Little Miss Enviro Geek : Microsoft Office

Some personal news...

biwirth — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:24:00 GMT

Hello Dear Blog Readers,

(hmmm....that kinda sounds like the beginning of one of those SPAM emails)

I wanted to let you all know I am moving on from Microsoft and shall no longer be blogging here. I'll be moving an archive of these posts to my website http://www.greenitstrategy.com and shall continue blogging there on Green IT.

So what will I be doing now?

Well, I have decided to take some time off, write a book and maybe look into starting my own business. Regardless, you can always catch me through my website and please do feel free to visit me there.

Thank you to everyone who contacted me with their Green IT questions over the past two years and gave me feedback. I really appreciate your support and good luck with your own Green IT initiatives.

Kind Regards,

Bianca AKA Little Miss Enviro Geek

Energy & Paper-saving Office templates: What the…?

biwirth — Sun, 03 May 2009 22:28:00 GMT

Last week I was going through a backlog of old emails and came across some information from the Templates Team Blog…and I thought “what the…”?

This team have published three templates that help save both paper and energy. And I never really had a deep think about this before (uh-duh!) – but once you take a look you’ll see there are some good tips in these templates that you can re-use for your own IT help sites and documentation for employees:

Energy and paper-saving presentation - tips and settings to help conserve energy and space for online and printed slides in PowerPoint 2007.
Paper-saving settings for print documents - tips and settings to help conserve paper for printed documents. Instructions are provided for making these settings the default for your new documents in Word 2007.
Space and paper-saving settings - tips and settings for print and online documents, to help conserve space for documents that are viewed primarily online but may also be printed. Instructions are also provided in this template for making these settings the default for your new documents in Word 2007.

Are digital downloads really more 'Green' than CDs?

biwirth — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:18:00 GMT

At first when you ask yourself this one, you kind of go - of course! Think about all that packaging & shipping! But then you kind of go: wait a sec - those digital downloads are hosted in big, power-hungry data centres. Microsoft recently undertook a study where they invited in the Natural Resource Defence Council to review their analysis on this very topic. And the result was that digital downloads ARE more environmentally friendly.

A couple of the key stats from this report are:

Digital download of Office (a nice chunky sized download that one!) avoided 8 times the amount of carbon compared to shipping & producing a DVD;
Carbon emissions avoided through online purchasing of 10 million copies is equivalent to:
- the electric consumption of 7,715 US households, or
- 13,008 passengers cars driven in one year, or
- 231 acres of avoided Amazon rainforest deforestation.

Checkout the full paper here: http://us20.trymicrosoftoffice.com/go-green/