Microsoft Office

You Can Run, but You Can’t…

By in Microsoft Office, Technology Tags: , , ,

Interconnected

I have to admit this. Some people are good at keeping meticulous records, but I am not one of them. My colleagues laugh at me because I am always losing notes, notepads, and even the pens I use to write my notes. Knowing this, I do use technology to help me. For some bizarre reason that I can’t really explain, I keep my digital life in much better order than my physical one. Perhaps it’s because you can throw a pile of virtual papers into a digital stack and rely on your technology to sort things out.

If you want me to dig out an address of someone I haven’t seen for ten years, I usually have all the contact details because I faithfully record any contact every time I make one. Here are some of the things I do:

  1. Every time I receive an email, I record the person’s email address using Outlook. (I right-click on the person’s name in the email and add it to my Outlook contacts.)
  2. Every time I make or receive a phone call, I make sure the contact information is preserved with the name.
  3. Whenever I get an email announcing a change of address, I record it in my contacts database.
  4. I make sure that my Outlook database on the computer is synchronized with my records on my iPad and my cell phone.
  5. I periodically review these databases, getting rid of contacts (usually on a long plane ride) that I am certain I will never see or hear from again.

That is how I make sure I don’t waste any time looking for someone’s contact information. It’s usually at the tip of my fingers. The maintenance of this information takes no time at all, and it is very handy to be able to reach the right people when you need them.

Outlook is an incredibly powerful tool, and it can do so much more than simply send and receive emails. Maintenance of a good contacts database is an excellent, painless way of making your professional and personal life easier to manage.

 

Microsoft Word – How to Print Track Changes (Only)

By in Microsoft Office, Technology Tags: , , , ,

Happy_Printing

Do you ever use the Track Changes feature in any Microsoft Office products? It’s great! I use it in Word all the time. It’s especially useful when I’m working with a client and they have revisions to make to documents. Track Changes makes it easy to locate and see exactly what changes they’ve made.

Recently, we’ve had to update older documents. One document came to me that was nearly 100 pages long. My colleague had made numerous changes, but not on every page. I only needed to print the changed pages so I could physically take them into the audio recording booth. But wait – Word does not have the capability to just print Track Changes! (Trust me, I used the Help menu and tried to Google how it was done. Nope – it’s not possible.) I was fearful that I’d have to look through page by page and write down which individual pages to print. Before I gave in to that solution, I found a much better work-around. Here’s a trick to help you save a serious amount of time and paper.

  1. Access the Print menu.
  2. From the Settings drop-down menu, select List of Markup.Track Changes 1   
  3. Click Print.
  4. Review the printed document. It’s a concise list that indicates every page where a change was made.Track Changes 2
  5. Access the Print menu again.
  6. From the Settings drop-down menu, select Custom Print.Track Changes 3
  7. Enter the pages that contain changes.Track Changes 4
  8. Click Print.

Forgotten Attachments in Outlook 2013

By in Microsoft Office Tags: , , ,

Oops2

I suspect that many people are like me. We prepare a document. When it’s ready, we compose a quick email explaining the purpose of the document, we attach the document, and finally we send it.

But, if you’re really like me, quite often we forget to send the attachment. We realize what we’ve done five minutes later and send another email saying, “Oops, I forgot the attachment.” I know I am not the only one who does this because I often get these “oops” emails.

Outlook 2013 notices your mistake! It politely reminds you if it “thinks” you have forgotten an attachment. You can turn off the feature, but who’d want to do that?

 

Creating a Contact Group in Outlook 2013

By in Microsoft Office, Technology Tags: ,

h

Do you ever find yourself continuously sending emails to the same groups of people? I do. Still, it feels like I’m constantly reviewing and thinking “who did I miss?” Then I wised up and realized there’s a solution for that! Now you can stop racking your brain with questions like, “who was on that committee?” And there’s no longer any need for my go-to technique of adding people based on their office location in order from front to back. The answer — create a new distribution list in Outlook (2013) and you’ll no longer need to worry about forgetting to add anyone!

