Office At Work : tips & tricks

Upgrading to Windows 7

StephB — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:43:01 GMT

The US Inside Office Online blog recently published some great tips in you’re considering upgrading to Windows 7. Read first and you can’t go far wrong :).

Windows 7: Links for life in the fast lane

Store your docs safely online

StephB — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:50:00 GMT

Have you ever lost a memory stick, had a laptop stolen or suffered a hard-drive failure? Yep – it’s likely the the answer is ‘yes’. An easy way to back up important files is to use an internet-based storage system like Office Live Workspace. You can back up your valuable documents to the web and then securely access them from any internet connected computer. That’s a PC or Mac running Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari.

And if you were wondering what happens to all those lost memory sticks… take a look at the video from one of the links below :)

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weSfAmonDgg
MSN video: http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-gb&vid=d0689630-1b1d-4876-af1b-8c65328a19b8
Office Live: http://ask.officelive.com/workspace/media/p/8573.aspx

Add train journey details to Outlook appointments

StephB — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:53:00 GMT

I recently heard about an extremely useful add-in for Outlook 2007 from National Rail Enquiries, which allows you to plan and add train journey details to your Outlook appointments. Great idea and it’s really nicely put together too :). The screenshots below show how it works in Outlook 2007, but there’s also a version for Outlook 2003.

First of all you just download the plug-in from the National Rail Enquiries web site.

Once you’ve installed the plug-in you get an extra ‘Journey Planner’ button in all your appointments.

Clicking the Journey Planner button opens a dialogue box where you can specify you’re departure and arrival destinations, including default settings for work and home. You can then view details to select the journey which best suit your needs.

Once you’ve selected your journey appointments are created in your Outlook calendar which even have reminders set to the appropriate time, so you leave enough time to make it to the station!

The appt itself has all the detail of your journey, including links to the live departure board, so you track any delays. You can also set up SMS alerts for the journey.

All in all, a really nicely designed little application, which I know I’ll be making good use of very soon. Give it a go and let me know if it works for you!

Download the National Rail Enquiries plug-in for Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007

Top tips for using Office 2007 on your netbook

StephB — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:34:54 GMT

I wanted to share this article which my colleague in Mexico, Adriana, recently published. Hope you find it useful :). Thanks Adriana!

First things first: Everything you need to know about installing Office 2007 on your netbook

Most netbooks come with a free 60-day trial of Office 2007 pre-installed, so if you want to try Office 2007 before you buy, you can activate the trial by double-clicking the ’60-day trial’ icon on the desktop.

When you decide to buy, you simply convert the pre-installed trial by following the links you will receive in follow-up emails. Alternatively, you can buy a boxed copy of your chosen Office suite from a local or online retailer. You just enter the product key that comes with the box to convert the trial to a fully licensed version.

Not all netbooks have a CD/DVD drive. If yours doesn’t, don’t worry, you can buy and download a copy of Office 2007 from Microsoft Store. You can also download the Office trial from Office Online.

Read more about how to get Office 2007 on your netbook

Performance

You do need to take into account the capacity and technical specification of your netbook. The netbook I tested had 512Mb RAM memory and 60GB hard drive. The ‘official’ minimum specification for Office 2007 is here. I installed Office Home and Student 2007.

Overall the experience with Office 2007 was good, and the applications all functioned well. After a few days of testing, the only slowness I noticed was when I has several applications with several windows each running, so it’s a good idea to remember to save and close documents as you go (a good habit anyway!).

The best thing come in small packages

Netbooks are - by their nature - smaller than standard laptops. This is great for portability but also means you might want to adopt a couple of tricks to make the most of the smaller screen area.

Zoom is your friend

Use the zoom function to view a smaller amount of your document at one time, for easier editing. You can also save zoom settings to suit your preferences.

Using the zoom function

Minimise the Office menu (Ribbon)

This function gives you a larger working area. To minimise or reset the menu (ribbon) just press Ctrl+F1.

