Lately I prepared a bunch of spreadsheets in Open Office that contained lists of calendar data and values. I had a template file that already contained the basic layout which I just needed to fill in. So I typed, copied, typed, and so on until I was finished after almost three hours of work.

After saving the document and re-open it on my notebook (another installation of Open Office), I found my whole list of dates displayed with different years – they had gone four years into the past. At first I thought I made a mistake, corrected the dates, saved the document and re-opened it on my desktop computer. Yet again I found the dates shifted. I corrected the dates again, saved and re-opened it and annoyingly they were shifted again.

After a while I figured out that the reason for this behavior was due to different settings of the base date in Open Office

where one installation was set to to the default of “30/12/1899”, the other one to “01/01/1904”. Normally I would have expected that the base date settings are stored in the spreadsheet document, but for some reason this is not the case.

After settings both installations to the same base date, the problem was solved. Simple, if you know where to look. In the end it had cost me quite some time to figure this out.

As in previous versions of Microsoft Office, there’s an option in Office 2007 that turns on additional feedback sounds. The additional sounds needed for this feature to be activated, can be downloaded from this page at Microsoft's website.

Unfortunately the installer insists on having an older version of Microsoft Office installed and refuses to work if you have Office 2007. But there’s a rather simple solution to get it installed anyway. Here’s how:

1. Download the file sounds.exe from the web page above
2. Open an execute dialog by pressing the keys WIN + R or by selecting “Execute” from the Windows Start Menu.
3. Enter this command (note that c:\download in this example has to be replaced with the path where you stored the downloaded file):
   c:\download\sounds.exe /t:c:\officesounds /c
   This will unpack the installation files and store them in C:\officesounds
4. Go to the newly created folder C:\officesounds, execute sounds.msi and follow the instructions of the installer.

All what’s left to do is to turn on the sound feedback in one of your office programs. For example, in Microsoft Word you would click the Office-Button, then "Options" and "Extended", scroll down almost to the end of the dialog and turn on the option "Provide sound feedback".

Enjoy :-)