Follow these steps:

  1. Create a list of the people you want to add.
  2. In Outlook, click People from the navigation bar at the bottom.Photo 1
  3. Under My Contacts, pick where you want to add the contact group.Photo 2
  4. Click Home and then select New Contact Group.Photo 3
  5. Type a name for the group in the Name field. Photo 4
  6. Click Add Members, and then add people from your address book or contact list.
  7. Click Save & Close.
    Photo 6

When you need to send an email to this group of people, simply begin to type the name you saved the list as, and it should appear. Click the list to select and use.Photo 7

Note: clicking the plus sign next to the contact list name will display each individual your message will be sent to.Photo 8

Do you have any useful tips about creating groups in Outlook?

 

Power Corrupts, PowerPoint…

By in Microsoft Office Tags: , , ,

Boring_PowerPoint

Most people are familiar with the saying that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Some people know that the expression is associated with Lord Acton (1834 – 1902). But few people know anything about the contex or that the quotation isn’t entirely accurate.

The complete remark was “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Lord Acton, an English historian and politician, was a Catholic. He was, however, very aware of the way in which Popes had abused power. He wrote a letter to Mandell Creighton, an Archbishop of The Church of England, arguing that history was right to treat Popes harshly. He believed that they deserved it! The remark was part of the letter.

So much for Lord Acton! Edward Tufte is a visionary statistician, who gives seminars on how to display, represent, and communicate data. He wittily parodied Lord Acton’s famous remark in an article he wrote for Wired magazine in 2003 by saying, “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

Tufte deplores the way that PowerPoint encourages speakers to prioritize format over content. He dislikes the way children are encouraged to reduce their ideas to bullet points and sales pitches. He argues that a PowerPoint presentation is really no help to the audience but is a crutch for the presenter. Worse, “PowerPoint’s pushy style seeks to set up a speaker’s dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?”

I must admit that, in the course of my career, the number of PowerPoint slides and the number of bullets I have seen have probably run into hundreds of thousands. Rarely have I laughed, been impressed, or even learned very much from a bullet. But I can’t help feeling that Tufte is blaming the tool rather than the presenter. Any technology creates the opportunity to create dreadful output. The advent of desktop publishing spawned thousands of appalling newsletters in the 1980s. The digital camera has been behind billions of ugly photographs. You only have to look at YouTube to see that video technology has let thousands of untalented videographers loose on an undeserving world. Microsoft Word is probably the underlying technology behind every boring book in the library!

Presentations definitely need to be redefined. That is clear. Let’s be honest. How often do you look forward to a presentation? How often do you walk away feeling enlightened, amused, or even simply better informed? I have resolved to make more use of pictures, replace my bullets with stories, offer my audiences the opportunity to participate, and try to fill my presentations with light-hearted humor to replace corporate cliches and platitudes. But this change won’t come by getting rid of PowerPoint. It will come with my resolve to improve my speaking skills.

Like all tools, PowerPoint can be well used or abused!

You may want to resolve to take an interesting risk. Try making a presentation with very few bullets. Use pictures instead. You will be surprised how much more engaged your audience will be. If you’re concerned that they need to walk away with certain details, note these down on a single sheet of paper. Give your audience ample time to read that sheet before you begin. Use PowerPoint to deliver your message, by all means, but do so through the use of cartoons, photographs, and informative charts. Your audiences will be grateful that you left the deadly bullets behind.

 

Dalberg-Acton, J. E. E. (1907). Historical essays and studies. J. N. Figgis & R. V. Laurence (Eds.). London, UK: Macmillan and Co., Limited.

Tufte, E. (September, 2003). PowerPoint is evil. Wired, 11 (9). Retrieved from http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

 

Color-Coding Messages in Microsoft Outlook 2013

By in Microsoft Office, Technology Tags: ,

ColorCoding

Learning Solutions would like to thank System Source for writing this blog article.

Did you know that Microsoft Outlook 2013 can change the color of email messages sent to you by a particular person, like your boss, your best customer, or a co-worker?