You can also save time by becoming familiar with the Quick Access Toolbar

Save documents online and save space on your PC

Office Live Workspace is your No. 1 ally here. Don’t clog up your hard drive with documents and photos. Set up an Office Live Workspace instead. You can upload all your files so you can access them anytime over the internet, whether you’re using your netbook, work PC or an internet café on holiday. You can also choose to give access to some areas of your workspace, so friends or colleagues can download, edit and upload documents too.

What are you waiting for?

After you’ve installed Office 2007 on your netbook, visit our training portal to learn everything you need to get started with Office 2007, completely free, with our interactive training courses. If it’s the first time you’ve used Microsoft Office programs, don’t worry, I have something for you too. Learn how to take the first steps with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook 2007 here.

Changing the standard VAT rate in Office Accounting 2008

StephB — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Well, Gordon Brown has surprised us all by reducing the standard VAT rate for Christmas. Great news, but if you're a small business you may wondering just how you're going to implement it - or keep track of it!

Fortunately, if you're using Office Accounting 2008 it's quick and simple to change.

1) Select the ‘Company’ tab from the menu bar

2) Now scroll down and highlight ‘VAT’

3) Finally, with VAT still highlighted, select ‘Manage VAT Codes’ From the right hand menu

4) Now select ‘Standard rate’ and click the ‘edit’ button

5) Highlight 17.5% and use your keyboard to change the rate to 15%

6) Change the date under ‘as of’ to 01/12/08, click the ‘OK’ button and Office Accounting is now ready to go with the correct standard rate of VAT.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas – with OneNote

PhilEvans — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:02:00 GMT

As you may have guessed, we've gone a bit OneNote crazy in the team. We love it. It's just so.... useful. Leading on from my last post, here are some more thoughts around how OneNote can help you this Christmas.

Whether you’re preparing to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, or simply looking forward to a mid-winter seasonal break at home (or away), some planning will make everything go more smoothly. Of course you could just write lists in a notebook, bookmark useful sites on your PC, and tear out present ideas and recipes from magazines. But just think how much more useful it would be if you could keep all these bits together in one place. Microsoft Office OneNote 20007 gives you an infinitely-sized electronic notebook which will provide writing space, storage areas, a calendar, to-do lists, and you can import files from other programs like Word and Excel which you may already have on the go. Remember - if you've Office 2007 Home and Student you're already good to go. And if you don't? You can download a 60-day trial for free, from us here :).

Countdown has started

The first thing to do in your new OneNote notebook is to download a monthly calendar template and number each square for the month of December. (Tip: take off ‘snap to grid’ in the Edit menu so you can position the numbers easily within each square.) Now you’re ready to add daily items to each box so you can keep track of what you should be doing when. Don’t forget to include last posting dates if you have friends or family overseas. A great feature of OneNote is that you can convert any piece of text to an Outlook appointment or contact using the Tools menu so important information doesn’t get forgotten.

Cards

They can be a hassle, but they don’t need to be! Make a new section in your notebook and quickly insert a table from the Table menu. Then you can list all the people to whom you’re going to send cards, together with columns for ‘sent’ and ‘received’ for instance. (Tip: turn the title of the section into a hyperlink from the Insert menu, paste that onto the date on your planner when you’re going to write your cards and the pages will be linked together.) Next year, you’ll have a ready-prepared list to work from, to which you can add or remove names. If you already have names in a Word or Excel file, it’s even easier. Just drag the file onto the OneNote page, and you’re ready to go.

Recipes and menus

If food and drink is your thing, you probably started thinking about festive victuals in October! Use screen clippings to assemble all your fave recipes in one place, or simply paste the URLs into your notebook. (Tip: if you’re working on something in your notebook and you think of something else, open a new side note window from the Windows menu. You can quickly jot down your thoughts and the note is filed in Unfiled Notes.) How about scanning that much-loved but dog-eared recipe for Granny’s Christmas pud and inserting it into your notebook? That way you’ll have it forever!

Time to delegate

To make life easier, enlist some help. Choose a to-do list template (from the Format menu > Templates) and list some jobs with names attached. Print it out and distribute it, or email it to everyone involved. (Tip: you can email from inside OneNote by simply clicking the email icon on the toolbar.) Or for children, why not put each task on a separate card and get them to lucky dip for them! Add a variety of tags from the toolbar to anything in your notebook so you can keep control, and get a list of tagged items from the View menu.

