We have covered a lot of MS Word 2007 tips and tricks and how-to’s over the months and we have seen how the Office application can be used to create interesting documents. With decreasing attention spans and more hurried reading, designing documents for easy readability has become very important. People don’t read — they glance through. If it’s not your grandmother bequeathing you all her worldly possessions, I guess you too would prefer a rapid scan through a document instead of going at it by line.

Bullets are an essential tool for creating concise documents. You can capture the essential gist of a document in a bulleted list (or a numbered list for that matter).

When I was starting out with MS Word, I knew of only those that I got from the toolbar, with a click on Bullets and Numbering. As MS Word graduated to MS Word 2007, one colorful option came in. A few more days spent spraying bullets all over a document and I learned that there’s an entire gallery of bullets that can be used for improving the décor of one’s document. Not only that, I can use symbols and my own custom pictures too to create my own bullets.

So let’s take a look at the different ways in which we can create bullets. Of course, these are common across all MS Office applications.

Define your own bullet with symbols

MS Word makes it real easy to customize our own bullets if we don’t like the default ones.

• On the Home tab of the Ribbon, go to the Paragraph group where the Bullets command is located. Click the little drop down arrow to access the default bullets in the Bullets Library. Click on Define New Bullets.

  

• Next, click on Symbol and select any character you like to get a new bullet. You can select Wingdings, Wingdings 2 and Webdings from the Fonts dropdown to access a rich variety of typefaces as bullets. You can see a small preview too. Click on OK to set your new choice of bullet.

  

• Just like a font, you can change the color and size of a bullet.

  

Define your own bullets with pictures

• Alternatively, you can click on Picture in the Define New Bullet box to select any from the large gallery. You can also put a check on Include Content from Office Online.

  

• Click on Import to browse to an external file and include it in the collection.
• A lot of the picture bullets can be found under – (In Windows XP) C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Media\Office12\Bullets.
• In the above location, you will see that the GIF files have average dimensions of 15 pixels. You can make your own customized picture bullets using the same dimensions in any graphic application.

  

Shortcut bullets with AutoCorrect

• The AutoCorrect feature of Word allows you to create fast bullets with some special characters. To see whether AutoCorrect is set for automatically creating bulleted lists, go to: Office – Word Options – Proofing – Click on AutoCorrect Options.

  

• In the AutoFormat as You Type tab, check Automatic Bulleted Lists.

  

• AutoCorrect recognizes any of these characters…
  *
  o
  — (em dash)
  –
  ––
  >
  –>
  =>
  …and changes them to bullets on the run when you press Enter. Type in any of these characters, press Spacebar, or a tab to enter the text for that line. Hit Enter to go to the next line as the bulleted list gets created with each press of an Enter.
• Creating bulleted lists with AutoCorrect works with all kinds of bullets like symbols and pictures.

Steal bullets from open documents

• If you get a document with a bullet you like, you can easily copy it into your collection. Bullets in an open document get added to the bullets collection under the group – Document Bullets. Select the bullet in that group, right click and Add to Library. Now, it’s yours’ to own and use.

  

• You can remove them by selecting them in the Library group and right clicking on Remove.

Composing bulleted lists is often harped upon these days. Don’t you think that attractive bulleted lists will help with more eye-catching points?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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There are a lot of things which can go into creating a professional looking document. But when we are talking about first impressions, then we have to speak about the first thing that catches the eye and that’s the cover page.

The cover page is the very first page of your document. Its purpose right at the beginning is to give the reader the Big Idea about the document. The why and wherefore is communicated through a specific title, the author name, date, a one-liner on the subject and any other bit of important information on the cover page.

If Black Text On A White Page Is A Turn Off…

One of the reasons I am writing this post is that Microsoft Word makes it painless to create a professional cover page. Unlike the previous versions, Word 2007 has Building Blocks which are pre-formatted templates for cover pages, headers, footers etc. Learning how to make a cover page in MS Word is as easy as a few clicks.

So let’s move away from the monochromatic black on white to more colorful beginnings.

1. Open MS Word 2007 in a new document or the document you wish to create the cover page for.
2. Click on the Insert menu on the ribbon. The very first section, Pages contains the dropdown for Cover Page. Click on Cover Page to open the inbuilt gallery of templates.



3. The inbuilt gallery has about 15 pre-formatted cover pages that you can scroll though. Click on the one you like to select and open it. The cover page appears at the beginning of the document by default.



4. If you want it in any other location, right click on the cover page thumbnail in the gallery and select from the options given.



5. Now, you can click on each pre-formatted field (the square brackets) and the whole thing gets highlighted with a blue field label on top. Type in your version for the given field. The author name might appear by default if the Office installation was in your name.



6. For date fields, you can click the dropdown arrow to select a date from a calendar. You can format all fields as you would for normal text.



7. Building blocks have editable regions which can be customized again. For instance, some of the cover page templates use tables which again can be formatted for size and color of borders or fills using Word’s table tools. Also, some templates have pictures which can be swapped for another or formatted. Think a logo would go better with the page? Just right click on the picture and click Change Picture in the context menu.



8. While working on one cover page, you can change it for another cover page by selecting a new template from the dropdown. The field entries are retained in the new template.
9. Click on Save to finalize the cover page as a document.
10. If you would like to save the cover page for later use in another document, select the entire cover page. Click on Insert – Cover Page – Save Selection to Cover Page Gallery. You can use the same menu to remove a selected cover page from the gallery.

Adding a cover page to a document not only helps in stylizing it but it also gives a sketch to the reader about the contents. You can create a generic cover page for your company and save it in the gallery for frequent use. Another use is to create a document in Word with a nicely laid out cover page and save it in PDF. It can add oodles to the way you present your document (and you don’t have to have any designing IQ).

If a book can be known by its cover, so should a document. Most of us don’t commonly employ a cover page with a document. Or do you? Let us know the benefits you find in inserting a well designed cover page.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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You should know, however, that Microsoft isn’t just about money. They do provide an awful lot of free software that is really cool! So I went digging on their site and sniffing around for some free Microsoft software and here are 3 cool programs I didn’t know Microsoft had.

Scalable Fabric

Don’t let the name fool you. It’s not a fabric of the cloth variety. What they’re talking about is a window management application. Essentially, it replaces the function of the minimize button on the top right of your window.

With Scalable Fabric installed, if you click on the minimize window, the window merely shrinks and moves to one side of your desktop. If you drag that window towards the center of the screen, the window gets bigger until it becomes full size. Vice-versa as well.

The program does make some annoying noises, but those can be shut off.  Really, it’s something you have to try to really understand. However, as always, here are some pictures!

What this shows is how the large window scales down when moved to the periphery and scales up when moved to the center of the screen. You can also set the boundaries for where this scaling begins and ends. That’s what the blue square represents.

The usefulness of this is limited. However it meets a specific need by keeping your window’s content visible on your desktop. Yes, this feature is available in operating systems newer than XP, yet this is a nice add on for XP and earlier versions of Windows.

Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint

If this free Microsoft software was used on all PowerPoint presentations, we might not have the saying Death-By-PowerPoint. People would find it much easier to add audio and video to their PowerPoint through the time-line editing feature.

It works much like any basic movie editing software would, like Microsoft MovieMaker. So you can have music spanning several slides, and have a richer visual experience. This product is also ideal for creating stand-alone presentations that don’t require you to be there talking.

A person could create a kiosk-style presentation and leave it running on a computer or monitor for the public to see. That’s a good thing, because to get someone to develop a presentation in Flash or other methods is terribly expensive compared to doing it yourself in this freeware.

I could see this being ideal for a small-business owner or village, or any other organization with a limited budget. A presentation with this could really raise your profile.

Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2009

This free Microsoft software application is like a mini-version of Microsoft Money or Intuit’s Quicken for free! If you have XP or Vista, you can download this great free app to help you with your small business. It can integrate and share data with Microsoft Outlook, Access and Excel.

What I find really exciting is that I can use this with eBay and PayPal to list items I want to sell as well as create the invoices for the customers. Apparently you can process credit card payments too, but I didn’t venture into that feature. If you need to share your books frequently with your accountant, you can also do that through Office Live with this package. Incredible really, for free software.

Now, think about this. Microsoft, the world’s most successful IT company and creator of dozens of filthy rich people made and distributes this software for free. These programs can increase your productivity, market presence and profitability. Maybe they couldn’t make money off of Scalable Fabric, but certainly the other two could be sold for at least $40. No, Microsoft does give back. So, maybe I’ll back off on the trashing of Redmond’s finest – at least for a little while.

Do you use any other freeware from Microsoft? If you do, I’d love to hear which ones and what your opinions are on them. Drop me a line in the comments below!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets.

Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste.

We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process.

1. Open the document which you want to work upon. The screenshot below shows the before state, i.e. before we activate the Hidden feature.



2. Select the text you want to hide from prying eyes. Right click and choose the Font option from the context menu.



3. Under Effects, put a checkmark against Hidden. Click OK.

The text has done a Houdini act.

But with the important part invisible to the eye, how do we get it back? Houdini usually made dramatic reappearances, MS Word’s Hidden feature doesn’t quite match up but it’s dead easy.

1. Select the entire document with a Select All (Ctrl-A or Toolbar – Editing – Select – Select All). Right click and go back to the Font option again from the context menu.
2. The Hidden setting is solid and active. Click on it once to display the checkmark. Click again to remove the checkmark and unhide all the content. Click OK to exit and reveal the content.



3. Note: There is another way to reveal hidden content. Click on the Office Button – Word Options – Display. Click on the Hidden text formatting marker under Always show these formatting marks on the screen. Any hidden text in the document is revealed underlined with the marker.

Thus, with a simple toggle of a setting you can selectively hide blocks of text, print the documents and then unhide the text again. That’s great, but what if you need to send the document over to someone with hidden content? Then we need to fall back on the Protect Document feature of MS Word for more ironclad security.

Protect Document is a security feature that prevents modification of a text document unless allowed by the author. To start protection, click on the Review tab and go to the Protect group and follow these steps.

1. Click on Protect Document – Restrict Formatting and Editing.



2. Drill down and click on Limit formatting to a selection of styles – Settings under Formatting Restrictions.



3. In the Formatting Restrictions box, select None to disallow formatting for styles.



4. Click OK and then put a check against Allow only this type of editing in the document and keep it set on No Changes (Read Only) in the dropdown.



