It’s available for pre-order from Amazon now, for $29.00, which is 47% off the full retail price. And when you get the paperback you get the e-book version for free, in your choice of PDF, Kindle, EPUB, or other standard, DRM-free formats.

Amazon.com pre-order

Microsoft® Office Inside Out: 2013 Edition

The book has full coverage of the five core applications in Office 2013: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote, with additional material on Access, Publisher, and Lync. We also explain the difference between Office 2013 and Office 365 and help you decide which edition is the right one for you.

- Ed Bott

This is aggravating not just because it requires an extra click to initiate the search I requested, but more important, because it ignores the default search engine I’ve configured in IE9. (Believe me, when I have a choice, Ask.com is not my preferred provider!)

I’ve done lots of Googling and Binging (but no Asking) to find a solution, but all the fixes revolve around the Search Providers tab in the Manage Add-ons dialog box—which has no effect on this problem created by my ISP. (FWIW, this occurs on my office T1 service from XO, but I’ve seen similar hijacking on other ISPs, including Charter Cable, which I use at home.)

Although the symptoms are similar to a browser that has been hijacked by malware, the problem is external to my machine; no add-on, other software, or cookie is installed here. It’s simply the DNS service at the ISP that is doing me this wonderful favor.

Read on for two workarounds and a solution…

WORKAROUND: You can click one of the search provider icons that appears at the bottom of the address bar drop-down instead of pressing Enter. (If it’s not showing, you can click the arrow next to the search icon in the address bar.) Although it’s effective, this isn’t as convenient because you must either reach for the mouse or press Tab several times.

The good news is that, after you do this once, IE remembers your choice for the rest of the session. Thereafter you can press Enter and IE passes your search text to the provider you last clicked. However, you must repeat the process the next time you open IE.

WORKAROUND: Other ISPs hijack address bar searches in different ways, but I found a way to improve—but not disable altogether—this “courtesy” that XO applies to my connection. They don’t make the solution obvious, however:

1. On the landing page, click About This Page.
2. On the About page, click the opt-out link.
   
3. Choose your preferred search provider in the Opt-Out box.

Unfortunately, this ties you into a single search provider. I tend to use different providers for different types of searches. And alas, the None option doesn’t just disable the feature and let IE9 take over, as you might hope. Instead, just as it says, it shows an error page when you type something other than a legitimately formed URL in the address bar. Thanks for nothing.

But there is a way to solve the problem once and for all:

SOLUTION: Change DNS providers. Instead of using the one recommended by your ISP and used by default, configure your network to use an alternative, such as Google DNS or OpenDNS. (Using one of these private DNS services can have other advantages as well, such as improved speed and security.) This can be done at your router–which means you have to have permission to manage the router and knowledge of how its settings are made–or at individual computers. Here I’ll explain the simpler method, configuring a computer.

To use Google DNS with Windows 7, follow these steps:

1. Open Network And Sharing Center. (Among the myriad ways to do that: right-click the Network icon in the notification area and click Open Network And Sharing Center; or open the Start menu, type network, and click Network And Sharing Center.)
2. In Network And Sharing Center, click Change Adapter Settings, double-click the icon for your Internet-facing adapter, and click Properties.
3. In the adapter’s properties dialog box, select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IP v4), and then click Properties.
4. In the Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IP v4) Properties dialog box, shown below, record the current settings by writing them down or capturing and saving a screen image. (That way you can undo your change if things don’t work as expected.) Then select Use the Following DNS Server Addresses and then enter the IP addresses of Google’s two public DNS servers: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Click OK and Close a few times, restart IE, and you’ll finally be able to enter search terms in the address bar and get decent results.

Want to know more? This page explains how to configure other operating systems to use Google Public DNS, how to test your settings, and how to diagnose and resolve DNS problems. And, of course, we discuss DNS issues in Windows 7 Inside Out and the just-released Windows 7 Inside Out Deluxe Edition.

UPDATE: Within Windows rock star Rafael Rivera (@WithinRafael) points out that Cox and Comcast provide information and instructions about their search hijacking, er, enhancement features.

No problem. Although you don’t get a shiny CD, purchasers of the printed book can download a DRM-free PDF file for free. (Free? Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it’s included in the price of the book.)

Simply go to http://microsoftpress.oreilly.com/safarienabled and enter the coupon code from the card bound into the back of the book. For complete, step-by-step instructions, see the Microsoft Press blog.

It isn’t easy to use these features, but Bott and Siechert explain the steps with great care.

As usual, we tried to keep it light, but…

Because this book skips all the cartoons, jokes, and fluff in other publications, you’ll learn much more than you could just browsing through the programs.