Let’s say that you’d like to color-code the emails from your co-worker, “Suzanne.” Here’s how you would do it:

1.  Click View –> View Settings –> Conditional Formatting

EmailColor_1

2.  Click the Add button.

3.  In the Name field, type the name of your view (for example, “Emails from Suzanne”).

4.  Click the Font button and choose the formatting you would like. For instance, you could choose to make the font purple. When you’re done, click OK.

EmailColor_2

5.  Click Condition –> Messages tab –> From –> and then search for Suzanne’s name. When you locate it, double-click it and then click OK.

6.  Click OK. Click OK again. Then click OK one more time to complete the process.

EmailColor_3

And you’re done! Never miss that important email again!

 

Microsoft Unveils Project Spartan – The Successor to Internet Explorer

By in Microsoft Office, Technology Tags: , ,

620_eeevolution project spartan windows 10

I think many of us have been waiting for the day we could stop using Internet Explorer. And now, finally, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yesterday, at the Windows 10 press conference, Microsoft showed off boatloads of new software and technology. Among these announcements was a brand new web browser that will come loaded on all Windows 10 devices – Project Spartan.

Project Spartan will supposedly be more compatible with the way the web is written today, and features a new rendering engine. They didn’t say how compatible, but I will remain cautiously optimistic. They did, however, show off some super cool features! This new browser will include:

  • The ability to draw on webpages using your finger (on touch screens), a stylus, or your mouse, and share your marks with others. This feature will also sync to your OneDrive account. Note-taking via typing is also supported.
  • Built-in options to share web pages through social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
  • A “reading mode” that strips away the clutter from web pages so you can just focus on reading the content.
  • A way for you to add pages to your “reading list” to save for later. This list syncs across all of your Windows devices and natively supports .pdf files.
  • Extention support.
  • Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, will be built into the web browser. She can help you in all sorts of ways, such as scheduling, GPS, reservations, etc.

It’s still unclear whether or not Project Spartan will replace Internet Explorer for good, or if Internet Explorer will remain part of Windows 10 for the sake of backward compatibility. We’ll have to wait until closer to release to know for sure, but we do know that Project Spartan will be the default browser in Windows 10. And from what Microsoft showed us yesterday, this new browser has the potential to be great!

For more details and if you’d like to see it in action for yourself, here is a recording of the demo on YouTube.

Working With Dates and Days of the Week in Excel

By in Microsoft Office Tags: ,

Calendar

Working with dates in Excel is easy, and there are all sorts of formats that you can use to display dates in your spreadsheet, including:

April 1, 2015
Wednesday, April 01, 2015
4/1/2015
4/1
1-Apr-15
01-Apr-15
1-Apr-2015

 

Selecting the format is quite easy:

  1. Move your pointer or your cursor to the cell or column that you want to change.
  2. Right click.
  3. Select Format Cells…
  4. Choose Date from the Format Cells menu.
  5. Move your pointer to the Type of format you prefer from the Samples.
  6. Click OK.

When you’ve done this, your chosen format will appear no matter how you type in the date. For example, let’s say you prefer the format, “1-Apr-2015.” That format will display even if you type “4/1/2015.” Personally, I prefer formats that include the name of the month because it avoids ambiguity in countries that use “2/7/2015” to mean “2 July 2015” rather than “7 February 2015.”

Although it’s a little more complicated, you can also choose to display the day of the week without the date. Frequently, I find it useful to have two columns. The first shows the day of the week; the second shows the date.

Day Date
Wednesday April 1, 2015

 

Here’s how you do this:

  1. Enter the words “Day” and “Date” in Cells A1 and B1 respectively.
  2. Highlight both columns and select the format “April 1, 2015” as explained above.
  3. Enter a date in Cell A2.
  4. Set Cell B2 to equal A2 by clicking in Cell B2, entering the “=” sign and pointing at Cell A2.
  5. Highlight Column A.
  6. On the Home tab, in the Number group, click the drop-down menu, click More Number Formats, and then click the Number tab.
  7. Under Category, click Custom, and in the Type box, type dddd for the full name of the day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, and so on), or ddd for the abbreviated name of the day of the week (Mon, Tue, Wed, and so on).
  8. Click OK.

The day of the week will now display in Cell A2.

