Posts Tagged MS Office
Latest “Creative Tips” newsletters added to the site
Posted by Alan G in Business Communications, Creative Tips, Office Software, Typography, Word on February 19th, 2010
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!)
Typing speed tip for Word and Open Office users
Posted by Alan G in Business Communications, Creative Tips, Office Software, Word on December 28th, 2009
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 was something that non-typists fell in love with. Its purpose was to catch, and automatically correct, common typos (like “hte” for “the”) or misspellings (“acommodate” for “accommodate”). No sooner have you hit the space bar than the typo or misspelling corrects itself. Wonderful! But with a little imagination you can get a lot more mileage out of this feature than simply saving yourself from embarrassing mistakes (and not all of those, either, because it won’t fix “their” when you should have said “they’re” or “then” when it should have been “than”).
Here’s how the Auto-Correct dialog looks in Word:
You’ll find this one by looking under “Options” (from the Tools menu in Office 2003 and earlier, and in the hidden stuff under the Office logo in Office 2007). Find the Proofing tools and look for AutoCorrect.
It’s all in the way the feature works. The word processor (Microsoft Office Word, for example) watches the words you type, and when it sees a “word,” like “adn” that is listed in its auto-correct list, the program immediately substitutes what the list says is the correct one. Any combination of letters in the “Replace” column can be replaced with its corresponding entry in the “With” column.
If your company is “Acme Widget and Automation, Inc.” you can type “awa” in the “Replace” box and the full company name in the “with” box, then click OK. From now on, any time you need to type the company name, just type “awa.” As soon as you press the space bar, those nonsense letters turn into Acme Widget and Automation, Inc.
This works for people’s names, product names, or even (as you see in the screenshot) for substituting an actual copyright symbol © for the typed (c).
Best of all, you only have to get the spelling right once. After that, it will always, automatically, be correct.
Microsoft Office 2010 is (almost) here
Posted by Alan G in News, Office Software, Word on December 21st, 2009
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.
Microsoft Office 2010 gets a movie trailer
Posted by Alan G in Business Communications, News, Office Software, Word on July 24th, 2009
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 a more typical Microsoft introduction (in other words, very corporate and bland, but informative if the boredom doesn’t get you first) to the upcoming version at their website. You do get to actually see what things will look like, though.
Another way this site is typical is that it shows how to glitz up your documents (in some fairly horrible ways, sadly) but nothing about how to make a good looking document, pick the right font or set your margins or line spacing. If you’re a Creative Tips reader, you know about my campaign to bring business documents to a new level of good looks by providing the design tips that office software companies leave out of their tutorials.
Microsoft Announces Office 2010 Free Web Services
Posted by Alan G in Business Communications, News, Office Software, Word on July 13th, 2009
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 Docs and Acrobat.com isn’t clear yet, but such things as simultaneous working on an Excel spreadsheet (sounds nightmarish, actually) or being able to “broadcast” a PowerPoint slide show on the fly could have some appeal.
It will be interesting to see how many people take to this. I’m not a believer yet, myself, although there are times when working with clients that I create online versions of documents so that different people can have access to comment and make changes or updates. I’m not convinced that the web is secure enough, nor that connections are generally speedy enough, for so-called “cloud computing” to become the norm. Documents are like young kids: I just feel more comfortable when I know where they are.
The next version of Microsoft Office is about to go (semi)public
Posted by Alan G in Business Communications, Office Software, Techie Stuff, Typography, Word on June 28th, 2009
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
Posted by Alan G in Business Communications, Creative Tips, Office Software, Typography, Word on June 19th, 2009
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 tool that really can “do amazing things” like check your spelling while you type, let you select from a mind-boggling selection of typefaces, handle bulleted and numbered lists automatically and even apply all kinds of automatic formating to your documents. So if a word processor can do all this, and just about everbody has one, why do so many (most) business letters, proposals, resumes and promotional letters look, well… let’s just say “unpolished”? Read the rest of this entry »
The Battle for Good Looking Documents
Posted by Alan G in Creative Tips, Graphic Design, Typography on April 21st, 2009
I’ve been amazed how many people have told me — enthusiastically — that after reading Creative Tips #5 they are battling to overcome their years-long habit of typing two spaces after a period. Those typewriter habits we learned at our mothers’ (or fathers’ secretaries’) knees are sometimes hard to break, but folks tell me they’re persevering! Oddly enough, the two-spaces thing never was considered correct in the UK, so ex-pat Brits don’t have a problem with it.
It’s all in the interest of better-looking documents. That, and copy that designers can typeset without a fuss. There’s a degree of enlightened self-interest in these newsletters: the better the copy is written in the first place, the less there is to fix before it goes into the brochure, magazine, manual or book.
Getting Rid of Uglies
Posted by Alan G in Creative Tips, Graphic Design, Typography on March 21st, 2009
From the amazing amount of feedback I’ve been getting to the Creative Tips newsletter, it’s clear that there’s a vacuum of basic “how-to” information on simple layouts and making documents look good in standard office-type programs. This is mildly surprising, considering how many books, websites, etc., have been devoted to the topic over the years. On the other hand, I’ve looked at Microsoft’s website and discovered that the good stuff is hard to find. Lots of “Gee Whiz!” but the basics are well buried.
The Creative Tips newsletter seems to be a hit!
Posted by Alan G in Graphic Design on March 10th, 2009
I’ve had a ton of positive response to the first newsletter. Thank you to all those who emailed their appreciation. The second issue is now online for those who aren’t on the mailing list.