­cal neigh­bor (Hi, Jim) has had it for a few weeks and has done noth­ing but com­plain. I have to admit I am not in love with the new inter­face, it does look like it might be help­ful to novices and today’s big button/colorful icon lovers, but I’m old school and like the drop down menu thing bet­ter. I quickly fig­ured out how to hide the Rib­bon and add my wanted but­tons to the top menu, so I can deal with the changes.

Office 2007 turns on Microsoft’s ClearType auto­mat­i­cally which they have designed to make text look crisper on LCD screens by blur­ring the edges. Some peo­ple love this “advance­ment”, most don’t even notice and another fac­tion hates it. I thought I fell only in the hate col­umn because at work and home when I have run into Clear Type in the past the first I did was to dis­able it. To me the slight blur­ring of the char­ac­ters, just makes them look out of focus.

Off to the web to see about shut­ting off the Blurr Type in Office 2007. Before you jump in to let me know Microsoft has Con­trol Panel App for tun­ing ClearType, I tried it and it didn’t help.

Depend­ing on which ver­sion of Win­dows you have there are dif­fer­ent ways to turn off ClearType. For XP you have to:
1. Click Start, click Con­trol Panel, click Appear­ance and Themes, and then click Dis­play.
2. On the Appear­ance tab, click Effects.
3. Click to select the Use the fol­low­ing method to smooth edges of screen fonts check box, and then click Nor­mal in the list. This turns it off for a lot of things, but Office 2007 still uses it.

To shut it off in Office you need to fol­low these instruc­tions:
1. Click the Microsoft Office But­ton, and then click pro­gram Options.
2. Click Pop­u­lar.
3. Under Top options in work­ing with pro­gram, click to clear the Always use ClearType check box.
4. Click OK to close the pro­gram Options dia­log box.
5. Restart the 2007 Office pro­gram. This is all well and good, but Out­look is still hold­ing out!

To bring Out­look into line you need to go to View -> Cur­rent View -> Cus­tomize Cur­rent View -> 1) Other Set­tings But­ton — Change the 3 fonts, Col­umn, Row, Auto Pre­view & 2) Auto­matic For­mat­ting But­ton — Change all 5 rules. Then go to Tools -> Options -> Mail For­mat Tab -> Sig­na­tures But­ton — Change the font if needed. Then select the Per­sonal Sta­tion­ary Tab — Change the three fonts there. I changed them all to Tahoma and left the point size alone. Arial would work pretty well here too.

After all that, the doc­u­ments now use the crisp sharp fonts I know and love, but guess what, all the menu text in Office 2007 still looks fuzzy. Turns out Microsoft com­mis­sioned some new ClearType friendly fonts to be use in the Office inter­face. Bastards!

There may be a dif­fer­ent way to cure this issue, but I opted for the brute force method, my Google search­ing turned up a site that listed those fonts and I moved them and all their vari­a­tions from the win­dows font direc­tory: Cal­ibri, Cam­bria, Can­dara, Con­so­las, Con­stan­tia, Cor­bel and Segoeui.

It is no secret here that I loved the first Iron Man, SOI have been eagerly await­ing IM2 for some time now. The trail­ers have looked awesome.

But now I’m not so sure. I’ve now seen a cou­ple of clips from the Iron Man movies and I think it may suf­fer from the same fate as TDPM series (the first was great, the sec­ond sucked and the third was an embarass­ment.) In the sec­ond trailer the Stark Expo entrance entrance takes 20 sec­onds, in the actual movie it takes 2 min­utes which is about a minute too long.

In the car race sequence where Whiplash chops Tony Stark’s car in half we get intro­duced to the new portable armor, the suit­case suit. The suit is a mar­vel (pun unin­tended) in that it is light enough for Pep­per Potts to toss out of a car 20′ away to Tony’s feet and it is strong enough to with­stand fero­cious elec­tri­cal whip­pings. Then it takes 20 sec­onds for it mag­i­cally expand and then snap back shut bit by bit. It must have some hyp­notic qual­i­ties as well because Whiplash just stands around wait­ing for the thing the fin­ish coa­lesc­ing into a com­plete suit before attacking.

The movie has actu­ally had it’s world pre­mier yes­ter­day in Hol­ly­wood and the early reviews are mixed. I’m think­ing that a week from Fri­day I may just pop the DVD of the first movie in and savor it.