5. To make the protection active click on Start Enforcement and provide a password to secure the document. Now, you can forward this document to others with the text hidden and protected from changes.

Hidden text as a formatting control is usually more useful for quick print jobs rather than as a secretive cloaking device.

Though, the latter too can be used creatively. Think of school quizzes with the answers hidden. I personally use it to hide and unhide sections while writing. Sometimes, it helps me understand the flow and length (word count) without having to delete any section.

Do you use this feature to hide text? How…or has it stayed hidden and unused?

Image Credit: CarbonNYC

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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You probably wonder what a DAT file is in the first place. Simply put, DAT files contain data in text or binary format.

They are typically found as winmail.dat files in email attachments, created by Microsoft Exchange Servers. But many other programs can create .dat files as well. So if the name doesn’t give it away, it’s difficult to tell whether you’re dealing with text, pictures, movies or something completely different.

Giving advice on how to open a DAT file of an unknown source is difficult because there are so many options, depending on the original source of the file. But say you were supposed to receive a WORD document and what you did receive was a document with a .dat file extension. Basically, you have two straight forward options to open and convert a DAT file into a Word doc.

First, you could try to change the file extension. In case you don’t see file extensions in Windows, go to the folder that contains your .dat file, click Tools and select Folder Options. Switch to the View tab and uncheck the option Hide extensions for known file types.

Second, you could simply try to open the .dat file with WORD or notepad or the program you suspect created the original file. To do this, right-click on the .dat file, select Open With from the menu, then select an application from the list or click Choose Program… to pick another.

Once you successfully opened the DAT file, you’re at least half way to converting that DAT file into a Word doc. But once again, there are several options.

Say we’re still dealing with a .dat file that originally was a .doc file. You changed the file extension and now that you open the file in WORD it looks fine. In fact, you already “converted” your file – congratulations!

If you managed to open with WORD, the easiest way to “convert” your file from .dat to .doc, is to save the document using WORD. And there you go. It wasn’t that hard, was it?

Now let’s get a little more serious. All the strategies above didn’t work and your file doesn’t display properly? Maybe it’s time to use a file converter. If Microsoft Outlook messed with your attachments, chances are that Winmaildat.com will get you out of the mess.

From within the Extract tab browse for the respective .dat file on your computer, send it and wait for the Results to show in the respective tab. The file size limit with this service is 5MB.

There really isn’t more to it than that. To successfully retrieve data from a .dat file or convert it to its original file format, you need to know the source or the original file type.

Is there another smart trick that I missed out on? Please share your knowledge in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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There are open source free desktop applications, then there are free cloud-based applications. Microsoft has been working on a free version of its popular Office franchise as well. The free version would be available online. Microsoft recently launched a tech preview. It is an invite-only preview, however you just need a Skydrive account and some URL tweaking to try out the Microsoft Office Web Apps Preview.

Here is how:

• The following steps seem to work only if you have ?mkt=en-us appended to the Skydrive URL. So click here.
• Create a Skydrive account (Windows Live Account) if you don’t have one, or log into your existing one. It gives you 25GB of online space you can use to store/backup your files. We wrote about it some time back.
• Make sure there is a Word/Excel file in your Skydrive. If there isn’t, you can upload one.
• You will see an option to join the tech preview to edit the file.

• Click on the link, read and choose to accept the terms. Silverlight should be installed for you to use Office Online. Don’t worry, you will be given instructions to download and install in case it is not found on your computer.

With all that done and completed you are in and ready to test out the latest in cloud office apps.

So how good is it?

Well to begin with – the Microsoft Office web apps have the same ribbon interface of Office 2007 and Office 2010. So if you were hoping to get back to the Office 2003 like menus and buttons, you will be disappointed. The similar look definitely makes it easier to find your way around. All the icons, menus and options (though few) resemble the ones you would find in the desktop version of the software.

As for the file format, Microsoft Office Web Apps uses Office Open XML formats (i.e. the .docx, .xlsx, .pptx formats). However, you can still use the older formats, only they will be converted to the newer OOXML formats before Office Web Apps allows you work on them.

Overall, it is limited and don’t expect to see all the functionality of the desktop version or something reasonably close to it. You would be better to make a comparison with some of the web-based office suites instead, in which case the functionality seems respectable, no amazing over-the-top stuff that would overthrow Google Docs.

Collaboration is the key feature, as is often the case with most cloud-based applications. You can share files with others, make your files public, choose whether they would be able to edit documents or not. People can leave comments as your file gets edited, re-edited and refined.

Go ahead check it out and let us know what you think. Do you think Office Online offers the features you need to do your day to day work? Or is it too stripped down to be used for any decent job? Give it a thorough spin and sound off in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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With the case of MS Word documents, usually it’s right before we press the save button. Bang! All that unsaved hard work goes down as lost bytes. But for a failsafe device built into MS Word.

AutoRecover is the supposedly goof-proof mechanism that can get back our documents after an accidental closure. By default, MS Word 2007 makes an automatic file save every 10 minutes. I am an average Joe, but there are times when I can get a lot done in 10 minutes. Sometimes, I am an average dunce too because I forget to continuously save the work. That’s why the need to pay closer attention to the AutoRecover setting makes for good foresightedness.

AutoRecover is not a productivity substitute for the normal save operation. Saving our files consistently and continuously is a best practice.

AutoRecover to the rescue

1. Following a crash or an abnormal close of a document, the Document Recovery Task Pane appears with a prompt when Word is restarted.



2. The pane on the left hand side lists the files (usually three of the most recent) that Word managed to recover.



3. The file name is qualified by a status indicator which gives an idea of the stage of recovery. Original indicates that the file is the same as was during the last manual save. Autosaved indicates that the file has managed to recover data between the last manual save and up to the last AutoRecover process.
4. With the Document Recovery Task Pane, you can open and check the files for lost content. Save the most recent version (or all of them) and delete the rest.

Where are the auto-recovered backups stored?

1. By default the files are placed as temporary files here (Windows XP) - C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Application Data\Microsoft\Word. The files have the extension ASD (Word Automatic Backup).
2. The AutoRecover location can be modified by providing an alternate folder location. Click on the Office button – Word Options – Advanced – Scroll down to the General section on the right hand pane – Click on File Locations – Modify the location for AutoRecover under File Types by assigning a different folder.

Insure your documents by changing the AutoRecover interval

As mentioned before, MS Word normally auto-saves a document every 10 minutes. Is it too much for you or is it too less? A few steps into Word’s settings and you can change the interval to your liking. If you are the forgetful sort, a more frequent auto-save could be the pill.

1. Start with the Office button.
2. Click on Word Options. Go to Save found on the left hand column. For the section Save Documents, come to the entry – Save AutoRecover information every X minutes.



3. Change the time interval to your liking. Every 5 minutes should be just fine.

AutoRecover consumes resources, so too frequent an interval could hit performance.

Microsoft Office Suite has the AutoRecover option enabled for Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Visio and Word. In OneNote, a five second auto-save is the default (That’s why it does not have a Save button.)

In a perfect world the practice of save early and save would be followed to the letter. Unfortunately, our world isn’t one. That’s why the AutoRecover option does its best to safeguard our hard work.

Is your auto-recovery set to the default? How often has it brought you back from the brink?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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If you are quick with your copying and pasting and you do it with large amounts of text then I am sure you are careful about massive blobs of formatted text that spreads itself all over your Word document.

Ugh, plain text is so dull! Where’s the color…where’s the stylized font…where’s the pizzazz?

Yeah, it’s ho-hum for sure. But being able to strip formatting from text and pasting it in the original format has its uses and its moments. But for times, when we need to apply our own formatting or make it take on the formatting of a paragraph, ‘paste as unformatted text’ is the way to go. Matching the text format of what we are copying to what we want at the destination is always the job.

The feature as we all know is right there in MS Word. A click on Paste – Paste Special – Paste as Unformatted Text/ Paste as Unformatted Unicode Text, and we get it the way we want it. There’s also the Paste Options smart tag but it still involves moving the hands and selecting an option. It’s irksome if one had to do it repeatedly. As far as timesavers go, there’s nothing similar to the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl-V for unformatted text.

Oh wait, there are! Hold on to your mouse.

Over the course of time, I have evolved from the default way gradually to the three methods to strip formatting from text that are mentioned here. I will put down the three ways to always paste without formatting and I invite you to contribute your own. Some of us may be old dogs but it’s never too late to learn new tricks, even for an ordinary task as pasting unformatted text.

Hey…it’s right there in MS Word!

Sure it is. The feature is more targeted – Match Destination Formatting. It’s a simple matter of changing a setting and all text loses its source formatting to take on what’s there in the open document file. Here’s how it is –

1. From the Office button – click on Word Options at the bottom to open the panel.



2. Come down to the Advanced feature on the left. Within it, the second section is for Cut, copy and paste which lists the four options – Pasting within the same document, Pasting between documents, Pasting between documents when style definitions conflict and Pasting from other programs.
3. Change the default of Keep Source Formatting to Match Destination Formatting. Alternatively to paste text without any formatting, you can also choose Keep Text Only. Click OK and that’s it.

Get back that cleanliness with PureText

Plugging all Windows deficiencies has spawned a software industry of its own. Thanks to a neat little freeware called PureText we can strip the format from any copied block of source text. PureText gives us a new shortcut key using Windows Key +V which is the default hotkey for the app. Here’s how it is –

1. PureText does not need an installation. Run it and it operates from the system tray.



2. The formatting of any copied text on the clipboard can be changed by just clicking on the system tray icon. The clipboard text loses its rich formatting but retains carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space.



3. The clipboard text though remains available to be pasted normally (i.e. using a Ctrl+V) with all formatting intact if we so wish.

The little clipboard software is great because it’s just 13K, is portable and can be run on all Windows programs across all editions (Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista).

Let’s record a Macro

Macro programs are little snippets of code that turn a complex multi-step task into a single click function. In brief, they are productivity tools for power users and this ability is built into MS Office. A simple Macro program lets us paste text into a Word document without the original source formatting. Here’s how it is –

1. Go to the View tab on the Ribbon. Click on the Macros group button.



2. In the Macros box which opens, give a descriptive name (without space) for the macro you are about to setup. Press Enter.



3. In the Visual Basic editor, delete the default text and paste the following snip of code:Sub PasteSpecial()
   Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
   End Sub



4. Click on File – Save Normal or on the Save Normal toolbar icon.
5. To assign a shortcut key to the Macro, click on Office button – Word Options.
6. Click on Customize on the left column. On the right panel, from the Choose commands from dropdown select Macros. Choose the PasteSpecial Macro.