And finally...

A lovely idea is to keep a diary or journal in your notebook of the people and events that made your Christmas special. It’s easy to say you’ll remember, but it’s even easier to forget. Choose a template (from the Format menu) in the Decorative section to make this section stand out, and get everyone to contribute with words, pictures, even audio or video recordings. Next year you’ll have some memories to revisit and get you in the seasonal spirit once again.

Now where are those decorations...?

Phil

The At Work Holiday Survival Guide Part 1

PhilEvans — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:26:00 GMT

Well, it seems winter is well and truly here. It’s cold, it’s dark, and it’s wet. But at least the holidays are coming! However, alongside the lovely upsides of Christmas - such as cake abundance and inbound gifts - there are also hazards such as present buying, party planning, and family politics. Fortunately, help is at hand, and in this series of blog posts, I’m going to try to help you negotiate these hurdles so that you can breeze through the festive season with a minimum of stress. First up on the list? Christmas shopping.

Shopping

There is no doubt that the advent of online shopping has given us a tremendous increase in choice and flexibility when trying to buy presents for people at Christmas. However, when you’re buying for multiple loved ones, things can get pretty complicated, particularly if you’re going for the whole ‘thoughtful’ present angle for those extra brownie points. When I shop online this Christmas, I’m going to use OneNote. Here are three reasons why OneNote is going to help me turn this potentially horrendously boring (and expensive) task into something which is much, much less painful:

1) A picture speaks a thousand words

They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and this is especially the case when brainstorming for presents. So, instead of bland and boring lists of text, I use OneNote to compare gifts that I find online. Not only do I find this more useful than text to refer back to, but it’s much more engaging for me; I’m a very ‘visual’ thinker, and I find plain-text lists quite boring. My brain much prefers to deal with images.

Tip: Use screen clippings to capture information quickly

2) OneNote lets you escape the boring bits

The useful thing about doing your shopping this way is that you can take all the information you need without having to do it all manually. For example, when you screen clip something off a site with OneNote, you can capture in one swoop:

- The price

- The shop

- A direct web link to where to find the product again

That last point is massively useful for keeping on track of where you found everything, stopping you losing track of where you found the best price, present, or offer.

3) ‘Find’ keeps it all manageable

One of the really cool things about OneNote is that it includes a pretty smart search feature. This is much better than flicking through endless pieces of paper. You can even make the text within the screen clippings you’ve taken searchable, as I have:

Tip: Search and find notes easily

So, let’s see how this all comes together, using a - purely hypothetical of course - example of my ideas for my mother-in-law (click image to see full size):

You can see that I have four ideas which I have found on MSN Shopping based on my initial thoughts around ‘what she likes’. Using screen capturing, I’ve captured the ideas in a visual way, along with the price. When I did this, OneNote automatically made a note of the web address to the item, which sits below the picture. It can also make all the text in the picture searchable so I can find things really easily later. I then thought about the advantages and disadvantages of each present and added my own notes, before eventually deciding to buy idea number four. When I place the order, I’ll use the ‘Find’ feature again to create a list all of the items from that particular shop so that I can check easily what I want to buy and don’t forget anything – avoiding those annoying multiple delivery charges.

What do you make of this use of OneNote? Let me know via the comments section - I’m interested to hear what you think.

Stay tuned for part two of my guide to surviving the Christmas holidays!

Phil

Scanning into Microsoft Word 2007

GillLeFevre — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:28:51 GMT

I've had a number of questions about scanning images into Microsoft Word 2007 so I asked one of my colleagues to dig into the situation.

He's confirmed that this is an area where we've changed the functionality since Word 2003. Instead, you need to scan images to your computer and then insert them into Microsoft Word.

Here are some more useful links:

Hope this helps!

How to take a screen-shot

GillLeFevre — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:20:18 GMT

One of the great parts of my job is that I get to spend time talking with other users of Microsoft Office about how they use the product and I'm regularly surprised (and even inspired) by the myriad of different ways the same product is used.

