Interactive Pivot of Australia Tech-Ed 2010 Sessions

Going to Tech-Ed in Australia next week? Check out this Microsoft Pivot of the session data, created by MVP Rob Farley:

http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au/TechEdAU2010/

I’ve been able to quickly filter down to the SharePoint sessions and see who is presenting on what day (fyi – there are 20 Office/SharePoint breakout sessions).

It would be nice if it was easier to get something like the session names for the set of data you are looking at, rather than having to click on each item individually. Still – it’s a nice fast way of browsing a large amount of data.

Right Click on a SharePoint 2010 list item

One thing I liked in SharePoint 2007 was the ability to click anywhere along an item’s drop-down field to get at the menu. I was disappointed to see this removed in SharePoint 2010 – now you have to click on the dropdown list’s down arrow to see the menu.

Sure, it makes sense from a user interface perspective – consistency with standard UI controls and all that. However it was a pain to have to move my mouse those extra few pixels to the right, particularly if the dropdown field is very wide.

Well, I just discovered that you can now right-click anywhere on a list item’s drop down field (except on the text) and you’ll get the drop down menu for the item. This is going to save me so much time!

Opening a Word document from SharePoint hangs the browser

Here’s an issue that I ran into on a recent project – when I tried to open a document (for editing) from the SharePoint web site, the browser would hang, Word wouldn’t launch and I would have to end up killing the Word and Internet Explorer processes using the Task Manager.

To keep a long, tedious story short, I eventually discovered that the document’s metadata in SharePoint had trailing spaces. Once I removed these, the document opened up just fine. One or two trailing spaces seemed to be fine, but if there was a lot of them, then it caused issues when trying to open the document in Word.

It’s not particularly easy to get trailing spaces into a document’s metadata. If you try to insert them via the browser user interface, SharePoint automatically removes them for you. However, in this project, I was populating the metadata using code. So now I know to use a Trim statement in my code to remove any trailing spaces when updating a SharePoint document’s metadata.