7. To assign a shortcut key to the Macro, click on the Customize button for keyboard shortcuts.
8. In the Customize keyboard window, dropdown to the entry for Macros under Categories on the left. Select the PasteSpecial macro on the right. Enter a shortcut key combination like Ctrl+Shift+V in the Press new shortcut key area by typing the keys combo on the keyboard. Click on Assign and Close to set your Macro.

Give it a rip by copying and pasting some text.

The three ways give a simple makeover to a very basic document operation. In their own way they illustrate that productivity can be had in the tiniest of details.

How relieving are these quick ways to paste unformatted text? Or do you think that the default way stands up to the task adequately? Paste some of your comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 4 Custom Bullet Tips and Tricks for Microsoft Word 2007 (11)
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To be able to revise quickly and often, it helps if the information is terse and to the point highlighting only the important aspects. Something like an application cheat sheet or a poster that you can print and pin to a board or keep on your desk.

Here are some application cheat sheets for commonly used software that will hopefully make you more productive.

Microsoft Office

Need to get that report typed and formatted quickly? Can’t find your way around the ribbon interface? Check these out:

Explains the ribbon interface, smart shapes, which format to choose and how to do things like adding a digital signature, protecting the document and other little tips. (Download)

Excel 2007 (Download)	Word 2007 (Download)
PowerPoint 2007 (Download)	Outlook 2007 (Download)

If you are interested in other Office applications or different version of Microsoft Office, Customguide is a great resource.

Browsers

Browsers are among most commonly used software these days. You may be using Firefox or Chrome or Opera or even Internet Explorer, the bottomline is you need to get online and browsers help you in doing so. It is always nice to know your browser inside out and have some tricks up your sleeves, here are some cheat sheets that should get you started:

Google Chrome

Contains keyboard shortcuts, command line switches and the about:urls (Go there) (PDF)

Firefox

Contains keyboard shortcuts, highlights important directories related to Firefox, and presents a trick or two. It has not been updated for a long time but the information still stands good for Firefox 3.5 (Go there) ( PDF )

Linux

This is a huge 18 x 18 in poster that presents you – “The Anatomy of a Linux System”. It has a plethora of information about Linux, top Linux magazines, top Linux sites. In addition, it lists the popular software on Linux systems along with the sites and useful books (it’s from O’Reilly after all) on each of them. (More) (Download)

Lists commonly used commands, switches and what they do. Good for beginners. (Download)

Looking for something a little more advanced? Linux Administrator’s Quick Reference card has you covered with the important files and commands you need to know for system administration. (Download) Credit: Jialong He

Vi/Vim

One of my personal favorites, I actually learned Vim way back using this. It is a complete tutorial and apart from the all inclusive version, there are ones for individual chapters. You can download the SVG versions and scale them to make a wallpaper if you like! (Download)

Photoshop

Concisely lists all the common Photoshop shortcuts you should know to make your work easier and faster. (Download for CS4) (Other Photoshop Versions)

Twitter

Twitter finds its way into everything these days, how could we not have a reference sheet for Twitter?

Packed with all kinds of information about Twitter including important pages, desktop clients, widgets and apps, a definition of various Twitter buzzwords and ethics! (Download)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It has tons of information on what to include in tags, redirects, sitemap syntax, robots.txt syntax and much more. Presents lots of useful information in a tiny little booklet. A must for anyone working with SEO. (Download)

Looking for more?

I bet you are. Didn’t find the one you were looking for? Well there were too many of them to fit in one post. If you are looking for a specific application cheat sheet fire up the request in the comments section, someone might drop you a link. There are two great resources for posters and cheat sheets here and here. If you ever created one for yourself we would love to see them too!

Plus, don’t forget that MakeUseOf have our very own cheat sheets. Click here to check them out and if you like them, download them for free!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use OfficeTab To Give Microsoft Office Firefox-Like Tabs (45)
• Top 3 FREE web-based Office Suites (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) (12)
• OxygenOffice Pro: Enhanced Version of OpenOffice (5)
• How To Make Microsoft Office 2007 Look Like Office 2003 (7)
• How To Get an Early Preview of Microsoft Office Web Apps (18)

I want to clarify how some of them work, so you can make the most of the tools at your disposal.

Cell handles

First off, let me tell you about the various cell handles that Excel makes use of. You use a cell handle by hovering the mouse on various parts of the screen. Fire up Excel and try this for yourself. Nothing beats a little practice.

I’m going to show you this in Excel 2007, but only the most advanced options are version-specific. You’ll be fine. One thing though. If you don’t use the default Windows mouse cursors you might see different sorts of shapes. Change it back to the defaults until you get the hang of this.

Select

You already use this one, if you use a mouse at all. Hold the mouse anywhere within the confines of a cell in a spreadsheet, and the mouse cursor becomes a small white cross. Hold the left button down and drag the mouse to select all the cells you slide over, in a rectangular shape. That’s it.

Move

If you hold the mouse over the edge of a cell, then it behaves differently. It’s quite common for people to do this by mistake, but it’s easy to avoid if you take a look at the cursor. It should be a thin black cross with arrow-heads on it.

The move handle does exactly what you would think. It moves the current cell, or the current block of cells if you have more than one selected. It’s smart though. If the cell you are moving is referenced by formulae in other cells, each formula is automatically adjusted so everything still works.

One safety tip. Make sure the cursor isn’t over the small black square in the bottom right corner of the cell. You’ll be doing something completely different. I’ll explain that soon.

Copy

To copy cells instead of moving them, put the mouse in the same place, and hold down the Control (Ctrl) key. The cursor changes back to a white arrow, with a small black cross beside it.

The behaviour is a little different now. If you drag the mouse to another location, the cell or cells you have selected will be copied and pasted there. If the cell contains a formula, it will change its references just the same as it would if you have used copy and paste. The contents of the cell you are copying from will not be changed.

Fill

Now this is the interesting one – the Excel fill handle.

If you hold the mouse over the bottom right corner of the cell or cells selected, the cursor will change to a simple black cross. That’s the Excel fill handle, and it does some cool stuff.

First off, if you have a formula in the cell, and you want to copy it to some adjacent cells, you can do that.

Hold the left button…

…and drag the mouse down (or to the right).

Release the mouse.

What happens in this case is the same thing as you would have achieved with the copy example further up. However, if the cells don’t contain formulae then the behaviour is different.

If the cells involved have a discernable pattern, then Excel will attempt to extend that pattern as best it can.

So imagine the above example again, but pretend, just for fun, that it contains 500 rows, instead of the four shown. You’re suddenly required to apply numeric codes to the items…

Create the first two, or however many are needed to establish a pattern. Hover over the fill handle…

… and drag the cursor down over the next two (or 500) cells.

Note the indicator to the right of what the final number will be. Release the mouse.

That’s it. The series of numbers is extended down over the other cells. Note that all the cells contain the actual values, not a formula.

You can use this for much more complex operations, none of which I have room for in this post, including complex lists, custom lists, and copying a formatting pattern along with the value pattern.

So tell me, do you use the handles? Did you already know what they do? Have you ever used the Excel fill handle by mistake? I certainly have. What else could I cover in Excel that might be useful?

Let me know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use OfficeTab To Give Microsoft Office Firefox-Like Tabs (45)
• Top 3 FREE web-based Office Suites (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) (12)
• OxygenOffice Pro: Enhanced Version of OpenOffice (5)
• How To Split a Huge CSV Excel Spreadsheet into Separate Files (5)
• How To Open, Edit and Print any Text Document File (5)

Earlier, I introduced MUO readers to my love affair with Excel when I wrote about how you can use it to create an effective household budget. I was also pleased to read some love from other MUO authors, such as Karl’s article about how to split a monster sized Excel spreadsheet, or Eyal’s Excel printing tips.

Today I’m going to share a few additional cool features in Excel that you can use specifically to make a calendar template in Excel.

Make a Calendar Template in Excel – A Step-By-Step Tutorial

The following calendar sheet is an Excel calendar template that you can open up and print each month. You have the option to keep it blank and it’ll automatically update to the correct month – all you have to do is print and fill in the days. Or, you can use the last few techniques described at the end of this article to fill in the sheet with the days before printing. It requires a little extra work, but it looks very cool.

Step #1 – Create The Header And Title

The first thing you’ll need to do is create the weekday header as well as the month title. This step will demonstrate the merge-and-fit feature as well as how to set the width of multiple columns at once.

First, type in the weekdays in a row across the top, but leave one row blank for your title.  Format the text around 12 point and bold. You’ll notice that some of the weekdays extend beyond the limit of the column.

To fix this, just highlight the weekdays that you’ve typed and then select Format -> Column -> Width – and set the width for around 15 to 20.

Now that you’ve got your weekday header nicely formatted, it’s time to add the current month at the top of your calendar sheet. While you could just manually type in the month at the top of the sheet, this wouldn’t be very efficient, as you’d have to change it every time you wanted to print a new calendar sheet. It makes more sense to create an Excel calendar template that knows what month it is and changes the month title for you.

You do this by choosing any cell above your weekdays, and typing in the formula, “=TODAY()” – which tells Excel that you want today’s date in that field. After you do this, you’ll notice that it looks nothing like the month and it’s formatted all wrong. First, format the title with a font of around 20 to 22 and bold. Then, go into the Format -> Cells -> Number tab, select date and choose the format that you’d like for the month title.

Once you’ve got your title formatted correctly, you’ll still notice that it’s not centered properly and exists only within one cell at the top of the spreadsheet. In other words, it looks odd. To fix this, highlight all of the cells above your weekday header (including the one where your month is displayed) and click on the “merge and center” button.

Clicking “merge and center” turns all of the highlighted cells into one collective cell, and then centers your title in the middle of the highlighted region. Now you’ve got yourself a nicely formatted, automated calendar header.

Step #2 – Create The Calendar Days

The next step to make your calendar template in Excel is to once again use the “merge and center” feature, but this time you’ll merge a few empty cells in order to create one larger cell that represents a single day.