Inevitably I also spend a fair bit of time answering questions from people who can't get something to work. This can be more tricky, especially if the conversation is by email or phone and so I can't see the computer in question. This is where screen shots can be a total saviour and the best thing is they're really easy.

The everyone-can-do-it way

Take a look at your keyboard. Chances are that somewhere in the top right-hand corner (although this may vary) there's a funny little button saying "PrtScn". This is short for Print Screen and pressing it takes a picture of your screen (although it might initially look as though nothing has happened).

Once you've "printed" your screen (and originally, this button used to do exactly that) you can then paste it into a document (for example, Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint), into an email message (HTML or Rich Text format only) or into image-editing software to refine the picture.

If you press the Alt key at the same time as PrtScn, then only the active (or top most) Window on your computer is printed. This is useful if you want to focus on a specific program (for example, an error message that you get in Excel) or don't want to share all of your desktop.


My desktop printed using PrtScn	The active window printed using Alt + PrtScn

For more detailed instructions, see this useful post on About.com.

The OneNote way

If you've got OneNote installed (and if you don't then you're missing out on one of the most useful members of the Office family - try it here!), then there's an even easier way: the screen clipping method.

Press the Windows key + S and your screen will appear slightly dimmed and white. Then click and drag your cursor over the area you want to clip. When you release the cursor, the area you selected will automatically be stored (temporarily) in your clipboard, ready to paste.

You can get more instructions and information on how to change what happens to your screen clipping once you take it from Office Online.

The Windows Vista way

If you've got Windows Vista, then there's a great feature called the "Snipping Tool" that you can use to take a picture of any part of your desktop. See this article for more instructions.

Do you love Office Online?

StephB — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:34:00 GMT

So, this is my first ever blog post. A little lame perhaps, given that I’ve been working with the internet for… hmmm… around 12 years, but what can I say except ‘better late than never’! I have the great pleasure of managing the Office Online web site for the UK. There are many things that are fab about Office Online but here are my top 3;

· It’s free

· It’s actually very, very useful

· It has a great audience J

Despite the fact I spend my working week making decisions about the site, I never cease to be amazed by the depth of resources available on Office Online – and the creativity of the people who visit the site to use them! Did you know there are over 150,000 Clip Art, images and sounds, nearly 51,000 templates and around 850 training courses on Office Online UK? So whatever you’re trying to make or do with Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Publisher or any other Office application the chances are they’ll be something on Office Online to help.

I’d love to hear what you love (or don’t) about Office Online so don’t be shy, post a comment J.

(Probably) the most useful Office tip ever

GillLeFevre — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:57:24 GMT

With a computer, correcting your work is completely taken for granted. For example, I've rewritten this paragraph about six times which, twenty years ago, would have required at least two pieces of paper and lots of crossing out (I still remember my Dad's first electronic typewriter which would let you correct the last 15 characters typed -- and at the time we were so impressed!). But the one thing that is still difficult to "undo" is sending an email. (Our friends at VideoJug.com have demonstrated just how hazardous this mistake can be!)

I probably need to "undo" an email two or three times a week, and it's almost always because I've forgotten to actually attach the attachment that I said I was sending... Even more frustrating, I usually remember that I've forgotten about 5 seconds after I've sent the email and I'm forced to send the embarrassing follow-up email: "Ah, yes, attachment actually attached this time...sorry".

A colleague took pity on me and pointed out this tip: set up a rule in Microsoft Outlook to delay sending all your emails for two minutes.

Office Online has all the details on how to set this up: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/outlook/HP012328171033.aspx?pid=CH100776981033#2

It took me five minutes to get it sorted and then every time I have an "oh no, stop that email" moment, I just go into my outbox and open up the email in question. Once the email's open, it won't be sent until I click "send" again, so I can take as long as I need to correct it.

The other alternative is to recall your message after it's been sent, but there are a number of limitations with this: both you and the recipients need to be accessing your email from an exchange server; and -- more importantly -- the email needs to still be unread. Better safe than sorry, so get that rule set up today.