What's that thing our your to-do list that just stays there? That task you know needs to get done, but it's just out of your comfort zone or just nags at you.
Or perhaps you want to provide your services for some $$$ to those folks who need some help.
It could be something small like:
- Translate a letter
- Copyedit that report
- Research a company
- Re-design your stationary
- Update a Web site
- Something else......?
With our new Task Market, you can find folks who would be happy to take those assignments on. Or subscribe to email alerts when someone is asking for the talents you have. Task Market is your free online marketplace where you can connect with and hire skilled freelancers in a variety of professions. Start in with Task Market now or see it in action with these how-to videos. --Doug
Office at Work is a site I imagine I would use in my previous job: working on a computer in a big corporation. I was always looking for hints and informal training for the programs I used, sometimes by force (thanks, Access). This week's refresh includes:
- A popular article from Office Hours on ninja tricks you can perform
- An introduction to readability stats
- A review of phishing and other email warnings
- Updated Excel tips (the most popular program folks are looking for hints on this page)
- Most e-mailed templates (based on email this link data)
- A link to our own comic, Office OFFline
- Plus keeping last month's most popular article, PowerPoint without bullets
Now that I manage a page like this, I'm, to quote Larry King, "I'm insatiably curious" to know what you would want to see on Office at Work or our other audience pages (Office at Home, Office at School, Office at a Small Business). --Doug
I’ve sung the praises of OneNote here a time or two, but this time I’m going to let my niece, Liz, do that. Liz just finished her first year of law school. I happen to know she purchased a copy of Office 2007 Home & Student before she started school because I shipped it to her. I also know that until this past year, she had never used OneNote. Naturally, I pointed her to some helpful information about all the fantastic things it can do. She took it from there.
So, since we’re launching our Back to School Student page this week, I thought I’d check in with Liz and see how the year went. One of the things I love about Liz is that I can just suggest a topic and she’ll take off running – I don’t have to dig to get her opinion. Her experience with OneNote was no exception. Here are some highlights:
“I had never taken lecture notes on my computer before,” Liz told me. “All through undergraduate school I took my notes by hand, on paper. But law school is different – there are so many case studies and so much to capture, I needed to be on my computer.” With free wi-fi everywhere, most students in her class of 167 had notebooks. The school provides downloads of the cases for their classes and outlines from past years, so the students can just make notes directly on those documents. As far as OneNote goes, Liz could not stop singing its praises.
“It keeps me so organized!” she enthused. “I create separate notebooks for every class, and sub-folders for every case study. It’s fantastic. I download templates from your site and use different color-coding and designs for each class. I can create separate folders, different tabs, use different fonts and highlight cases by importance, create sub pages. . . It’s so much better than taking notes in Word or in the Mac program a lot of people have. I don’t have any notebook binders – just tabs on my computer. ”
As for school, she likes it well enough, but isn’t looking forward to being in debt. In fact, her situation is not all that different from the typical college student experience conveyed in this video:
We hope our Students page makes your college experience at least a little easier to manage.
--Nancy
Ever since I started working here, I've gotten this question. First, most people assume I'm a code geek. Second, they assume I know how to fix their computers. Neither of these things are true. I don't even know how to fix my own computer most of the time. And by the way, it's old and slow just like yours.
My background is magazine editing and freelance writing - not programming. When I tell people I'm a Content Project Manager they don't know what to say. I explain that it's like editing, just for the Web, and then they change topics. Sorry to disappoint. Not everyone here is technical. (True, one does start to absorb some knowledge after a while - and it's nearly impossible to keep acronyms out of one's speech.)
I also don't know how to answer all your Office questions. I go to our Help & How To home page and search, the same way you do. (Sometimes I do get to talk to one of the writers of our help topics in person, though. I admit, that's a distinct advantage.)
So, if you've ever wondered what it's like to work at Microsoft, I'm pleased to be able to point you to Microspotting - a blog about the people who work here. It's not just about the people at Office - it's about people throughout the company. I think you'll be surprised at what you read.