This step is where you’ll build the body of your calendar template, but it’s also the easiest step. First, highlight about 5 or 6 cells, and click on the “merge and center” button. This will form one cell the perfect size for one day on the calendar. Then, while this large cell is highlighted, copy it (control-c or Edit->Copy) and paste it into the other days (or just drag the lower right corner of the box over to the right). This will duplicate your box for every day of the week. Do this for five rows. Your calendar should now look like this:

Highlight your entire calendar click on the borders tool, and select the “grid” so that every grid line shows – essentially “drawing” out your calendar for you. Finally, you can either leave your template as it is (so you can write in the days yourself) and move ahead to step 3, or you can add in the days using Excel. Instead of going through and manually typing in “1″ to “30″, you can save a lot of time by using Excel’s auto-fill feature.

Using this technique, you simply enter in a formula for the first Monday and the second Sunday of the month. For example, if the 1st of the month is on Sunday, you’d enter “1″ into the first Sunday box (and of course nicely format it at 14-point and bold). Then, for Monday you’d type “=” then click on the day before it (A1) and type “+1″.

When you’re finished, highlight the box where you’ve entered this formula, and drag it across the entire week – this will correctly fill in all of the days of the week. Then, do the same thing for the following Sunday, but click on Saturday and add 1.

When you’re done, drag this box down each week so that every Sunday has the same formula (adding 1 to the previous Saturday). Drag the formula from the previous Monday down through the month as well – and then drag from Monday across each week. While it may sound confusing, as you give it a try you’ll find that filling in the days only requires a few clicks and less than 5 minutes.

Step #3 – Printing Your Calendar Template

Finally, you’re ready to print out your calendar to a nice clean paper so you can pin it up on your wall. By this point, your calendar should look like this.

While this looks absolutely fantastic within the Excel sheet, it won’t print properly because the edge of the calendar template goes beyond the printable page, so you’ll end up with parts of it on two pages. To fix this, go to File -> Page Setup, click the Page tab, and make sure it’s configured as shown here.

Set the format for landscape, and fit the entire calendar to 1 page wide by 1 page high. Click OK, and when you do a print preview you’ll find that your calendar template is formatted on one sheet and ready to print!

The next month, just open up the same Excel file (the month will already be correct), renumber the days and click Print – it’s as simple as that!

Do you have any tricks that might make creating a calendar in Excel a little simpler? Have you ever created any unique projects using Excel? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use OfficeTab To Give Microsoft Office Firefox-Like Tabs (45)
• Top 3 FREE web-based Office Suites (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) (12)
• OxygenOffice Pro: Enhanced Version of OpenOffice (5)
• How To Split a Huge CSV Excel Spreadsheet into Separate Files (5)
• How To Save Time In Excel By Using The Fill Handle (13)

Well if you are not into finding the latest and greatest software you have probably never heard of it. But I am here to show you what it is, how it works and how to grab it. Interested?

Good, I thought that would spark some interest!

Feel free to download OfficeTab from this link. BUT WAIT – the catch is that the site is NOT in English.

So the direct download link lives here which, if you scroll down to the bottom of the product page, is the only link there. So no need for Google Translations today. The actual application IS multilingual so there are no issues there. Let’s take a look at how it works.

After downloading the application you have to install it. You will see a screen that looks like this after the initial start…

Simply check the Microsoft Office Applications you want OfficeTab to add Microsoft Office tabs to. I left the only three that showed up checked. I guess you wouldn’t have a real need for it in Access or Outlook (or would you?) Finish your install and then check out the settings.

These are the Excel settings which start with the check box to enable the Microsoft Office Tabs inside Excel. I left the rest of the settings alone until I really get into using the application.

The other tabs include WordTab and PowerPoint Tab – they are essentially identical. But peruse them and see if there is something that tickles your fancy like enabling custom colors, changing the hot key to switch labels and more. If you find a particularly helpful option, let us know in the comments.

Hit apply if you change anything and let’s see how it looks in Word:

Wow just like Firefox! Very cool and a lot handier than having to hit the task bar to switch between windows. All you need to do is open multiple files and they will each have their very own tab. Sweet!

Let’s see how it works in Excel:

It works the exact same way in Excel as it does in Word. And guess what? It works the same exact way in PowerPoint as well. It could not be easier and this really helps my work flow.

Now here is a little hint that you Firefoxers will love – you can open a new tab the same way you would in Firefox by simply double-clicking the area where the new tab would appear. Go ahead and try it – we will wait.

See I told you we would wait. Wasn’t that worth it? For me this is going on all my systems where I use Microsoft Office.

What do you think? Will this help you work faster? Do you know of other free MS Office plugins? We would love to give them a try. Go ahead and leave them in the comments – I dare you

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Top 3 FREE web-based Office Suites (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) (12)
• OxygenOffice Pro: Enhanced Version of OpenOffice (5)
• How To Make Microsoft Office 2007 Look Like Office 2003 (7)
• How To Get an Early Preview of Microsoft Office Web Apps (18)
• How to Fix Microsoft Office Problems with MS Office Diagnostics (6)

I’m going to show you how to use styles in Word 2007, but if you have an older version you’ll be fine. This stuff is largely unchanged since Word for DOS, and that was too long ago to discuss. Most other word processors have similar capabilities, so don’t despair if you’re not a Word user.

An analogy is the simplest way to approach this, so come outside with me, and take a look at the fence. No, really.

Okay, you work as a painter. You have all the gear. Brushes and paint cans. Overalls. Unfortunately you don’t work for yourself though. Your boss is a nice enough guy, but there’s one thing he does that’s really annoying. He changes his mind at the last minute.

So with this fence, he has told you to paint all the normal pickets white, and the larger posts blue. You’ve put in some time, and the result is great. The boss comes flying by in his new car, takes one look at the fence, and decides the posts need to be the same red as his sports car.

So you need to sand, prepare, prime and paint all the blue posts. Three coats.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of painting the posts blue, you could have tagged them all somehow to say they were the same, called them something sensible, and then just said all ‘posts’ should be blue? Then, when the guy with the Porsche came by, you could tell the system to change all the ‘posts’ to red.

That is exactly what styles do, in Word.

The simplest way to do this is to use the predefined styles.

Let’s put some text in a document to start with. No formatting. Just type it up.

On the ribbon, on the Home tab, there are a number of styles listed. The ones you can see depends on your screen resolution.

The text you have in there now is already using styles. It’s all set using the Normal style. So the first thing we want to do is to change the headings so they look different. That’s easy. Select each of the headings, and click the Heading 1 option on the ribbon.

And you will end up with something like this.

Don’t worry if yours doesn’t look quite the same. If anyone has messed with the defaults for the styles you could have some differences.

Okay, now here’s that same situation as with the fence, right? You’ve taken the document in to show your boss, and he’s told you the headings need to be red. Like his car.

To understand how much time this can save you, you need to think about a report that’s a hundred and fifty pages long, rather than the snippet you have here. If you have gone into each heading, and changed it to Cambria 14pt Blue, and now need to make each of them Arial 15pt bold, and red, you would be in for a lot of effort. With styles, all you’ve done is tag all the headings to say that they are Heading 1, and then taken the defaults as to what a Heading 1 looks like.

So to make them red, we just redefine what a Heading 1 is, and they all change.

How easy is that? Very.

Right-click the same box you used to set the style in the first place…

Click Modify…

And then change the settings as you require. You can see here I’ve made the headings just the way the boss said he wanted them. you can also see a preview of what the result will look like.

Click OK.

All fixed.

It’s worth some effort from the start to try to only use styles in your documents, so that you can quickly deal with the unexpected later. And remember that as the body text is also a style, you can change that.

So, given that your manager has a lot of power, and absolutely no sense of style, let’s apply the next set of crazy requirements.

The main text, for whatever reason, needs to be indented, blue, and italic.

Right click the Normal box:

Easy, right?

But there’s a trap. Once you know, it’s not much of a problem, but it throws people off the first time. Styles cascade. if you work with the web, that might be enough explanation, but if not, it works like this. Most of the default styles are based on the Normal style. By changing the Normal style, which you just did, you change things in other styles as well. So that’s why the red headings are now indented along with the body text, and also italic.

You can fix it a few ways. In this case the simplest is to go back and change the settings for Heading 1 style back the way you want them. Note that anything you already messed with (such as the red) isn’t touched.

We want to change the headings some more anyway, so let’s go and deal with that.

Right-click the Heading1 style. Click Modify.

Porsche-guy wants the headings be inside shaded boxes, so let’s fix the font stuff first, and then go take a look at how to do that.

Instead of clicking OK, click on the Format button.

Click Border…

Follow my example, or format it as you please. Click on the Shading tab.

Find a shading colour and/or pattern both you and the big guy can live with, and then click OK.

You can see an example of what your design efforts will do to the headings.

Click OK again.

Again, think about long documents, rather than something short.

You can also create completely new styles, and assign the styles back to templates so they are always set up the way you want them, but that might have to wait until another time.

So tell me, how do you use styles in Word? How do you find them? Do you have any trouble? Clever ideas? Tell me about it in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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A lot of people enjoy other word processors, and I would never claim that Microsoft Word is the best one out there. All you have to do is read articles like Israel’s 6 Less Known Free Word Processors or Aseem’s 6 Free Office Suites That Are NOT Microsoft to recognize that there are some amazing and very useful word processors out there.

However, there are over 500 million Microsoft Word users in the world, and it’s still the most popular word processor out there. Because of that, many people often find themselves sifting through the Internet for tips on some of those not-so-easy tasks within Microsoft word.

Today, I’m going to offer 4 of the most useful Microsoft Word Tips that I’ve learned through the years. These include:

• Placing an image anywhere in a document without ruining text formatting.
• Inserting page numbering into the footer and starting the numbering over in new sections.
• Inserting pop-up comments for highlighted text inside your document.
• Making use of integrated Internet functionality to research selected text within word documents.

I’ve found each one of these techniques to be extremely useful throughout the years, and I’m sure you will too if you haven’t already tried them. For the purpose of this article I’m using MS Word 2003 so that most readers (who likely have later versions) will more likely have all of the features available that are shown in this article.

1. Placing An Image In Your Document Anywhere You Like

For the purpose of demonstration, I’m using the text from my recent article on how to repair a CD with toothpaste, but I’ve removed the images. Many people just insert images into a word document between paragraphs, since this is the easiest and simplest method to embed images in your document. However, if you want to have images appear within your document like on a typical web page, where the text flows smoothly around the image – it’s possible using a simple approach I call, “playing inside the box.”  Let’s say that you have a word document formatted in the standard way, as shown here.

Now, if you try to just do an Insert -> Picture where the blue circle is located, all of the text gets shoved rudely down the page as your inserted image takes over that entire section of the document. Don’t worry – you can teach your image to play nicely with text by forcing it to: Play Inside The Box.

