We've had an irritating issue recently with our accounting system, when creating the custom invoices.

Basically, every time we tried to create a custom invoice with Microsoft Office Accounting the entire application would crash for no obvious reason.

Checking the exception's stack trace it would talk about get_item which lead me down one path but the answer was actually (and irritatingly) more simple than that -we had a couple of merged cells in the footer of the totals table. Silly I know but it made all the difference!

So if you're getting a crash with Microsoft Office Accounting when creating your invoices, check for merged cells first!

I've had an irritating issue for the past week or so. I used to use POP3 in Outlook however the other day I switched to the internal Exchange server and I got stuck in an eternal loop saying that Exchange needed to connect to the server to synchronise the offline files and folders -but you couldn't do that until the files were transferred.

The message looked something like this:

The set of folders cannot be opened. You must connect to Microsoft Exchange with the current profile before you can synchronise your folders with your offline folder file.

Took me a while but the fix was to remove the profile and setup the exchange inbox first:

1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
2. Click Switch to Classic View, and then double-click Mail.
3. In the Mail Setup dialog box, click Show Profiles.
4. On the General tab, click Prompt for a profile to be used, and then click Add.
5. In the Profile Name box, type a descriptive name for the new e-mail profile, and then click OK.
6. In the E-mail Accounts dialog box, click Add a new e-mail account, and then click Next.
7. Click the appropriate server type for your new e-mail account, and then click Next.
8. Type your account information in the required boxes, and then click Next.
9. Click Finish, and then click OK.

This is still unconfirmed and somewhat word-of-mouth etc atm but if you check out Ian Moulster's blog you'll see his post about Microsoft giving away free copies of the release version of Vista and Office 2007 check out his blog post to find out more.

Hopefully we'll hear more before DDD Day

I know this is covered all over the web but I'm forever forgetting it so if Outlook has started blocking email attachments i.e. ASP files you can easily adjust this by adding a String Key called "Level1Remove" to the registry, navigate to: Current User --> Software --> Microsoft --> Office (x) --> Outlook --> Security (where (x) is the version of office you are running: 9 = Outlook 2000, 10 = Outlook 2002 11 = Outlook 2003

Then right click and choose "New" and "String Key", then add in a list of the attachments you would like to allow seperated by semi-colons i.e.:
.exe;.mdb;.url;.asp;.aspx;.zip