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Archives: Microsoft Office

News and tips about Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook,and the rest of the applications in the Office family.

New templates coming for SharePoint

Mary Jo Foley has details about a new set of templates that just arrived for SharePoint Services, the collaboration technology built into Windows Server 2003: On Tuesday, Microsoft quietly rolled out 30 free, downloadable applications that build on top of the company's SharePoint Services collaboration/workflow technology that is built into...

Tip of the day: Customize the Places Bar in Office

Yesterday, I explained how to change the five icons that appear in the Places Bar in Windows common dialog boxes. If you use Microsoft Office, you can do a few extra tricks. First things first: Although the Open and Save As dialog boxes in Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and...

Tip of the day: Customize the Places Bar

In most Windows programs, when you choose Open or Save As from the File menu, you see a common dialog box that includes five icons in a vertical sidebar on the left side. The five choices are pretty logical, as you can see here: Click any of those links on...

Why you should send those error reports to Microsoft

When a Windows program crashes, Windows XP gives you the opportunity to send an error report to Microsoft. The process is called Online Crash Analysis. My advice: Do it. Here's a perfect example of why it's good for you and for your fellow PC users. For years, I've encountered a sporadic...

Will anyone really care about XML support in Office 12?

In the comments to my earlier post, Jim Minatel greets the XML announcement with appropriate skepticism. I thought the comments were worth promoting to the main page: I've been burned so many times by the "this Office version is going to do XML right/better" mantra. In fact, I'm sure that...

OK, maybe it IS a big deal after all...

I've been reading up on the new Office 12 formats, which will be based on XML. Hmmm. Way smaller than existing binary formats. Distributed in Zip format. Easier to recover data from a corrupted or damaged file. Open. Easy (well, easier) to repurpose content. OK, Scoble, maybe you're right and...

Office 12 to go all-XML, all the time

Once again, Mary Jo Foley scoops everyone with a two-hour head start on Microsoft's big Office announcement: Microsoft continues to slowly trickle out bits of information about its Office 12 suite. On Thursday the company will announce that it plans to make XML-based file formats the default in the version...

Tip of the day: Disabling "personalized" Office menus

Office XP and Office 2003 share a feature that is supposed to reduce clutter but instead increases confusion. I'm referring, of course, to the dreaded personalized menus and toolbars feature. Using default settings, Office menus and toolbars change dynamically as you use each program. If there isn't enough room on...

Tip of the day: Enter international currency symbols in Office

Money makes the world go around, so why is there only one currency symbol (the dollar sign) on a standard U.S. keyboard? To enter an international currency symbol in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint (or in Outlook's message editor), you'll need to memorize its four-digit ANSI character code and enter that...

Tip of the day: My three favorite Excel shortcuts

You don't have to be an accountant to use Excel. It's an ideal tool for managing any kind of data that falls into a neat rows-and-columns format, including everything from simple lists to complex budget reconciliations. These are my three favorite Excel shortcuts that most people don't know about: Quick...

Tip of the day: Recover gracefully when an Office program crashes

If an Office XP or Office 2003 program (such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) stops responding to input, don't panic. And don't kill its entry in the Windows Task List. If you do that, you'll lose any unsaved work. Instead, take a deep breath and use a well-hidden tool that...

Tip of the day: Disable Word's annoying Overtype key

This week's tips are exclusively for Microsoft Office users. Sooner or later, everyone who uses Microsoft Word discovers that they've mysteriously shifted into a new editing mode, where positioning the insertion point in an existing block of text and then typing a few characters causes the new text to erase...

Which Windows e-mail program is best?

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Rob Pegoraro has a review of several e-mail programs that left me scratching my head. Let me see if I can give you the short version. Here’s the intro: One of the two most widely used programs in this category, Microsoft's Outlook Express, has not had a meaningful update...

Update for Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter

Yesterday was Patch Tuesday, and of course you have Automatic Updates set to download Critical Updates for you. Right? But if you use Outlook 2003 you might have missed this one, which isn’t delivered via Windows Update: Update for Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter (KB890854) It’s a shame that Microsoft...

From PowerPoint to your TV screen

My sister-in-law Teri asked last week if I knew how to get a PowerPoint presentation onto DVD. She had a 180–slide PowerPoint presentation (made by someone else for a friend's 50th wedding anniversary party), and they wanted to be able to pop a DVD into a player and watch the show on...

Office 12 in 2006?

Mary Jo Foley has some very (very!) early Office 12 details: According to partner sources who requested anonymity, Microsoft has established an internal Office 12 ship calendar that pegs Office Beta 1 availability for August 29, 2005. Beta 2 is slated for December 5, 2005. The internal release-to-manufacturing target is...

Shoebox or file cabinet?

Old joke: The world is divided into two kinds of people, those who divide the world into two groups and those who don't. Heh. Actually, I think the world is divided into people who file stuff neatly and those who throw everything into a shoebox. I've historically fallen into the...

Metadata myths

Stephanie Krieger has an excellent debunking of some myths about the "hidden" parts of files created by Microsoft Office applications: The Whole Truth About Metadata in Office Documents: Some producers of add-in applications referred to as metadata scrubbers would have you believe that there is a grand conspiracy brewing within...

Office 2003 for under $100!

Have I got a deal for you! One of the greatest secrets in Microsoft's catalog is the Student and Teacher Edition of Office 2003. You qualify for this software if you or any member of your household is a full-time or part-time teacher (K-12 or any accredited educational institution), a...

Office Tips

In his Office Weblog, Marc Orchant links to a PC Magazine collection of 106 Tips & Tricks for Office. Scoble links to Marc's entry. But neither one of them mentions what John Walkenbach and I pointed out several weeks ago: PC Mag's layout is downright user-hostile. Each tip is on...