Category Archives: Word
Microsoft Office 2010 is now on sale and it is well worth the effort and expense to upgrade if you’re using Office 2007 for your business. The applications are fast, and although the new navigation takes a little getting used to, it makes life much easier for newbies and those who never have attained familiarity with all the different menu options and where they were hidden. For those of us who are very familiar with the ways of Office 2003 … Continue reading
One of the things that messes up a design faster than almost anything else is the choice of fonts. Lots of fonts. As many fonts as the person feels he or she can use. The result is a fragmented mess that screams “amateur!” to anyone who reads it. There are good font choices, and bad ones, but the first bad choice is “Lots!” There are almost no ads, magazines, fliers or other documents that need more than two typefaces, one … Continue reading
I’m often asked by friends and associates to teach them this or that about Photoshop, among other graphics applications in Adobe’s massive catalog of industrial-strength software. I’ll spend half an hour or so going over how to solve the particular problem they’re wrestling with at the time. It’s fun, it breaks up my day a bit, and I enjoy passing on what I’ve learned. But sometimes a beginner, or a not-so-beginner needs more than a quick how-to on a particular … Continue reading
Issues 16 and 17 of the Creative Tips newsletter are now live on the newsletter page. Number 17 covers “capital offenses” — all those places where people commonly use ALL CAPS, but shouldn’t. (Hint: It’s most of the time!)
If you write business letters or other company documents, there are almost certainly some terms (like your company or product name), that you end up typing a lot. This might not be an issue if your company name is “Acme, Inc.,” but something like “Serious Business Strategies” or “Life Enhancement Supplement” might get a bit tedious after the third of fourth time you type it. There’s a solution built into every modern word processor: Auto-Correct. Back in the day, auto-correct … Continue reading
Microsoft recently opened official public beta testing of Office 2010. That means you can download it here if you’re feeling adventurous and you want to see what’s coming.
Ever since Sprint’s success with their “movie trailer” marketing campaign for the Instinct cell phone, it seems every tech marketer has to have movies. Now it’s Microsoft, with “Office 2010 — The Movie.” It’s been up on YouTube for a couple of weeks, so if you haven’t caught it yet, here’s the link. Actually, it’s kind of fun. It won’t really tell you anything about what 2010 will do differently, but there are various screen shots about the net and … Continue reading
At Microsoft’s annual Partner Conference in New Orleans, they announced the “Technology Preview” of Office 2010. This means the new programs will be available to members of Microsoft’s partner network and developers around the world to examine, test and provide feedback. Part of the plan for Office 2010 is an online service, some of which will be free, that will allow users to work with Word and Excel in a web browser. How they will compare (and compete with) Google … Continue reading
Type designer Thomas Phinney posts in his blog that Microsoft Office 2010, due to be released as a “technical preview” in July, will make a giant leap forward in its handling of typefaces: it will begin to support some (not all, by a long way) of the many advanced typesetting capabilities built into modern fonts (a standard known as OpenType, which I’ll expand on later in this post).
How to make your Microsoft Word or Open Office documents look ten times better and more professional
Microsoft Word, Open Office, Corel WordPerfect: they’re everywhere. Almost every business in the Americas, Europe, Australia (or 90 percent of the rest of the world, for that matter) uses one of these Big Three or an equivalent. We used to use typewriters, when they were fairly cheap and computers were super-expensive. Now computers are dirt cheap, so we use word processors. It didn’t even take long for the revolution to happen. A modern word processing program is a fantastically sophisticated … Continue reading