--Nancy
P.S. No, I haven't met Bill Gates. But I have stood next to him.
So I'm at dinner with my brother and dad last night, and my brother mentions the email problems at work. I let him know in my old job I had about 750-1000 messages permanently in my inbox. I changed my thinking when I came to Microsoft. As of right now, I have 52 emails in my inbox, including one from my brother asking me for some of those reminders. Well, he should know that I want to help more than him, so instead of an email, bro, you can read a blog post.
1. Use the delete key.
2. Use the Auto Archive function in Outlook. Right click the folder and click Properties. Set up how often you want to “clear” the folder, a day, a month, six weeks, or never. So if I have deleted an inbox email (see #1), I can still find it in my deleted box for 21 days (my default). You can “archive” these emails and save disk space. I did that at my previous job, but never dug into those folders. Now I simply select “permanently delete.”
3. Set up a few folders to automatically send system emails to: status reports, system issues. Set up a few folders for key projects, key emails from your managers, personal emails, FYI's. But limit yourself. Say, no more than 12.
4. If you have Office 2003 or 2007, you can prevent folks from using the forwarding or reply all buttons. Just click on the link for the version you have to read how.
5. Turn off all email notifications, they interrupt your work too much. (see my earlier blog post to read how).
If your team likes to read about things like this, hey, I happen to work at a site that has such things! Send them to Office Online’s Outlook help page with links to top issues, trainings, demos, and more. –your loving brother, Doug.
Not to be outdone by the Japanese creators of karaoke, German beer hall denizens have created a new variety of pub sport featuring everyone’s favorite “persuasion software.” In PowerPoint karaoke (as it has come to be known), inebriated volunteers deliver an impromptu presentation based upon random PowerPoint decks downloaded from the web.
You can read more about it here:
http://www.tiara.org/blog/?p=192
Or, if you would prefer, you can watch an Australian (more or less speaking English) performing PowerPoint karaoke. --Eric S.
PS: Someone named Lalit Patel created Powerpoint Karaoke App using the www.slideshare.net API. You can see it at: http://www.slidesharetoys.com/karaoke
At Office Online, we've opened the site up to more community contributions. (The site has accepted templates from the community for some time.) When you have questions or advice about the content you find, you can sign in with a Windows Live ID and post questions or bits of advice for the rest of the community. It's basically comments like you see on lots of sites, and you can rate the usefulness of the comments.
Because of a phased rollout of the Community Tips feature on the site, a lot of the content won’t get the feature until later this month, but templates and training courses have Community Tips now. You'll need to browse to a specific template or training course to contribute your own tips.
Watch a quick video demo about how to:
- Browse to Community Tips for a template
- Browse to Community Tips for a training course
Go ahead and try it out.
-- Matt
When I was looking for someone to advocate literacy, as part of our new Back to School pages, my first thought was superstar librarian Nancy Pearl. The following contains excerpts and information from our conversation.
When librarian Nancy Pearl was young, she found sanctuary in her local library, where she escaped an unhappy home situation by immersing herself in books that took her away. She also found inspiration for her life’s work.
“What could one do to change the world more than instill a love of reading?” says Pearl, who is arguably the nation's most famous librarian. And that’s just what she has spent her life doing – inspiring people to become lifelong readers.
From her Pearl’s Picks lists of reading suggestions, to her extremely popular Book Crush, aimed at ‘tweens’, she’s offered up a treasure trove of reading material to keep one occupied for years. Who better, then, to suggest how best to inspire your summer-bored kids or students to become lifelong readers? (Reading can also give your children a jump start before they go back to school.) Here are a few highlights from our discussion:
· Pearl's theory about books and timing: “I have started books many times,” she says, “not liked them, then picked them up a year or more later and loved them.” This timing - reading the right book at the right time - is fundamental to her approach to reading suggestions.