Start off by inserting a text box (Insert -> Text Box) anywhere on the document, and then move it so that it’s located where you want the image.

Now, right click on it and select “Format Text Box“.  Under the “Colors and Lines” tab, make sure “Lines” is set to “No Line.“  Then, under the “Layout” tab, make sure that “Square” is selected. Click OK, and now your document will look like this.

As you can see, the text box is now invisible, and the text wraps cleanly around it. Just click anywhere inside your invisible text box, insert your image (the box will automatically resize to fit the photo) and you now have a cleanly embedded photo within your document. This technique also works to the right side of the text if you wish as well.

2. Page Numbering Magic

Another thing that many people like to do, especially when writing a multi-part manual or long document, is to number multiple sections of a document starting over from 1. Most people know how to insert page numbers into the footer of a document, but re-numbering starting within multiple new sections can get tricky.

The first step is to create the page numbering format that you want.  For this example, I’m inserting a number in the footer that reads “Page x of x”. You do this by going to View -> Header and Footer, switching to footer and centering the text, and then typing in the text “Page“, then click on the “Insert Page Number” button, type “of” and then click on “Insert Number of Pages” button.

This is your standard page numbering setup. But what if you want to start over at Page 1 on the next page, to start a brand new section of your document?  First, you need to define the next page as a new section by going to the page and clicking “Insert -> Break” and choosing the “Next Page” section type.

Now, when you go back into “View -> Header and Footer“, you’ll notice that the footer for Section 2 has the normal continuation of page numbers from the previous section. To change this, when you’re viewing the footer for Section 2 (or the section you want to start over), just click the “Format Page Number” button and change the “Page Numbering” to start at “1″.

Now your page numbers for Section 2 will start at page 1 and continue on until you create another section break and start the numbering all over again.

3. Pop-Up Comments For Editing or Offering Reader Tips

Another really cool feature that I use in a lot of my own documentation are pop-up tips or comments. You can define specific text to pop-up whenever the reader places the mouse cursor over specific text in the document. You can do this by highlighting the text and then selecting Insert -> Comment from the menu.

The manner in which Word has you edit the comment is different depending on your version and what page layout you’re in. After you create the comment, whenever the reader reads your document in normal view, the text you’ve commented only appears highlighted. When they roll the cursor over the text, your comment (or tip) pops-up.

This is an awesome feature for creating a user manual or a how-to document, because you can embed additional information about a term or idea without cluttering the rest of your document with information that not everyone reading it might need or find useful.

4. Researching Selected Text Within Word

The last useful Microsoft Word tip that I’d like to share is one that I use more often when I’m reading someone else’s documents. If you’re reading along, and there’s a particular word or term that looks foreign, or there’s a concept that you’d really like to learn more about – Microsoft Word has an entire research library integrated into it. All you have to do is highlight the text or phrase, right click on it, and select “Look Up…”

You’ll immediately notice an entire menu bar open up on the right side of the screen with all of the research options available to you, including not only the typical dictionary or thesaurus resources, but also research sites like Factiva iWorks, HighBeam Research, Live Search (now Bing) and more.

For each of the research sites like Live Search, the results show up right inside Microsoft Word. If you spot one that may be helpful, you can click the link and go to the site outside of Word. I’ve used this particular feature in Word (particularly the Encyclopedia) many times, and I consider it probably the most helpful embedded tool within Word.

Were any of these tips brand new to you? Or are you an old formatting pro with a few unique tips of your own? Check our more Microsoft Word tips here and share your own tips in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use Microsoft Office As An Offline Google Docs Editor with Offisync [Windows] (14)
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They have an opt-in mailing list that they blast to once or twice a month. When I say huge I am talking about between 7 and 8 million email addresses.

Now if you have ever tried to open a file like this in excel you would see something that looks like this:

The reason you get this error is simple.

Excel can only handle 65,536 lines per sheet. It cannot display the rest of it and will truncate it. This is not good if you need to cut your list into smaller pieces. In my case I need to have less than 1 million records in my csv file to be able to import it into my mailing list program.

I tried using Base from Open Office with the same results. Now I could open this as a text file and chop it up manually or import it into an access database and try and manipulate it there as well. But hey let’s check out a free and EASY alternative to split an Excel spreadsheet into seperate files. It is called FXFisherman’s CSV Splitter v1.1 by Sopheap LY.

We came across it here but I was able to trace it’s origins to the actual post on a forum it was created for and that is here. The original purpose of the app was to work with stock data in smaller chunks from a huge dump.

But hey I guess it will work on ANY csv file. Simply download the application and run it – no install required.

That will bring you to this screen:

Now this program has two simple options : you can split the csv file by the number of lines and specify the maximum number of files. Simply type in the number of lines you want to split each file into, and/or make the maximum pieces that you would want to see.

Next browse for your file by hitting the Browse file button and then hit the Split Now! Button.

When the program is complete you should see something that looks like this:

This tells me that my file of approximately 100,000 records was split successfully into a few even files. If they were more than 25 pieces with 50,000 lines in each it would have changed the algorithm to make each one slightly larger. Either which way this saved the day! I was able to import almost 4 million addresses at the end of the day into smaller chunks! (Thank god for interns!)

Do you know of a better, easier and / or faster way to accomplish the same thing?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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It’s time to get things straight. Let’s see how to print an Excel sheet the right way.

[All the Excel tips shown here work in Excel 2003 as well]

Step 1 – A new sheet filled with data

I used Google tables to get some excel suitable data. Currently, it looks like this:

This is how our sheet looks like at the beginning

Step 2 – Convert the data to a table

(If you do not use a tabular structure in your sheet, you can skip this step.) One Excel tip to make the data look better and easier to scrutinize with, start by converting it to a table. Select the cells that contain data and press Ctrl + L. in the opened window click OK .

The sheet now looks like this:

The data designed as a table

Step 3 – Set the area to be printed

Another Excel tip to print only the part of the sheet you need is to set a print area. Select the cells (if it’s a table, click somewhere inside it and press Ctrl+Shift+8). On the ’Page Layout’ tab, in the ’Page Setup group’, click ’Print Area‘, and then click ‘Set Print Area’.

Step 4 – Wrap the text in the cells to make it visible

In order to make all the text in the cells visible, leave the cells from the previous step selected. On the ‘Home’ tab, in the ‘Alignment’ group, click ‘Wrap Text‘. Doing so will make the lines spread down and the text within them visible. This is a useful Excel tip when you have long lines of text in individual cells.

wrapped Text

Step 5 – customize the data to fit into the desired size and number of pages

Now is the critical part. In order for the printing to look well and make sense, you need to set it right in the print preview mode. Go there by pressing Ctrl+F2.

Click ‘Show Margins‘ in the Preview group. The page margins will be displayed. Stand on each of them with the mouse and drag them to the edges of the page, as much as your printer can handle (you can also choose one of the default margin values by going back to the normal view and in the ‘Page Layout’ tab, in the ‘Page Setup’ group, clicking ‘Margins’).

Now, choose ‘Page Setup‘ in the Print group. In the opened window, fill-in the desired values under ‘Fit to‘. If you set it to 1 page wide by 1 page tall, as I did in this showcase, your data will be printed on a single page. The cost of doing so is that the text will become smaller (since all of it has to fit into a single page).

Step 6 – Center the table and add a header and a footer

Still in the ‘Page Setup’ window, click the ‘Margin’ tab. Under ‘Center on page‘, select the ‘Horizontally‘ and ‘Vertically‘ check box.

Now move to the ‘Header/Footer’ tab, click ‘Custom Header‘, and fill-in a header. You can include text, page number, images and so on. Click ‘Custom Footer‘ to add a footer. Click OK.

Step 7 – customize row and column sizes

As different cells contain different data or information, you might want to change the length or width of the rows and columns. You can do that in the print preview mode, by standing with the mouse exactly on the borders of the cells and dragging them right or left.

Since now some of the cells might be bigger in length then they need to be, lets make them automatically fit the text inside them. Press the ESC key to go back to normal view. Select the entire sheet by pressing Ctrl + A, and double click the separator between line three and four.

You may need to repeat step 6 several times until the table fits perfectly to the page.

The final display is present below. You are ready to print.

How do you achieve perfect printing? Do you have any Excel tips of your own to share? Let us know in the comments.

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With that video file you can post it to YouTube, send it along  to another user via email or post it on your blog as a tutorial.

What ever you are going to do with the finished product this free 6.6mb application will make your life MUCH MUCH easier!

To start you need to download and install this application from here.

Once you complete the usual ritual of next, next and finish you will see a screen that looks like this:

From this screen it is super easy to convert your file. Simply click the New Task Button to get started. Let’s give it a shot.

After clicking the New Task button you choose between a single file or a whole folder. Next you will need to choose what you want to convert your PowerPoint File into. The only options you will have are: WMV, AVI, MPG, BMPs and MP3 audio.This should fit 90% of you and if you want to convert to another format either convert to a supported format and then convert that. But again for posting to YouTube or your blog this will do just fine.

I selected AVI and continued on. Next up you will see this screen:

From the above screen you can adjust transition time, compression, output folder and more. When you are ready to convert simply hit the convert button. you will get a warning screen telling you to make sure your PPT file is saved and not opened. Hit ok and continue.

It took about 25-40 seconds per slide but when I was done I had a smooth AVI video of my PowerPoint file. Awesome! Do you have another way to convert a powerpoint file to video? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

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Well not anymore, thanks to Offisync which allows you to use, update and synchronize your Google Docs onto Microsoft Office – as well as offering the ability to search on Google from the Office interface and insert images into your Office documents from Google Images.

This is one of those services that will prove to be insanely useful if you are in the habit of switching between them both all the time.   For it to work though, you need :

• Either Office 2003 or Office 2007
• Windows XP / Vista or Windows 7.
• Microsoft’s .net framework version 3.5, which will automatically be installed on your computer if you don’t already have it.
• A Google account to be able to use Docs (that one is a bit obvious!)

You first have to install a small toolbar which sits in your Office documents.   It looks like this :

To open a document from Google Docs, just press the small yellow folder icon on the far left and a box will appear asking you to enter your Google account name and password.   I was initially a bit concerned about entering my Google account password so I emailed OffiSync and asked them if they store the account details on their servers.   Their answer is an emphatic no.

