I am pretty much on my laptop and wifi'ed 90% of my waking hours. So it is always a conscious effort to channel my non technical self and relate to the majority of Microsoft Office users that are not developers or IT pros.

The idea of printing out a calendar and carrying it around on a slice of dead tree is one such notion. This calendar will not synchronise when meetings are changed, chime warnings when meetings are overdue or update the calendar on your mobile device (perhaps we should consider this reduced functionality mode). But then, I'm in my 20s and this is probably just a generational thing that I don't understand (like long division).

Outlook 2007 will print calendars out of the box - in fact it has been a feature of Outlook for quite a few versions now. However, Outlook 2007 can take support for the "pCal" format one step forward with the Calendar Printing Assistant for Outlook 2007 or CPAO for short (ka-pow!). CPAO is an optional download from Office Online, it's a separate application that allows you to print out day, week, month or year views of your calendar and control what it looks like. Even if you have the latest laptop/tablet/UMPC/mobile device, you might want to check it out too - it is a pretty cool app (even if it doesn't use the ribbon).

As my job as a Technology Specialist for Office, I'm constantly finding these little gems in the Office Platform. Over the next few weeks, I am going to be exploring the niche parts of the Office platform that get less attention than the big ticket items like Word, Excel or SharePoint, but can still make you much more productive. To paraphrase Douglas Adams:

“Office is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to Office.”