Archive for February, 2009

Are you keeping your meeting minutes in OneNote 2007?  Well it would be a great idea to put all the details of the meeting at the top of your OneNote 2007 page right?

Well you can stop opening up Outlook, double clicking on the meeting, copying the details, opening up OneNote, finding the right Notebook and the right page… and then paste (what a relief!)

So how can you save all that pain?

1) Make sure you have Outlook 2007 open!

2) Open up OneNote 2007 and find the page you want to work on

3) Click on the “Insert Menu”

4) Click on “Insert Outlook Meeting Details”

5) Select the Meeting you want to insert

6) Click “Insert Details”

This inserts a great summary of the meeting into your OneNote 2007 Notebook, including the name of the meeting, the Date and Location, the Attendees, and any of the details you included in the original meeting request.

What a great time saver!

‘till next time!
TNP

Don’t you hate how you put lots of effort into a Word 2007 document, and then you see one of your colleagues play around with the formatting, or accidentally delete an important section.

Or maybe you want to force users of your document to only edit certain parts – for example if you have built a form that you want people to fill in.

Well in Word 2007 there is a great feature which can literally protect the important parts of your document, and restrict them from being changed, edited or deleted.  Funnily enough, it is called “Protect Document”

So how do you protect a Word 2007 document?

1) Create your document

2) Make sure you can see the “Developer” tab in the Ribbon.  If you can, move to step three!  If not, you need to click on the “Office Orb” in the top left hand corner, then click on “Word Options”, and finally whilst in the “Popular” section, make sure you check “Show Developer tab in the Ribbon”

3) Click on the “Developer” tab in the Ribbon

4) Look for the “Protect” group, and click on “Protect Document”

5) Click on “Restrict Formatting and Editing”

6) Look at the right hand side.  You will now see a task pane which will talk you through all the different formatting and editing restrictions you can put in place.  Select your favourite settings, and when you are ready…

7) Click on “Yes, Start Enforcing Protection”

Now if your employer has gone to the lengths of implementing an Information Rights Management system, there are a few other extra restrictions you can put in place, which you will find when you click on the “Protect Document” button in the Ribbon.  They are out of the scope of this article and I am sure I will write about them in the future as more and more organisations implement IRM.

So there you have it – now you can sleep at night knowing that no one is messing with your document!

‘till next time!
TNP

Have you ever had a little bit too much text to fit into a cell in Excel 2007.  Maybe it is a description of a product, a company name, or simply lots of information you need to see without having to resize your columns!

Well there is an easy way to ensure you can see all that information when you need to.  You need to wrap your text!

What is wrapping text?  Wrapping text simply breaks the text into multiple lines, instead of one long line, and it is really easy to do!

How do you do it?

1) Select the cell (or cells) in which you want to wrap the text

2) On the “Home” tab in the Ribbon, look for the “Alignment” group

3) Click on “Wrap Text”

‘till next time!
TNP

Have you spent hours working on the perfect project plan, with literally hundreds, if not thousands of tasks!  Chances are you might have mistyped a few things.

Luckily Project 2007 has the same great spell checking ability you will find in other Microsoft Office products.

To spell check your Project in Project 2007

1) Click on “Tools”

2) Click “Spelling”

or… just use the “F7” key on your keyboard!

‘till next time!
TNP

Search folders are one of the great new features of Outlook 2007 that can really help you be more productive.  Essentially they are a view of your inbox based on certain criteria that you can pick yourself. 

For example, maybe you want a search folder that shows you all your emails from your boss?  Or a folder that shows you all the emails you have over 200kb?

Outlook 2007 comes setup with a few default search folders, like “Unread Mail”.  That being said, it is really easy to set up your own.

