Thursday, June 7th, 2007
Yum, PowerPoint’s new themes. They’re fun, colorful and a far cry from the drab and boring ones we’ve lived with for so long. So, what happens when you love everything about a Theme except its background?
Well, since I’m waxing lyrical about PowerPoint you can probably guess I’m about to let you in on a trick for fixing the background problem in your PowerPoint 2007 theme love affair? Click the Background Styles option in the Design tab and there is an entire selection of different backgrounds all coordinated with the theme. If you change your color scheme the background’s colors change too – sweet!
Helen Bradley
Labels: background, PowerPoint 2007, themes
Categories:Uncategorized
posted by Helen Bradley @ 3:40 amNo Comments links to this post
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
One of the coolest features in Word 2007 is the ability to blog from Word.
To do this, click the Office Button and choose New, New Blog Post. Click the Register Now button and choose your blogging tool, it’s Blogger for me. Enter the details of your account and choose the picture option to use for uploading images. If you have multiple blogs running from the one account, choose the blog to use with Word. It’s very simple then to create posts and upload them without having to
crank up your browser.
Helen Bradley
Labels: Blog in Word 2007
Categories:Uncategorized
posted by Helen Bradley @ 12:47 amNo Comments links to this post
Monday, June 4th, 2007
I use the £ and ¢ symbols a lot but they’re not on my keyboard. However they’re on my toolbar, thanks to the ability to customize Word’s toolbars.
Right click Word’s toolbar and choose Customize and then the Commands tab. Click the All Commands option in the Commands list and locate and click the Symbol: entry. Drag and drop it onto a toolbar and, when the symbol dialog appears, click the symbol to attach to the button and click Ok.
The toolbar button displays the font name and the symbol number. To make it look prettier, right click the button and type a different name for it. If the symbol can be typed using the keyboard by pressing the Alt key and typing out the numbers then do this. Alternately, click the Edit Button Image button and draw the symbol to create your own icon.
And, if you’re curious, the £ symbol is Alt + 0163 and the ¢ symbol is Alt + 155 – so now you know.
Helen Bradley
Labels: Microsoft Word, special symbols., toolbars
Categories:Uncategorized
posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:06 pmNo Comments links to this post
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Ever get that sense of deja vu – you’ve said this before.. oh so many times? Office has never had a good tool for managing blocks of text that you use repeatedly. The is AutoText and AutoCorrect but they’re not highly visible or intuitive. In Office 2007 another tool is thrown into the mix. The jury is out on whether this is a good thing or just another option that isn’t properly thought our or implemented. Anyway, it’s worth testing out to see if it works for you. BTW the technical term for text you use over and over again is boilerplate text… not sure why, but there it is!
In Word, for example, type and select the text that you use a lot and, on the Insert tab choose the Quick Part option. You can save the text and later insert it using the same tool – it’s kinda nice that the tool shows you the full text before you insert it.
Interestingly the same feature is available in Outlook 2007 where it just might be a litte bit more use.
Helen Bradley
Labels: boilerplate text., Outlook 2007, Quick Part, Word 2007
Categories:Uncategorized
posted by Helen Bradley @ 3:28 pmNo Comments links to this post
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
I need to meet with you. I know when I’m free I don’t know when you are. To avoid the “Can you do it this time?” “No. What about?” discussion you can send an outgoing email with your calendar in it so your recipient can see when you’re free and plan accordingly.
The proviso for this is you need to be using Microsoft Exchange so it’s the sort of thing you can do at work but unlikely you will be running exchange at home. To do this, in a new message dialog, click the Insert tab and select Calendar. You can then choose just how much calendar to send, just your available spaces or everything… it’s up to you.
Helen Bradley
Labels: Outlook 2007, share calendar
Categories:Uncategorized
posted by Helen Bradley @ 3:14 pmNo Comments links to this post
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
If you don’t like the new mini toolbar that appears when you right click something in an Office 2007 document, you can axe it. You can’t customize it, you can’t add or remove anything from it but you can zap it.
In Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007and Excel 2007 you do this by clicking the Office button and choose the Options link at the foot of the dialog. In the Popular group you will disable the Show Mini Toolbar on selection checkbox.
The steps are a little different in Outlook 2007 in Outlook, you need to open an element that uses the new Ribbon interface such as a new message window. Now click the Office button, Editor Options and disable the Show Mini Toolbar on selection checkbox.
If you want it back at any time, just reverse the process.
Helen Bradley
Labels: mini toolbar, Office 2007
Categories:Uncategorized
posted by Helen Bradley @ 2:51 pmNo Comments links to this post
Saturday, May 26th, 2007
If you often work on documents that need to use custom styles, you can easily copy the styles from one document to another – if you know how. Since you’re reading this, you’re about to be invited into the inner circle of knowledge.
So, start with the document open into which you want to copy the styles. Choose Tools, Macro, Macros, Organizer – yep! sounds weird but it works!
Now click the Close file button on the right to close Normal.dot and then click Open File and browse to find the file to copy the styles from. If this is a regular file and not a template, you’ll have to select the correct file type from the Files of Type list. When you open your file, click the Styles tab and you can select and copy styles from one document to the other. Simple when you know how?
Helen Bradley
Labels: Copy Styles., Word 2003
Categories:Uncategorized
posted by Helen Bradley @ 4:04 amNo Comments links to this post
Friday, May 25th, 2007
The Styles task pane in Word is a handy way of tracking what styles are applied to a paragraph and for formatting text with styles. You might be wondering if the Styles task pane is totally missing it in Word 2007. Don’t worry – it is still there, you just have to find it.
Click the Home tab and locate the Styles group. Click the indicator in the bottom right corner to open the Styles dialog – voila! just what you need. To dock it so it sits permanently on the right of the screen, double click its title bar. You can also display it by pressing Control + Alt + Shift + S.
Helen Bradley
Labels: Style Task pane, Word 2007
Categories:Uncategorized
posted by Helen Bradley @ 4:16 amNo Comments links to this post
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007
As an extension to yesterday’s tip my preference for moving items around a Word document is to hold the Shift and Alt keys together and to use the Up and Down arrow keys.
This moves a paragraph up and down a document or, if you have more than one paragraph selected, it moves all of them up and down a document.
If you do this inside a table you move the table row up and down the table – neat but there’s more to come. If the table row moves past the top of a table it is broken out of the table and it becomes a table all of its own. Move some table rows from one table down into another table and they’re automatically incorporated into the second table. It’s an amazingly simple yet effective way of moving things around a Word document.
Helen Bradley
Labels: Microsoft Word, Moving paragraphs, table rows
Categories:Uncategorized
posted by Helen Bradley @ 7:35 pmNo Comments links to this post
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
My friend Theda and I were talking the other day about a project she’s working on where she has to reorder a lot of items into alphabetical order and, in some cases, an order which is not alphabetical.
While she is doing the project in Microsoft Excel there are, of course, difficulties in Excel in moving items around as Excel does not, by default, open up a row when you choose to move an item from one part of the worksheet to another – instead, Excel thinks you want to overwrite the target cells – as if!
There is, however, a way to do this which opens up the space for the new row and which closes up the space that you have just made available. To do this select an entire row or range of rows in Excel by clicking on the row number or numbers. Hold your mouse over the dark outline around the rows and hold the Shift key as you drag the rows to their new position. The empty space that you have created will be closed up and a new space will be created between the other two rows for your item.
Problem solved!
Helen Bradley
Labels: Excel 2003, Excel 2007, Moving rows
Categories:Uncategorized
posted by Helen Bradley @ 7:22 pmNo Comments links to this post