“I think summer reading lists with Moby Dick and Charles Dickens . . . puts us on the fast track to turning kids off to reading. If you have to take a test on it, that turns off most possibilities of reading. . . I think no matter how wonderful a book is, if you’re assigned a book to read, and you don’t like that book, all that means is that you and that book are not in the same place. . . . Moby Dick is a great book, but most 11th graders are not ready to read that book. Most will say ‘I read that in high school and thought it was terrible,’ and never go back to it.” In short: don’t be dictators. Let kids explore what they want to read and they will learn to love to read.
· Regarding the impact of the Internet on libraries and the work of librarians: “At first we thought we would be helping people define the sources they found,” she explains. “. . we would be the arbiters of Web pages, helping people decide what to choose when they referenced sources in their papers.”
Graduate schools even took the word ‘library’ out of their names, she points out, as they became schools of ‘information’ instead of library science. Now that the Web has been around long enough to become ubiquitous in most people’s lives, librarians are charging forward in a new direction – helping people find the best books. Idea: ask your librarian for book suggestions.
· On other technology: Surprisingly, as someone whose entire life’s work has been vested in books, Pearl isn’t turned off by technological changes to reading.
“I actually have a lot of ideas how to make the hand-held readers better. If you close your eyes, the Kindle actually feels like a book. To me, it would be very sad if books disappeared, but I’m not attached to books as objects. Books I own are books that I love – they’re not valuable. “ As long as reading is available, Pearl’s for it – no matter what the technology. Idea: embrace technology.
Pearl’s popularity has spread worldwide. Her original action figure now has a companion, deluxe edition, and Pearl has seen her miniature, plastic likeness prominently displayed in libraries around the world, as she travels to lecture and inspire others to delve into the wonderful world of books.
As for me, I've got a pile of books set aside for summer reading. It's a habit I developed in grade school, when the first event of summer vacation was a trip to the local library. I never left with fewer than a dozen books.
Here's to a summer filled with novel ideas.
--Nancy C.
The copious amounts of email in your inbox have had a lot of press lately including the New York Times and a segment on NPR. The gist of it: there is too much and its distracting you from getting your work done.
Another NYT article focuses on a frightening statistic: 28% of the time the American worker is distracted by non-urgent matters or recovering from a distraction.
Just between writing those two sentences, took three minutes.
- I went to my Web browser to find the link the NY Times article.
- When I went to my browser, there was a production page I was looking at earlier I needed to send some notes on.
- So I sent a quick email.
- Then saw something in my inbox I had been waiting for, so I responded to that.
- I finally went back to the browser to find the article. Luckily, I remembered what I was looking for (this time at least).
Sound familiar?
Before I was at Microsoft, I read a previous article about distraction (Meet the Life Hackers) leading to an experiment with the team I was managing. For a week, I ask them to
- Thin their IM list to just our team or turn it off
- Turn off their Email notifications (those pop-ups in the right hand corner or a sound in Outlook)
I told them if I really needed them I would walk the 25 feet to their desk. Yes, our email piled up a bit, but we were no longer addicted to it. Also, many questions asked were answered by someone else. For Outlook you can see how to turn on and off email notifications or watch a demo.
Because sometimes you just need six minutes to get something done.
Like write a blog entry. --Doug
Today, a study by researcher Parks Associates shows 1 out of every 5 Americans do not use email. That's 20%, folks. The same number (probably the same individuals in the study) have not used the Internet. 30% have never used a computer to create documents; which I assume means 1) they don't need to, or 2) they still have a Smith-Corona typewriter.
I've been doing stuff on the Internet for, eeek, 14 years. And I really can't think of anyone I can't communicate with Online (now, whether or not they respond in a timely manner is another thing). I may choose to write or call, but I can't think of anyone I must do this for. If you are reading this you are probably in the same bucket: most of your people are online.
Question: besides an older parent/grandparent, how often do you have to communicate to someone who is not online? (Image and link from MSN) --Doug
If you're getting ready to install Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007, or Office Project Server 2007 for your business, we have deployment templates to assist:
You can find more information about Microsoft Office Project on Office Online and also consult the Office Discussion Groups. Check out the Project team blog for lots of great information, too.