 

 

 

Insert Audio for More Engaging PowerPoint Presentations

By in Microsoft Office, Technology Tags: ,

Inserting_Audio

Unfortunately, we’ve all been subjected to a couple (or more) dull, verbose, and graphically painful PowerPoint presentations that would make anyone happily poke her eyes out with a dull pencil instead of sitting through the 100+ slides. Here’s how you can insert audio into your PowerPoint presentation to make things more interesting.

(Please note: These instructions are for PowerPoint 2010. If you have an older version, the process might be slightly different.)

Inserting audio:

  • From the Insert tab, click Audio.

PowerPoint_Toolbar

  • A drop-down menu will appear.
  • Select “Audio from File.” You will need to have an audio file saved on your computer in order to retrieve it at this point.
  • When a dialog box opens, select your audio file (mp3 recommended). Then click Insert.

PowerPoint_Audio

  • Once you’ve correctly inserted your audio, your slide will have a speaker icon on it. Click Play to test it out!

PowerPoint_Speaker

PowerPoint Tips for Design: Back to Basics

By in Microsoft Office, Technology Tags: ,

Logo_Microsoft_PowerPoint_2013

Before PowerPoint was developed, most presentations were made within departments that shared common knowledge sets. With a changing work environment in the 60s and 70s came a need to clearly communicate between departments. A simple, illustrated guide was needed to organize and share information. The outcome was the presentation medium of 35mm slides, followed by less-expensive transparencies. PowerPoint 1.0 officially went on sale in April, 1987. The program was then Macintosh based, and produced black-and-white slides that a photocopier could print as overhead transparencies.

As technology evolved, PowerPoint became colorful and streamlined into Windows Office. Microsoft now estimates that at least thirty million PowerPoint presentations are made daily.

According to Ian Parker of The New Yorker, “after Microsoft’s… dizzying growth, there are great tracts of corporate America where to appear at a meeting without PowerPoint would be unwelcome and vaguely pretentious…”

So consider the following tips to get your point across:

  1. Simple is best. Steer towards clean templates, and avoid animations and unnecessary sound effects.
  2. Use a title that captures an audience’s attention. Draw viewers in with a bold statement that engages them to listen to your message.
  3. Clip art is passé. Avoid it at all costs. If you need more visual appeal, use a photograph, as long as it’s relevant to the content.
  4.  The “Rule of Seven” shouldn’t be a rule. “Seven (7) bullets or lines per page, seven (7) words per line” has been a rule of thumb for years, but is too formulaic. Keep your font a good, legible size (no less than 18pt) and keep your verbiage simple.
  5. One topic per page. Again, keep it simple. Too much information is confusing and difficult to follow. PowerPoint is used to summarize your presentation; each slide should be read and comprehended in 10 seconds or less.
  6. Put your best font forwards. Bold for is for emphasis, avoid italics. Underscored text is only for hyperlinks. No hyphenated lines. Use no more than two complementary fonts for your presentation. One sans serif and one serif work nicely. Do not use a display font.

    PowerPoint tips
  7. Titles should be short, in title case. As recommended by the U. S. Government Printing Office Style Manual, “Capitalize all words in titles of publications and documents, except a, an, the, at, by, for, in, of, on, to, up, and, as, but, it, or, and nor.”
  8. Master your formatting. The best way to keep a presentation consistent is to use the master pages, and use the same palette of colors throughout.
  9. Avoid triple delivery. Having precisely the same text on the screen, spoken aloud, and printed on the handout is too much redundancy. Don’t let the viewer read ahead of you. Present supporting material rather than reading your bullets verbatim. If you must print, include the “notes.”
  10. Squishing photos is cruel. Hold down the SHIFT key while scaling photos and graphics. Inappropriate resizing looks extremely amateurish.

    No squishing allowed!!
    No squishing allowed!

Want to read more tips? View Death by PowerPoint by Fadi-Pierre Singer.

Find out more of PowerPoint’s history by reading Ian Parker’s Absolute PowerPoint: Can a software package edit our thoughts? from the The New Yorker’s 2001 Annals of Business.

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