Castner IT Blog » Microsoft Office

Changing default language in Office 2007

Grant Castner — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:57:22 +0000

I recently moved back to Australia from the USA and had plenty of fun trying to change all of my defaults from USA to Australia. Here is a list of things to check whenever you are changing countries:

1. Microsoft Vista: Control Panel –> Clock, Language, and Region –> Change the country or region

and Control Panel –> Clock, Language, and Region –> Change the date, time, or number format

2. Time Zone: Click on the time –> Change Time Zone

3. For Microsoft Office 2007: All Programs –> Microsoft Office –> Microsoft Office Tools –> Microsoft Office 2007 Language

Reference: http://www.lizjamieson.co.uk/2007/12/03/how-to-set-the-default-language-dictionary-on-microsoft-word-2007/

Email merge in Microsoft Word

Grant Castner — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:37:56 +0000

Many programs, including MS Word, allow you to send personalized e-mails to any number of people. So instead of having to send a general e-mail to (for example) “Dear customer” you can send it to “Dear John Smith” and “Dear Jane Jones”.

The basic steps are:

1. Create a normal Word document that contains your standard e-mail content.

2. Create a database of names, e-mail addresses, and other personalized content. The data could be in Access, Excel, Outlook or many other formats.

3. With your e-mail document open in Word, go to Tools –> Letters and Mailings –> Mail Merge.

4. Select e-mail messages as the document type.

5. Complete the wizard steps at the bottom right of the screen to send your e-mail.

Use MS Word help for more information. The preferable e-mail format is HTML because otherwise MS Outlook may prompt you before sending each e-mail (as a security measure).

Changing the Password Complexity in ASP.NET

Grant Castner — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:55:12 +0000

Here is a great blog post on how to change the password complexity requirements in ASP.NET:
http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2005/05/11/406550.aspx

Using two ASP.NET membership providers

Grant Castner — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:09:20 +0000

Recently I wanted to give someone access to one of my teaching web sites. They were not a student or faculty member so they didn’t have an account in our active directory. I am not a system administrator so I wasn’t able to add them to the active directory either. The solution was to add a second membership provider to my ASP.NET site. The first membership provider is based on active directory. The new, 2nd provider is a SQL provider. I found a great blog post that had the relevant code for checking the username and password against the second provider: http://www.stevideter.com/2008/03/20/using-two-membership-providers-for-aspnet-logins/.

The code behind for the login page was in C# so I thought I would provide the bare bones Visual Basic equivalent:

Protected Sub Login1_Authenticate(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.AuthenticateEventArgs) Handles Login1.Authenticate

Dim foundUser As Boolean = False

‘this will call the default MembershipProvider
If (Membership.Provider.ValidateUser(Login1.UserName, Login1.Password)) Then
foundUser = True
‘ otherwise, explicitly call secondary provider
ElseIf Membership.Providers(“AspNetSqlMembershipProvider”).ValidateUser(Login1.UserName, Login1.Password) Then
foundUser = True
End If

If (foundUser) Then
e.Authenticated = foundUser
End If

End Sub

The membership section of web.config looks like this:

connectionStringName=”ADConnectionString” attributeMapUsername=”sAMAccountName” enableSearchMethods=”true”/>