Did you find this post helpful? If so, share it!
The free templates we offer on our site are consistently among our most popular content with Office users. That's in part thanks to the fact our templates team keeps coming up with great ideas.
In the past few months, they have been busy pulling together some design collections to help people who don't know where to begin when they start a project. They have posted a wedding collection for the do-it-yourselfers planning their weddings, a batch of handy real estate templates that make it easier to market your home, and now, a small business collection that makes it easy to create professional looking business documents without a lot of effort.
Do you have ideas for other collections you'd like to see? Let us know.
--Nancy
Hey there,
Here's a note from our International teams, letting you know how Office Online works in other markets. Just because you're based in the US doesn't mean that's the only content you can see. Check out the sites for some of our other markets as well:
"Did you know that each time you visit the Office Online website you are actually viewing content that has been specifically created for your region? From Los Angeles to London, from Melbourne to Mumbai, or from Toronto to San Diego we always try to feature articles and ideas that will be up to date and relevant to your local country.
Nowadays people like to have more flexibility and choice with the content they view. This is what we try to provide with the Microsoft Office Online Worldwide experience. This allows you to visit any of our international Microsoft Office Online sites regardless of location. You may also want to view content in a different language in your browser. This is now easier than ever with Office Online.
So why not take a trip around the world with Office Online? There are lots of destinations. You could start with India (India Hindi or India English), move on to Canada, spend some time in the United Kingdom, or venture down to Australia. The choice is yours."
If I wrote code, I would go work at Office Labs, a new group at Microsoft that finally let the cat out of the page and went public this month with their site. This lively group makes and tests prototypes; aka features and tools. I've worked with a few things they created for a few months, and now you can too. Community Clips is a nifty screen capture program that at the touch of a button starts recording your screen and your voice. You know when someone comes over to your computer and looks over your shoulder to see how you [insert task here like how to do a pivot table or enter your vacation time in the Intranet, or how to cheat at Scrabbulous]. Now you can make a quick video and, voilà, you can show every new employee the task without doing it over and over again.
I made a clip about killing those "curly quote marks," something I had to tell freelancers time and time again when I worked at another job. It took about 20 minutes to get online. I did a couple of takes uploaded it to the site. Pretty neat. A few months back, I had my daughter tells us why she likes PowerPoint. I've just made a little tour of Office Online and a page I need your input on, Office at home. Easy peasy.
Try Community Clips and a few other tools at Office Labs. And if you write code, get a job there so I can bug you about some other ideas I have. --Doug
“Community” and “social networking” are popular buzzwords among Web site owners these days. Everyone’s talking about Web 2.0, which simply means people communicating directly with each other, using the Web as their interface – either through a social networking site, such as Facebook, responding to blogs, or watching and sharing videos online.
Here’s an example of Web 2.0 in action: I read a story the other day about a woman unhappy with drug dealers in the alley behind her apartment. When local police wouldn’t do anything about it, she took video and posted it to YouTube – extending the precedent set with the Rodney King effect to the world-wide web. Imagine the possibilities for social change if everyone starts talking to everyone else through the Web. . .
It’s an empowering feeling – reaching out to the world through the Internet. It can also be intimidating, which is why some people never post feedback on any sites, or others only post anonymously.
I have seen a few suggestions about ways in which you would like to engage with us and with other users on the site and I am curious to learn how you communicate with your favorite sites today. What brings out the “chatty” in you? What compels you to post a comment or forward a page to a friend? How do you like to engage with the site, with other users of the site, with the experts?
For example, do you read reviews by other users before you buy a book on Amazon or book a hotel on Expedia? Do you return to the site and add your own review to help others with their decisions? If not, why not? What would motivate you to do that?
What about sites such as Wikipedia, that allow you to edit the content? If you could edit a Web page or share a how-to video, would you?
Here’s your chance to share with us your favorite ways to engage online with the experts, the general community, and companies. We’re looking forward to reading your comments.
--Nancy