User Names and Passwords are stored in the Windows Credentials Manager (CredMan) service on your computer. OffiSync does not store any credentials on our servers or on the Google servers.

That reassured me somewhat so I proceeded with entering my password.   When your details have been accepted, your list of Google Docs files will come up (I don’t normally use Google Docs so I created a test document for this article).

Just double-click on the Google Docs file that you want to work on in Microsoft Office and it will immediately open in Word.  If you have lots of documents and you can’t find the one you want, just click the black binoculars in the Offisync toolbar and you can filter out the file you want by entering keywords.

Now this is the file that I created with a simple short sentence.   All you basically need to do now is just work on your document and periodically save the changes using the Offisync toolbar.

Say, I want to add “Now I’m updating it” to the document -

When you’re finished with the document and you want to synchronize your changes with the copy in your Google Docs account — all you need to do is click the black disk icon on your Offisync toolbar and you will see this -

After a few seconds, that box will disappear and the updated version of the document will now be in your Google Docs account. Let’s check on that.

Yup, there it is!

There are other features to Offisync too. Basically the app gives you all the power of Google Docs but inside Microsoft Office instead.   Offisync allows you to do the following :

• Add or remove collaborators to the online Google document



• Email the online Google document to someone



• Paste the link to the Google Docs copy of the file in your Word copy.

But the best part of Offisync (in my opinion) is the ability to insert images from Google Images into your Word document.   Everything opens in Offisync’s custom-made mini browser.

Since I’ve just been to see Transformers 2 at the cinema, let’s see what pictures there are of Optimus Prime on Google Images.

As you can see, you can filter the images down to size, type and also by creative commons.  When you have found one you want to use, click “Insert” and you will receive a box notifying you where it has come from :

If you accept it, click “Accept” and the image will then be embedded into the Word document.

Offisync doesn’t only support Word though.   You can also use the feature in Microsoft’s Excel and Powerpoint to keep those documents synchronized as well.

And that’s it!   This one is going into my “keeper” pile of software apps as it has already motivated me to use Google Docs more and so far I haven’t found any bugs or really irritating features.  I really hope Offisync continues to be developed and I can’t wait to see what other features they come up with next.

Let us know what you think.   Is this something you would use?  What features do you like the best and what new features would you like Offisync to introduce?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Most free translation tools available for such translations are scarce, not quite accurate and generally have a price tag attached to them. There are some great, free options nevertheless. Karl reviewed Polyglot 3000 and found it quite awesome. Maria found 4 great online translation tools. Plus some more translation tools were profiled on MakeUseOf Directory.

I’m here to show you 3 more free translation tools that you can use to get the job done easily.

Google Translate

Google Translate dominates them all. It’s free, it supports auto-detection and it many different languages. Earlier, we had to use different workarounds to get Google to translate the documents or copy and paste the text into the tiny Google Translate Box, however Google just made it a hell of a lot easier to translate your documents into other languages.

All you have to do is browse here, upload the document to you want to translate, choose the languages (or let it detect automatically) and hit translate. Boom, you have the results, right there in the language you understand.

There are certain caveats:

Microsoft Office

If you have Microsoft Office then you can use the built-in translate option to do the translations for you. While this cannot be termed as free, if you already have Microsoft Office you don’t need to pay anything else. Office 2007 users can find the option to translate under the Review Tab. Hitting translate displays the translated text. Office 2003 users can also translate the text via the Tools > Research > Translate option.

OpenOffice Free Translation Tool

On the other hand, if you happen to use OpenOffice, you should install the excellent Writer’s tools extension. Apart from translation, the extension also offers a truckload of other features. Note that Writer’s tools uses Google Translate to give you the desired results.

Which one is the best? I prefer visiting Google Translate. A lot of other tools use Google anyway, plus displaying the result as HTML is better than having them displayed as plain text (because there is still some sanity from the formatting point of view).

But that’s me. It boils down to personal preference in the end, because all of them share the same drawbacks – accuracy and loss of formatting are the two main culprits! If you are using Office or OpenOffice you might not want to leave the interface, or else if you don’t mind the digression, you can always visit Google Translate.

Do you know of some better free Translation tools? Sound off in the comments and let us know!

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You bet that anyone working on a large Microsoft Word document finds that irksome; especially when one needs to refer to a specific part of a document several times. So what do you do in this case? Open two instances of the same document?

MS Excel makes it easy with its longstanding feature to freeze rows and columns.

Could a similar idea be ‘imported’ into Word? I found the solution in Microsoft Word’s own team blog. And it was surprisingly… quite easy.

The requirement…

Let’s say there is a figure, a graph, a chart or just some text that needs to be referred to while plotting the remaining document. Instead of scrolling to and fro, we want to freeze that part while working on the remaining document.

The method…

1. Click on the View tab on MS Word 2007 ribbon menu.
2. Click on the Split Window icon and position the split bar where just below the part you want to keep static. The Split window feature allows you to view different sections of the same window at the same time.

   

3. With the document split into two panes, you can work on one pane while keeping the other pane static for reference. For instance, in the figure the top pane with the chart is kept static while the bottom pane becomes the work area.

   

4. Click on each pane and use the View commands to change the view or the layout. For instance, you can keep the top pane in the Print layout, while working on the Web layout in the bottom pane. We can pretty much treat the two panes as two separate windows.
5. The widow split can be changed back by clicking on the Remove Split icon or by double clicking on the split bar.

Simple needs sometimes beget simple solutions. It is the job of the View tab to make the job of screening a document easier. A feature used in the right place adds ‘very’ to the ‘easy’.

Did this tip help to solve a tiny little problem? If it did help to enhance your productivity, drop us a comment.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Many writers prefer a simple text editor sans the frills. Something like a Notepad or writing tools which are generically called ‘minimalist text editors’. I relate them to a horse’s blinker. They serve their utility in that they cut off all distraction between the writer’s eye and his words on the screen.

I wrote my first sentences on MS Word and have always liked its power. Even with all its options, maybe one could make it ape a ‘minimalist text editor’.

The idea…

The idea then, is to simulate a minimalist text editor like Darkroom with a black background, a contrasting font color and an ‘easy on the eyes’ font face. To get the complete real estate for writing and to do away with the distractions, its full-screen view minus MS Word 2007’s ribbon and the Windows Taskbar. But, with the spellchecker and the mini-formatting toolbar remaining in action.

The hack…

1. Start up MS Word 2007. Create a blank document from Office button – New – Blank Document.
2. Change the layout of the page to Web Layout. This can be done from View – Web Layout. Alternatively, from the layout buttons located on the bottom right of Word’s status bar.
3. Set the page color to black for one part of the high contrast effect. Click on Page Layout – Page Color.
4. The other part involves setting up a high contrast font. On the Home tab select the Normal style. Right click and choose Modify…
5. In the Modify Style box, change the font face to Lucida Console and the font color to green (or any other cool color you are comfortable with). You can also set other options like spacing and indents.
6. Save as a Word Template from the Office button – Save As – Word Template.

To view our template in full screen now, we have to follow two steps:

1. Click the Office Button – Word Options – Customize. Select Commands Not in the Ribbon from the drop-down on the left. Scroll down the alphabetical list to select Toggle Full Screen View, and click the Add button to include it in the Customize Quick Access Toolbar column on the right.

   The Quick Access Toolbar is the small set of icons you see just above the Office ribbon next to the Office Button.

   

2. The Windows taskbar is now the only leftover against a full screen view. Right click on the Windows taskbar – click Properties – select Auto-hide the taskbar. The Windows taskbar remains offscreen unless we move the mouse near the bottom edge of the screen.

That’s it! When you want to write in your own ‘darkroom’, just click on the template, switch on the full screen view from the Quick Access toolbar and tap into your creativity. [To exit full screen view, press the Esc key on your keyboard.]

There are simple ways to do some things for which we often rely on additional downloads. I hope this is one of them. Put on your writer’s cap and try out your new writing canvas. And of course, type in your comments or suggestions.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Sure, the latest version of Reader has more bells and whistles, but you just want to read the flubsy PDF! Just open it like a web page and read it like a web page. Well, I went a-searching and here are some light alternatives to the hefty Adobe Reader.

FoxIt Reader

Download Size: 3.56 MB
Installed Size: 7.14 MB

The FoxIt layout is very similar to Adobe Reader and has a lot of the same functionality. You can add notes, zoom, search on text, view the document without images and more. It opens so quickly though!

Some of the more advanced functions are only available if you opt-in to FoxIt’s updates and eBay toolbar. The bills have got to get paid somehow I suppose. Overall, a fine piece of software backed by over 50 million downloads of it so far.

PDF-Xchange Viewer

Download Size: 17.9 MB
Installed Size: 25.5 MB

When you open PDF-Xchange Viewer, it is readily apparent that it is more than just a PDF reader. You’ll find all of the functions you would in FoxIt without having to sign up for updates or the eBay toolbar. That’s always a plus to me. Yes, the download is larger and it does take up more space when installed than FoxIt, however it also offers you the ability to customize its appearance and how it functions. You can set the threads to use for image rendering, amount of RAM to utilize, and text and image rendering quality amongst other things.

Perfect PDF Reader

Download Size: 22.4 MB
Installed Size: 14.6 MB

Yes, there seems to be a discrepancy there, doesn’t it? The download package contains some additional software that isn’t necessary for the base functions of Perfect PDF writer. That fact alone leads me to believe that the name Perfect is, yet again, a misnomer.  Why do companies insist on claiming perfection?

The interface is reminiscent of Office 2007 with it’s little orb thing in the top left corner and similarly confusing layout of menu items. You may be able to surmise that I am not a fan of Office 2007 as well.

Perfect PDF Reader has a limited tool set, making it essentially just a PDF reader. The one option I really don’t understand is the Open in Reader shortcut. Isn’t the point of this to take Adobe Reader out of the equation? Overall, I wouldn’t recommend Perfect PDF Reader.

Cool PDF Reader

Download Size: 632 KB (That’s right, less than 1 MB.)
Installed Size: 632 KB (No coincidence here.)

Cool PDF Reader is a straight-forward executable to read PDF’s with. Open it up, navigate to the PDF you wish to read and boom, there it is. You can zoom in, zoom out, page forward and backward and well, that’s about all.  If the name of the game is something small and fast to simply read a PDF, this is the winner. If you download the standalone version, you can also run it without permissions or from a USB drive.