The other day he asked where to find Send To Clipboard, an add-in for Windows Explorer in Windows XP that allowed him to copy the path to a folder or file to the Clipboard, so that he can then paste it in a document or message.

Not necessary, I told him.

• To copy the path to the current folder:
  In Windows Explorer, right-click the address bar and choose Copy Address As Text.
• To copy the complete path to a file, including the folder path and file name:
  In Windows Explorer, hold down the Shift key, right-click the file name, and choose Copy As Path.

In this example, choosing Copy Address As Text places the following text on the Clipboard: C:\Users\Carl\Documents\OneNote Notebooks\Work Notebook

Btw, if you’re pining for other Send To features that are not included with Windows 7, check out a nifty utility called Send To Toys from Gabriele Ponti.

You can read an excerpt—a good chunk about OneNote from Chapter 15—at the Microsoft Press blog.

Here’s the chapter-level table of contents:

Part 1: Office Fundamentals
Chapter 1: Inside Office 2010 (16 pages)
Chapter 2: Installing and Updating Microsoft Office 2010 (24 pages)
Chapter 3: Using and Customizing the Office Interface (32 pages)
Chapter 4: Managing Office Files (32 pages)
Chapter 5: Entering, Editing, and Formatting Text (42 pages)
Chapter 6: Working with Graphics and Pictures (38 pages)

Part 2: Word
Chapter 7: Inside Word 2010 (56 pages)
Chapter 8: Working with Complex Documents (34 pages)
Chapter 9: Reviewing and Sharing Documents (28 pages)
Chapter 10: Word 2010 Inside Out (34 pages)

Part 3: Excel
Chapter 11: Inside Excel 2010 (44 pages)
Chapter 12: Managing Lists and Data (34 pages)
Chapter 13: Charts and Data Analysis (30 pages)
Chapter 14: Excel 2010 Inside Out (36 pages)

Part 4: OneNote
Chapter 15: Inside OneNote 2010 (34 pages)
Chapter 16: Tagging, Organizing, and Finding Information (24 pages)
Chapter 17: OneNote 2010 Inside Out (30 pages)

Part 5: PowerPoint
Chapter 18: Inside PowerPoint 2010 (36 pages)
Chapter 19: Polishing and Delivering a Presentation (34 pages)
Chapter 20: PowerPoint 2010 Inside Out (38 pages)

Part 6: Outlook
Chapter 21: Inside Outlook 2010 (44 pages)
Chapter 22: Organizing Outlook Information (38 pages)
Chapter 23: Outlook 2010 Inside Out (44 pages)

Part 7: Sharing and Collaborating
Chapter 24: Security, Sharing, and Collaboration (20 pages)
Chapter 25: Using Office in a Web Browser (22 pages)
Chapter 26: Working with SharePoint 2010 (26 pages)

New options at the bottom of the View menu cause Calculator to sprout special purpose calculators to the right of the familiar keypad. These calculators perform all types of unit conversion in addition to calculations such as mortgage payment and fuel economy.

But the one that caught my eye today was the Date Calculation panel. Hmmm, how many days since I was born? I was astonished to see that the answer is 19,999 days! Tomorrow my odometer rolls over as I celebrate the big Two-Oh. Oh, oh, oh.

If you want to check your age—or see how much older I am than you—open Calculator and then choose View, Date Calculation or press Ctrl+E. In the meantime, I’m going to party like it’s 19999.

Shortly after the news hit the twitterverse, Ed Bott explained what God Mode really is (and isn’t). Today, he follows up with a list of other god mode (demi-god?) shortcuts.

Most of these shortcuts are well documented–if you know where to look. Check “Canonical Names of Control Panel Items” at MSDN, for example.

As Ed noted in his posts, we’ve covered this technique in previous Inside Out editions, but omitted coverage in Windows 7 Inside Out. Why? Frankly, it provides nothing useful in Windows 7. The Search box in Control Panel provides a much faster, easier, and more convenient method for finding Control Panel functions; you don’t need to know the name of the applet (many of which have changed in recent versions of Windows) or where it lives in the hierarchy. You don’t even have to spell correctly, because (as Ed points out in his blog) MS has put in several common misspellings as search keywords. 

Say, for example, you want to change the screen resolution. Begin typing “screen,” “display,” “monitor,” “resolution,” “size,” “pixels,” “adjust,” or “change.” (I’m sure there are other valid keywords; these are just the first few that occurred to me.) The short list invariably includes Adjust Screen Resolution under a prominent Display heading.

Anyway, Windows 7 Inside Out is now available at your local bookstore (or online at Amazon.com). We’re reading your comments and questions on our first post and will have some answers shortly.