Back in June, I posted that if you’re running the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office, you couldn’t insert Flash movies, since the Flash player is only a 32-bit plug-in. Users of 64-bit Windows have also experienced a lot of problems when watching Flash videos, which is the format of most videos on the Web, like on YouTube, Vimeo and elsewhere.

So it was an excellent gift today when I downloaded the beta of Adobe Square, the x64 Flash player. There are actually two downloads: an ActiveX control for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office, and a plug-in for Firefox and every other browser. You’ll probably want to install both.

As soon as I did — wham! — I was able to place Flash objects into PowerPoint and Excel. On the Insert tab, select Video/Video from File.

Someone had sent me an Excel workbook that contains videos (a teaching aide that I’ll review in the near future) and originally, all I saw were blank boxes. Once I installed Square, the videos played just great. I also noticed that YouTube videos play a lot more smoothly, without jumping, jittering, starting-and-stopping. Flash player 10.1 fixed a lot of that already, but Square seems even better.

A couple of caveats: since Square is still in beta, there’s no guarantee of anything, so if you experience crashes and whatnot, don’t say you weren’t warned. Also, the beta won’t update itself automatically and you won’t get reminders to do so. It’s up to you to visit the download page every so often to update it manually. Download it here.

According to StatCounter.com, IE6 — the bug-ridden, security-plagued, non-standard bane of web development — has fallen to an all-time low rate of fewer than 3% of all browsers in use. Thank goodness! It overstayed its welcome for about 5 years, long after IE 7 and 8 were introduced. For much of the last decade, developing web sites that would display properly in IE 6 as well as in browsers that actually worked properly often meant doing the work twice.

IE 7 was better, but still did weird things, and the further good news is that version 7 only accounts for about 13% of all browsers in use. IE 8 and IE 9 (now in beta) are W3C standards-compliant and display pages the same way as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and others.

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You can help drive in the final nail by pasting a bit of code in all your pages that uses IE conditional comments to tell people using the old version that they should upgrade. Get the code at www.ie6nomore.com.

The heuristic scanning got a major overhaul, and MSE also integrates with the Windows Firewall. It also has a network inspection module, so it sniffs ahead for trouble when you surf the web (using any browser, but it’s more effective with IE).

Here’s the really cool news: it’s absolutely free for home users, and even free for businesses that have 10 or fewer PCs. If you’re running an older version of MSE, the Windows Update service will upgrade your machine automatically. If not, you can get it from the Windows Download Center.

On the official Delicious blog, Yahoo (which owns the service) posted an article titled What’s Next for Delicious?, saying “‘No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is [an] ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.”

That sounds like CorporateSpeak for “Anyone want to buy it?” If you have an account, it’s probably safe for now, but you should probably back up your bookmarks, just in case.

Microsoft always releases a new Mac version of Office one year after releasing a new Windows version of Office, and the 2011 version is now available, following Office 2010 for Windows.

The two biggest changes over Office 2008 for Mac is that Outlook now replaces Entourage as the mail/calendar/contact/task application, and macros are once again part of the team. This means you can now record, write and play macros using Visual Basic for Applications. Microsoft inexplicably removed VBA in Office 2008.

Like the 2008 version, 2011 looks and feels like a native OS X application. They didn’t try to stuff a Windows program into a Mac. So the toolbars and panels are right where you left them, and there are some cool, new features and the look and feel is updated, like Excel PivotTables:

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PC Magazine has a great slide show of screen shots from Office 2011. Take a look.

Three months ago, Microsoft announced that it was discontinuing Windows Live Spaces, their free blogging and social networking service. Live Spaces simply didn’t have the functionality of its competitors, and Microsoft decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to create yet another blogging platform.

Microsoft reports that since the end of November, they have helped Live Spaces users convert over half a million blogs to WordPress.com, the free service provided by Automattic, the company started by Matt Mullenweg, the original developer of the WordPress blogging and CMS software (which this blog uses).