Which one is best? That’s truly dependent on what your tastes are. For me, I like PDF-Xchange because it has some neat editing controls. FoxIt obviously has something going for it, based on the sheer number of downloads. Perfect PDF will appeal to the neophyte user whose first introduction to software included Office 2007. Cool PDF is definitely for the purists.

There are many other PDF reader options out there – which one do you use? Why do you use it? Let others know about it in the comments.

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As with most suite programs, we don’t need the whole ball of wax especially in standalone home machines. Say… in the Microsoft Office suite, it’s just MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint. One program we give the go by is Microsoft Groove.

In MS Office 2007, Groove is a collaboration software program which helps diverse teams work together using shared workspaces. Its core job is to synchronize common data between different sets of people. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great tool for teamwork – there’s a mention of its help during Hurricane Katrina on the MS Groove homepage. But it’s no help to me in a home computer where it’s just me and the missus.

That’s the biggest reason to remove the program from the system. Sorry fella, you aren’t vital. But there are a few other grounds as well.

• MS Groove makes an appearance on the Explorer menu as a Folder Sync option.

  

• It’s there in the right-click context menu too as Groove Folder Synchronization.

  

• Unless disabled from startup, GrooveMonitor.exe starts as a background process, wasting memory.
• It’s also there on the Internet Explorer menu and a few other places.
• Takes up nearly 1GB of HDD space.

If we don’t need it, here’s how we can get a little of our screen real estate back without affecting the other Office programs. The process is similar for both Windows XP and Vista.

Remove Microsoft Groove completely

1. Go to Start – Control Panel. Click on Add or Remove Programs. (In Vista, it is Start – Control Panel – Programs – Installed Programs.)
2. Scroll down the list of programs to your Microsoft Office installation entry. Select it and click on the Change button.

   

3. The Change your installation of Installation of Microsoft Office 2007 lists three options. Select the radio button for Add or Remove Features.

   

4. In the installation options window, select Microsoft Groove and click on the little dropdown arrow. Select Not Available. Press Continue and let the setup remove Microsoft Groove installation completely.

   

Remove only Folder Synchronization options from Explorer

We have to head into the Windows Registry if we want to remove only the Groove options from the shell i.e. from the Explorer and the right-click context menu. This keeps the Groove program intact but only removes the shell references.

1. Select Start – Run. Type regedit and click OK to open the registry.
2. On the left hand pane, expand and locate the following entries. Delete each of them.

• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\XXX Groove GFS Context Menu Handler XXX
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\XXX Groove GFS Context Menu Handler XXX
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\XXX Groove GFS Context Menu Handler XXX
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\XXX Groove GFS Context Menu Handler XXX
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\XXX Groove GFS Context Menu Handler XXX

Remove Groove only from startup

By default, Groove starts with Windows and runs as a background process, taking up approximately 6MB of memory. GrooveMonitor.exe is not necessary for MS Office to run smoothly. It can easily be removed from the Windows startup list.

1. Click Start > Run or hit Win+R keys together.
2. Type msconfig. Click on Enter.
3. Select the Startup tab.
4. Uncheck GrooveMonitor

   
   

5. Click on Apply. Reboot to free up your memory.

That’s it! A leaner computer is a healthier and a faster machine. So let’s hope this how-to helped to boost the unclutter habit up another notch.

For unanswered queries, you can also read Microsoft’s FAQ page on Groove here. Do you use Groove and what for? Enlighten us in the comments.

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Every now and then you would get a file that is not supported on your computer, there are couple of ways to tackle such a situation:

If you want to view and print the contents

If all you want to do is view the file and dont want to make any changes then look into TextMaker Viewer.

A 4MB download that allows you to view and print documents in a variety of different formats. Once you have it installed you can view almost all of the common document formats irrespective of the fact whether you have the requisite software installed or not.

TextMaker viewer allows you to open, view and print docx, sxw, dotx, rtf, doc, dot Microsoft Word templates, pwd, tmd, htm/html, odt and txt files.

On the other hand if most of your chores are related to Office 2007 file formats (i.e. docx) and if you have still not made the jump to Office 2007 you can use these Microsoft downloads to get those files working on Microsoft Office 2003, XP etc.

If you want to edit the contents

If you would like to work upon a file that is not supported by the software you have installed, you have to go for file conversion and hope that everything turns out the way you wanted.

If you are going for conversion there are some pretty handy online resources that you should keep in mind. Cometdocs and Convertfiles are excellent for such purposes. You can mostly convert all the common document file formats using these two sites.

Zamzar is another very popular site for similar purposes. Besides documents it also does video, audio and text to speech, so you might want to check it out for your other conversion needs as well.

Online resources generally have a file size limit and you might have to wait in some cases, if you are looking for a solution that is “closer” to home you might want to check out the “Save As” feature of your software. Generally there are plenty of formats available that you can choose from so that your recepient is able to use your file. OpenOffice as an example is able to read doc, docx, pdf besides the native formats, so if you happen to be using OpenOffice you can always open a file and save it in the desired format.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Sometimes the glitch may not be in the Office suite but in the innards of the computer itself. It could be caused by a faulty RAM or a problem in the hard disk drive. Or maybe you were too lazy to install one of the released service packs.

Microsoft now offers an in-house physician. MS Diagnostics is a tool included with the Microsoft Office2007 system that runs a battery of tests which can let you know about the problems and help you with ways that to solve them. You must have run into Microsoft Office2003’s Detect and Repair features; MS Office Diagnostics is like a MRI Scan to the former’s X-ray. It gives a more thorough run over to your system with better repair choices.

MS Diagnostics sizes up your system by running these scans,

• Setup Diagnostic

Files and the registry are scanned for glitches commonly caused by viruses and faulty installations. This test can take up to 15 minutes or more as it goes into the very nerve center of the computer.

• Disk Diagnostic

This diagnostic test scans the hard disk for potential problems. It looks at the Windows system event log and the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) feature of your hard disk if available. This test is sure to let you know if the hard disk is headed for a crash.

• Memory Diagnostic

This checks up on the stability of the RAM.

• Update Diagnostic

This is an update check – does your computer and your Office suite have all the updates installed? It is important as official updates smoothen out the bugs and make the system more stable. This test is available only if Check for Updates is enabled for the Office suite.

• Compatibility Diagnostic

Sometimes you may have different versions of the same Office application installed or conflicting DLL files might be causing the errors. The compatibility test checks for this and nails the problem factor.

• Check for known solutions

This test uses the vast database of Microsoft’s crash cases and their possible solutions to offer a similar for you after reviewing the crash reports on your system.

Now, let’s diagnose…

Though it sounds like a very serious piece of work, in practice it’s not. That’s a hurrah for Microsoft’s user friendliness. Before running the tests, close all open programs and avoid using the computer for the duration of the check-up.

1. MS Office Diagnostic can be found under the MS Office tools group menu.

   

2. MS office Diagnostic window opens to inform the user that the test may take up to 15 minutes and also connect to Microsoft’s servers. Click on continue.

   

3. This window displays the tests that will be carried out. Begin the scan by clicking on Run Diagnostic.

   

4. The diagnostics will run one by one and notify you of any glitches detected. This should ideally complete in less than 10-15 minutes if there aren’t any errors.

   

5. At the end of the diagnostic run, a summary of results is displayed. Here, perhaps is the only significant catch in the tool – it does not give the specific error. The diagnostic tool can make some repairs to the installation. Clicking on continue will connect you to Microsoft’s vast information resource of problems and solutions. You can follow its recommendations to resolve an error if the repairs fail.

   

The above steps diagnose the entire Office suite. To save time, you can shortcut the process and have the tool check up on a single Office application. For instance,

• Diagnostics on MS Word can be accessed from: Microsoft Office Button – Word Options – Resources
  Similarly for MS Excel/MS Access/MS PowerPoint, the tool can be accessed from: Microsoft Office Button – [Office Suite] Options – Resources

• For the others like MS Outlook/MS Visio/MS SharePoint Designer/MS Project/MS Publisher, the path is: Help – Office Diagnostics

Note: If all the above options fail to open MS Diagnostics, you can access the application directly from its location – C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE12\ offdiag.exe

After a run of MS Diagnostic tool, the problem may or may not get resolved.  But Microsoft Diagnostics packs in a rapid detect and fix mechanism which gives us a ‘crash’ course in Office repair.

Has the Microsoft Diagnostic tool helped to reduce your emergency calls to the support guys? Do let us know about your experiences with Microsoft Office crashes and how you got back on your feet?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Necessity is the mother of invention and so someone thought up UBitMenu (and thankfully made it free!)

UBitMenu is a small plugin for Microsoft Office 2007 (Excel, Word, and PowerPoint) that makes Office 2007 look like Ofice 2003 by giving the menu – the Office2003 makeover. It gets added on as an additional menu tab in the three Office 2007 applications.

While you will get back your old usage habits, do also realize that the new Ribbon interface was designed keeping fluency in mind (take a look at the Quick Styles feature in the Ribbon). The Ribbon interface allows for first level access to the commands we use most often.

For instance, I personally find the Ribbon interface a better help in MS PowerPoint. One point to remember is that shortcut keys will continue to behave as they do in Office2007.

The add-on benefits…

• UBitMenu lets the bewildered switch back and forth at will between the older and newer style interfaces. That’s great because it doesn’t replace the newer feature rich menu with the classical one but merely adds an extra tab. And kilobyte-sized, it’s no extra flab.

• UBitMenu does not interfere with the new features of Office2007 in any way. The contextual tabs like the Mini-formatting toolbar works just as well with the classical menu active.

  

• UBitMenu also retains any extra features that may have been installed through other plug-ins. For instance, documents can still be saved to PDF or XPS from the File – Save As submenu.

  

• UBitMenu is based on standard Microsoft® Office-Add-in technology; therefore it seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office2007.

This 359KB freeware application lets you keep the best of both worlds. UBitMenu is available for download in several languages from here.

Are you still one of those (Office2007 has been out for some while) who wished they could cut the ribbon and make Office 2007 look like the classic Office 2003 in Windows XP? Then you just might see the utility of this small software. Give us your freewheeling opinion in the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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For a while now, my solution has been Google Docs. It’s a great service, and one that has served me well over the months and years I’ve been using it. Google Docs, though, is not without its issues and downsides, some of which have left me in constant search for the best and brightest of the online document managing application.

Well, I haven’t found it yet, but I’ve found five pretty great alternatives to Google Docs that you might want to check out. All of these, and Google Docs, offer the same basic editing features; instead of rehashing them over and over, I’ll point out the one or few great features that put the application on this list.

