To highlight the cells where changes have taken place, do the following

1) Click on the “Review” tab in the ribbon in Excel 2010

2) Look towards the right hand side of the ribbon and click on the “Track Changes” button

3) Click “Highlight changes”

A new menu box appears in which you can select some options as to how Excel tracks the changes.  Make the selections as you like, then click ok.

To accept or reject the changes someone made, click on the “Track Changes” button again, then click “Accept/Reject Changes”

‘till next time!
TNP

If you don’t know what I am talking about – open up a word document that someone has send you via email – or a spread sheet that you might find on a website.  Chances are when you open that Word, Excel or PowerPoint file, you will see the “Annoying Yellow Bar” – and you will not be able to edit, print, or save your document.

Well it may be annoying, but it is actually really important.  The yellow bar shows you that Word, Excel or PowerPoint is running in what we call “Protected Mode”.  Any time you open a file that isn’t on your computer, or from somewhere that you can’t trust (like the internet), the document will be opened in protected mode, to (as the name suggests) protect your computer from harm.

It opens up the document so you can take a look at it, and then if you are sure it is what you are looking for, and you trust that it will not do any harm, you can then click on the “Enable Editing” button, which sits on the yellow protected view bar.

Now there are ways to stop Protected View from happening, but trust me, it is worth putting up with because if you accidently open a document that causes damage to your computer, it is a LOT more annoying!

‘till next time!
TNP

Either way – Microsoft have a great training tool available which can help you or  your people get more out of Office 2010.  It is the Office 2010 Getting Started Screensaver.

Now you need to be running Windows 7 to use it, but if you are, it is one of the better ways I have seen to learn more about Office.

Click here to download the screensaver today.  Thanks to Ian Palangio from Microsoft Australia for pointing it out!

‘till next time!
TNP

It is a spread sheet that you can use to track your team’s progress during the world cup.

Read more about the Rugby World Cup score tracker and get your hands on the free Excel spread sheet on the Excel Blog

Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=66a6848c-6c28-4b61-9c12-a8cad4b380a4&displaylang=en

‘till next time!
TNP

In particular I am going to focus on building high value add-ins for Microsoft Office.

Now when it comes to writing an add-in, there are a couple of ways to go about it.

1) Roll your own

If you are confident C#  or VB coder there is nothing stopping you from cracking open Visual Studio, downloading Visual Studio Tools for Office and giving it your best shot.  I must admit I tried this at first, and had some success. 

But that success was time consuming, and when I wanted to build an add-in that was backwards compatible with Outlook 2007 (which has that horrible combination of ribbon and command bar), Office 2003/XP and beyond it became VERY time consuming.

So I decided to use an alternative.

2) Use Add-in-Express

Before I share my experience with Add-in-Express… here is what the brochure says!

“Add-in Express for Office and .NET is the only all-in-one platform that includes all the features you may expect for your Microsoft Office extensions such as Office COM add-ins, smart tags, Excel XLLs, RTD servers and Automation add-ins (UDFs). It fully supports Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, 2008 and 2005 and makes it very comfortable for developing application-level extensions for all available Office versions from 2000 to 2010.”

What that means for people new to Office Development is that Add-in-Express makes it easy to quickly extend the functionality of Microsoft Office, irrespective of what version you are running.  And after spending about a month using the tool to build some add-ins myself, I have to agree.  For someone who is exploring Office Development for the first time, taking the painful parts of COM out of the picture meant that I could focus on the features and functionality I wanted to build, and not spend hours pulling my hair out!

For example, being able to access all the key events in Office without having to write event handlers accelerated development time.  Sure, it may only seem like a small thing, but as any developer knows, anything that saves you time, and takes the pain of troubleshooting away is a good thing!

Anyways – if you are interested in developing your own Office Add-in, make sure you subscribe and check back in the next few weeks for more content about my development experiences – and some examples that will get your Office Development journey started.

‘till next time!
TNP

With RTM comes a shift in content here at The New Paperclip.  Whilst I will still produce Office 2007 content, there is a whole new world of Office 2010 that is to be explored, documented, and published in easy to understand language just for you kind folks!

Before we get into the nitty gritty of Office 2010 – there is one thing I would love to share with you.

One thing that most of you will like (and people that work on IT Helpdesks will LOVE) about Office 2010 is that the File Menu is back!  Well, technically it never left, but in Office 2007 it wasn’t called the File Menu, it was simply this weird looking “Office Orb”. 

So IT Managers – if you are looking for a quick win to cut your helpdesk calls dramatically (you know… all the ones that were like “Where has Print gone”, Where has Save gone” etc) – just upgrade to Office 2010.  Because everyone knows, you find them in the File Menu.  And you will not get as many calls about

“What is that funny looking circle thing… what do you mean you want me to click on it?  It doesn’t look like a button!”

If you are upgrading to Office 2010 – make sure you subscribe or check back regularly for more tips, tricks and tutorials.

‘till next time!
TNP

Are you on the bleeding edge and have already had a play around with the beta version of Microsoft Office 2010?  Or are you just interested in what is coming in the next version of your favourite productivity tool?  Well do we have a great link for you today!

Our friends over at Microsoft Press have released a few electronic version of the book – “First Look Microsoft Office 2010”.  14 chapters of Office 2010 gold, including:

• Welcome to Office 2010
• Express Yourself Effectively and Efficiently
• Collaborate in the Office and Around the World
• Create and Share Compelling Documents with Word 2010
• Create Smart Data Insights with Excel 2010
• Manage Rich Communications with Outlook 2010
• Produce Dynamic Presentations with PowerPoint 2010
• Organize, Store, and Share Ideas with OneNote 2010
• Collaborate Effectively with SharePoint Workspace 2010
• Create Effective Marketing Materials with Publisher 2010
• Make Sense of Your Data with Access 2010
• Putting It All Together
• Security in Office 2010
• Training Made Easy

You can read the Microsoft Press blog post – or just click here and download the book directly.  It is about 10.5mb or so.

‘till next time!
TNP

There is a great function in Excel that you can use to do exactly that – count the number of BLANK cells in a range.

Simply type…

=COUNTBLANK(range)

(replace range with the range of cells you want to limit your count to). 

Note that there is one particular thing that might slip you up with this function.  When using =COUNTBLANK(), Excel is only searching for blank, empty cells.  If you have a space in a cell for example – it might look empty to you, but Excel can see that there is a space – which means it will not think it is blank, and not count it.

‘till next time!
TNP