1) Click on the little arrow beside the “New” button in the top left hand corner of your Outlook 2007 window

2) In the drop-down menu that appears, click on “Search Folder” (or just use the shortcut – CTRL+SHFT+P)

3) In the box that appears, start to select the criteria you want to use

4) Depending on what you just chose, fill in the box below – for example, if you want to show all the emails from your boss… put their email address in there

5) Click “OK”

Now you can keep track of your email by looking at it in different ways… and make sure you know where your boss’s emails are just in case they come asking questions!

‘till next time!
TNP

Do you need to find a phone number of one of your colleagues?  Well if you have Office Communicator 2007 you can quickly look up their digits.

1) Find the person in your contact list, or using the Search feature

2) Look for the phone beside their name

3) Hover your mouse over the phone, and click on the little arrow that appears

4) You will find the phone number on the fly-out menu

‘till next time!
TNP

Are you lazy like me and feel that clicking your mouse to change slides in PowerPoint 2007 is not a good use of your time?

Maybe not!

… but maybe you just want a series of slides to advance automatically whilst you talk to your PowerPoint deck.  Well with PowerPoint 2007 it is easy.

1) Select the slides you want to have automatically advance

2) In the Ribbon, make sure you are on the “Animations” tab

3) Look to the far right hand side, and make sure you check “Automatically After”

4) Beside that checkbox, enter the number of seconds you want to the slide wait before it automatically transitions to the next.

Simple as that!  Whilst you are there, you can also change the transition – whether you want a fade, dissolve, wipe, push and cover, or stripes and bars – just choose your favourite from the transition gallery!

‘till next time!
TNP

Are you writing a report, an assignment, or just a plain old document and need to hyphenate you paragraphs?

By default, Word 2007 has hyphenation turned off, but it is really easy to turn it on, and there are a number of options to control how the hyphenation works.

To turn on hyphenation in Word 2007 to hyphenate your document, simply:

1) Go to the “Page Layout” tab on the Ribbon

2) Look for the “Page Setup” group

3) Click on “Hyphenation”

4) Select “Automatic”

Now that your document is hyphenated, lets look at the settings you can change to control exactly how the hyphenation works!

5) Click on “Hyphenation” again

6) Click on “Hyphenation Options…”

In the box that appears, there are two key settings you can play with.  The first is the “Hyphenation zone”, and the second is “Limit consecutive hyphens to”.  Change these settings to adjust the hyphenation to meet your needs!

‘till next time!
TNP

Have you been working on a spreadsheet, but then suddenly realised that you need to add another column?

Well there are a couple of ways to add a column to your spreadsheet in Excel 2007.

The long way

1) Select the cell that is to the right of where you want the new column to appear

2) Look at the ribbon, and make sure you are on the “Home” tab

3) Look to the right, and you will see the “Cells” group

4) Click on “Insert”, and then select “Insert Sheet Columns”

The short way

1) Right click on the top of the column (the letter) that is to the right of where you want the new column to appear

2) Click “Insert” from the menu that appears

If you want to add two or more columns, you can use one of the methods above, and simply use the “Redo” command to keep inserting new columns – either use the button in the top left hand corner (in the Quick Access Toolbar), or simply use the shortcut – CTRL+Y

‘till next time!
TNP

Hi everyone!

I am very proud to announce that today The New Paperclip was listed on Alltop.

Alltop is best described as an online magazine rack that helps you keep up to date with all the top news from around the world.  The New Paperclip is now featured in the Top Microsoft Office News section!

It wouldn’t have happened without all your support, so a big thank you to everyone in the “The New Paperclip” community!

In the spirit of community, here are a few links to a few of the top articles being featured right now in the Microsoft Office section of Alltop!

• Erika Ehrli (Adventures in Office Development and .Net):
  Links for February 6th 2009: Workflow Development Resources Interactive Map, Join Us on Facebook, + Lots of New Articles and Downloads 
• The Office for Mac Team Blog:
  the MacBU Giving Campaign
• Inside Office Online:
  Raining pennies (and other cool effects)
• The Microsoft Office Word Team’s Blog:
  Advanced Comparison of Word Documents

‘till next time!
TNP