Buzzword

My current online editor of choice, Buzzword, is Adobe’s offering in the online word-processing department. It’s attractive, flash-based, and incredibly simple to use. In addition to all the standard features, Buzzword offers a few key uses for users of all levels. Buzzword lets you share documents with people, giving individuals varying levels of access, from comments to editing to just reading the document.

Also useful is the Version History tracker, which tracks your changes and lets you revert to an earlier version of the document in only one click.

Buzzword is the prettiest of the bunch, and while it’s not terribly feature-rich when it comes to document editing, its collaboration and tracking tools more than make up for it.

Zoho

The number of applications Zoho offers, from an email service to a personal wiki and a “centralized public repository” (whatever that is) is ridiculous. I’ve become a big Zoho fan recently, and it has a huge number of useful tools at your disposal.

The writer itself is excellent, with a ton of editing options organized in a way that looks much like Office 2007’s Ribbon interface. Almost anything you can do in Word can be done in Zoho, from adding a header and footer to directly posting a document to your blog.

Zoho is the most feature-complete of the Web-based applications, including Google Docs, and is incredibly easy to use. Zoho doesn’t get nearly the press Google Docs does, but I can’t see a reason not to switch to Zoho.

Etherpad

If collaboration is what you’re into, give Etherpad a good look. There’s no need to sign up for Etherpad – just click “Start New Pad” and get going. Then, either share a link to the pad or send invitations to your contacts by email.

As users come in, you can edit the text on the pad in real-time, and changes automatically appear. You can chat in the sidebar, highlight which user made a given change, and save revisions in order to revert if a mistake is made.

Etherpad is perfect for coding and programming, but is also great for writing and editing documents. There aren’t as many features to Etherpad, and all your editing is in plain text, but it’s so collaborative and useful that it deserves a mention anyway.

Peepel

Peepel is basically a whole suite of desktop applications, stored within your browser. You can run multiple Peepel windows in the same browser window, letting you manage more pieces of your workflow all at once.

Peepel offers services like the WebWriter word processor, WebSheet for spreadsheets, a contact manager, great file-sharing and collaboration tools, and the Workspace Manager that lets you save your layout and return to it later.

Peepel isn’t the flashiest of the applications, but I love the ability to run more than one document or application in the same window.

OpenGoo

OpenGoo is similar in appearance to both Google Docs and the Zoho suite, with a well-integrated interface available to you. You can access calendars, tasks, documents, sticky notes, email, contacts, and time-tracking tools all from within the OpenGoo interface.

For document editing, OpenGoo is much like Google Docs. You can create documents or slideshows, and the interface is much like Google’s. You can edit documents, and then tag them or add them to folders for easier organization.

One thing I liked was that a new document is opened in the same window, with the document browser in the sidebar, whereas Google Docs always opens a new window.

If all you want is documents, there’s not a lot unique about OpenGoo; if you’re looking for a more complete interface and application, it’s a great choice.

What do you use for document editing, either online or off? Which one of the above mentioned online office apps in your opinon is the best alternative to Google Docs?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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However, nothing is perfect. And although imperfections create the uniqueness and beauty in most cases, we want software to be as close as it can get.

This is the main reason why plug-ins were created; one might say to pimp out your applications to fit your preference. Ask any three Firefox users why they use the browser, and I guarantee that you’ll hear the word ‘add-on’ more than once.

However, Firefox add-ons have been discussed multiple times over, but I was stunned to see nearly no one took on the job of looking into Microsoft Word Plugins. We even covered Open Office extensions, but never looked at free Plugins for Microsoft Word.

Save as PDF or XPS in Office 2007

Converting documents from and to PDF is a matter that keeps a lot of tongues occupied. But why all that hassle of converting if you can just save your document to PDF out of Word?

Microsoft released Save as PDF or XPS, a free add-in which adds the PDF format under the save-as menu, together with XPS (Microsoft’s own PDF-like format), and works quicker than many premium solutions I’ve tried before (including the official Acrobat one).

You can also send your documents over the internet in an email, in PDF or XPS format, with a few clicks of the mouse.

The Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS add-on works with the following Office 2007 applications:

• Word 2007
• Access 2007
• Excel 2007
• InfoPath 2007
• OneNote 2007
• PowerPoint 2007
• Publisher 2007
• Visio 2007

The plugin can be downloaded here.

Open and save Docx files in Office 2003

One of the biggest bothers that came with the splendid looking Office 2007, was a new file format – the only bother, if I might say.

OK, I get it. It’s smaller in size, stores additional style types, and so on – honestly, if I could just open it in previous word versions, I’d love it.

I’ve always worked around this problem by either saving it in doc format myself, or by converting it if I was using a non-2007 computer. It wasn’t long ago that I discovered the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. We have already looked at different ways to view docx files.

This download makes all the applications in your 2003 suite compatible with their Office 2007 companions. When installed, you can not only open, but also save docx files.

The plugin can be downloaded here.

Open ODF (OpenOffice) Files In Word

A friend once asked me to print out a document for her. With her liking freeware, she sent me an odf file.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with it, odf is the standard format for OpenOffice documents, an open-source Office alternative.

Luckily for you and me, Sun Microsystems (the guys we know from Java) developed an Office plug-in. It’s compatible with both Office 2000, 2003 and 2007, and it allows the user to open, edit and save in the odf format.

The plugin can be downloaded here.

Do you know of any other Microsoft Word plugins? If so, let us know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Looking at 280 Slides a very interesting thought popped into my mind; Microsoft, and every other desktop software maker is in very deep trouble. Why would I want to buy the Office suite when I’ve got a perfectly capable web application available on any of my computers for free?

Even Windows is in trouble; One of the big downsides to switching from Windows at the moment is the lack of portability for applications: you have to learn how to use apps which are compatible with Debian for example. But when the apps run in your browser, and the browser is the same, Firefox, there’s nothing to stop users from switching platforms. As these web applications evolve this will become a very pressing problem. I’ll leave this discussion for another time, so let’s get to know 280 Slides.

• All the basic features are there: text boxes, pictures, video, shapes, notes. If you’re using PowerPoint or Keynote to create presentations but never heard of manually assigning animation paths, you’re never going to know the difference.
• Import and Export PowerPoint 97-2007, ODF or PDF. Create slides online and then save them on your computer or import an existing slideshow for editing. Simply click Import and select your document. To download – just select the format you prefer.
• You can store documents directly on the 280 Slides server if you create an account. The only information you have to provide is an email address and a password.
• The full screen presentation mode works very well and supports the standard key combinations for going forward and exiting.
• Recognizes and uses existing fonts from your presentation.
• 12 integrated themes, simple and elegant, inspired from similar themes in Keynote.
• Uses Amazon S3 storage facilities – which have a consistent uptime and are reliable.
• The application is written in Objective-J and Cappuccino. Objective J is JavaScript with the addition of classes.

280 Slides is in beta but so far works very well; There are a few kinks and bugs, but no ‘showstoppers’:

• It had trouble recognizing non-ASCII characters, which limits its use to the English-speaking market. For example it replaced Romanian specific characters with a question mark:

• It doesn’t recognize cropped areas created with PowerPoint 2007. For example, I had a cropped signature from a screenshot. Instead of the signature – the whole screenshot appeared.

• It is still a bit slower than the offline versions; be prepared to wait 2-3 seconds to switch from one slide to another. Sometimes, when opening a new dialog box, the application was unresponsive for a short period. That proved to be a little frustrating.

An alternative to 280 Slides is SlideRocket – in my opinion a better choice when it comes to creating presentations online. It has more advanced features such as transitions, charts, diagrams, tables and assets managing. Unfortunately, SlideRocket isn’t free.

I invite you to take a look at 280 Slides and tell us in the comments what you think about the app; How would you compare it to SlideRocket?

Other MakeUseOf writers have reviewed similar web applications. Check out articles by Tina and Jeffry. You can read Varun’s review of SlideRocket here.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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A contingent requirement lead me to the ‘discovery’ of Research feature in Microsoft Word 2007. Since Office 2003, this feature has been a quite presence.  Perhaps, not used as frequently because for most of us a browser is more second nature. But a Research feature within the Office suite has its own value too.

Simply put, the research options button provides one click access to particular reference books and research sites that the Microsoft Office 2007 suite provides as information resources. For example, the Research  services to choose from include dictionaries, thesauruses, and various Internet research Web sites in several languages. The Research pane also includes a very useful translation service.

3 ways to access the research feature

Stuck at a word for a meaning or its nuance? Get the dope on the word by either…

1. Right clicking on the word and selecting Look Up… from the context menu.



2. Select the word and Alt-Click on it.



3. Open the Research pane by going to – Review – Proofing – Research.

Set up your Research Resources

The research functionality includes quite a few known resources as can be seen from the dropdown. Third party reference mines like Dow Jones’ Factiva iWorks, the premiere online library HighBeam, Gale Company Profiles and Microsoft’s own Live Search coupled with its rich Encarta dictionary and encyclopedia.

To fine tune our results we can include a few more options and exclude those we don’t want. Configure the research sources by following these steps -

1. Click on Research options at the bottom of the Research pane.
2. The Research Options box gives us checkboxes to select or deselect for Reference books, Research sites and Business /Financial sites we choose.



3. The Add Services button puts in the choices in the Research Options dialog dropdown.

Similarly, the Update/Remove button updates or removes the services of our choice. The Parental Control is a filter which sieves the results and screens out the offensive and the vile in the results.

The quite so useful translate service for a word or a phrase

Word 2007 can translate a single word or a phrase into 15 languages. Translating a single word is simple through the right click menu or through the search box in the Research pane. The word is looked up in the dictionary and the meaning returned. Translating a phrase involves sending the selected text to WorldLingo.com, a language translation service. The results open up in a browser window.

Note: The selected text is unencrypted so user discretion is advised when sending sensitive text.

The sum and the substance

The research feature is not only a Word 2007 tool but it is inbuilt into every Office 2007 application. It also combines several third party sources like Gale’s company profiles, WorldLingo or HighBeam along with standard issue Microsoft resources like Encarta or Live Search.

Yes, for a more comprehensive lookup I might have to head over to my favorite search engine, but having a research option with the plus of a translation tool is also help enough.

So, have you also ignored the research functionality of Office 2007? Or are you a frequent user? Let us know about your satisfaction score on this one.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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