Level 300 - Advanced

Did you know that Outlook 2007 saves drafts of your emails as you type them?  This is great if you accidentally close the email window before sending, or start an email and then the power goes out.

By default Outlook will save a draft every three minutes.  But if you are paranoid about losing your work… or don’t care that much… you can change the timeframes in which the auto-save occurs.

To increase or decrease the auto-save time for draft emails in Outlook 2007:

1) Click “Options” from the menu

2) Make sure you are on the “Preferences” tab”

3) Click the “E-mail Options…” button

4) Click the “Advanced E-Mail Options…” button (about half way down the window)

5) Beside the first checkbox (“AutoSave items every:”) change the number to the number of minutes you would like the interval to be

6) Click OK 3 times to close all the windows

To find the drafts that Outlook saves, just take a look in your drafts folder

‘till next time!
TNP

Does your Junk Mail folder in Outlook 2007 seem to continually build up with… well… junk mail?  If you are confident that no important mail ever ends up in your junk mail folder, you can set Outlook to automatically delete junk mail instead.

To automatically delete junk mail in Outlook 2007:

1) Click on “Tools”

2) Click on “Options”

3) Make sure you are on the “Preferences” tab”

4) In the “E-mail” section, click on the “Junk E-mail…” button

5) On the “Options” tab, look half way down for a checkbox that says “Permanently delete suspected junk e-mail instead of moving it to the Junk E-mail folder”.  Check that check box.

To stop the automatic deletion of junk mail, repeat the process, and just uncheck the checkbox in step 5

‘till next time!
TNP

If you have ever printed handouts for your PowerPoint presentations before, you know that they can be pretty bland.  Just the slides all stacked up on a page, with plenty of whitespace.

Well did you know that you have complete control over how those handouts actually look?  You can add your company logo, or a copyright statement, or remove the date or the page numbers.  You can do whatever you want!

All of this is controlled from what is called the “Handout Master”.  Those of you familiar with the “Slide Master” will know exactly what we are talking about.  The easiest way to describe the handout master is that it is the template for all the handouts printed from the presentation.

To access the Handout Master in PowerPoint 2007:

1) Click on the “View” tab in the ribbon

2) In the “Presentation Views” group on the left hand side, click on “Handout Master”

Once you are in the master, you can control all manner of different things, including the page setup, the handout orientation (portrait or landscape), the slide orientation on the handouts, and how many slides will appear on each page.

To get out of the “Handout Master” view… simply click the “Close Master View” button on the right hand side of the ribbon

‘till next time!
TNP

Word 2007 has some fairly powerful translation features that can help you quickly understand what a word is in a different language.

By using the “Translation ScreenTip” you can see the translation of most words simply by moving the mouse over them!

Translation ScreenTip works for the following languages:

• Arabic (Saudi Arabia)
• English (United States)
• French (France)
• Spanish (Spain, International Sort)

To turn on Translation ScreenTip:

1) Make sure you are on the “Review” tab of the ribbon

2) Look for the “Proofing” group

3) Click on “Translation ScreenTip”

4) Select the language you want to see the translation for, or click on “Turn Off Translation ScreenTip” to turn the translation off.

‘till next time!
TNP

Is there a section of text in your document (or your whole document!) that isn’t “English (United States)” or another language.  Well to make sure that your spelling and grammar checks in Word 2007 work well, you need to make sure that text is marked as the right language.

So how do you mark a section of text as a different language?

1) Select the text

2) Make sure you are on the “Review” tab of the ribbon

3) Look for the “Proofing” group”

4) Click “Set Language”

5) Select your preferred language

Now you can be confident that spell check is doing the right thing!

‘till next time!
TNP

Have you ever built an awesome slide with lots of different objects?  Well then I am sure you will understand how frustrating it can be when you need to select an object that is behind 3 or 4 other ones!

Did you know there is a great tool you can use called the “Selection Pane”, that will help you select those pesky, hard to get to objects?

Selection Pane simply lists all the objects that are on a slide, in a simple to use task pane to the right hand side of your PowerPoint 2007 screen.  Using Selection pan you can quickly select any object, not matter how far to the back of the slide it is.

To turn on the selection pane:

1) Make sure you are on the “Home” tab of the ribbon

2) Look for the “Editing” Group – you will find it on the far right hand side of the ribbon

3) Click on the little arrow beside the “Select” button

4) Click on “Selection Pane…”

‘till next time!
TNP

Did you know in Word you can automatically select all the text in a document that shares the same formatting?

For example, you can select all text that is Arial, 12pt.  Very handy if you are not using styles, yet want to apply a formatting change across select blocks of text.

To select text with similar formatting in Word 2007:

1) Select some of the text you want to select

2) Make sure you are on the home tab of the ribbon

3) Look for the “Editing” group on the right hand side of the ribbon

4) Click on “Select”

5) Click on “Select Text with Similar Formatting”

‘till next time!
TNP

Are you building a spreadsheet and would like to know how many black cells you have in a given range?

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

One of the interesting statistics I looked into when preparing for my presentation at Microsoft TechEd Australia 2009 was how many people make use of the shortcut keys in Office.

One of my favourite resources for fun facts like that is Jensen Harris.  Those of you who have dug a little deeper into Office 2007 would recognise that name – he is the guy responsible for the new Ribbon user interface.

In his presentation at MIX 08, he brings up a few statistics which really shocked me (and I am paraphrasing here):

• Only around 50% of users use the Ctrl+C shortcut to copy (which means 50% of folk use the menu!)
• Only around 27% of users use the Ctrl+S shortcut to save (which means 73% use the menu!)
• Only around 2% of users use the Ctrl+O shortcut to open documents  (which means around 97% of users don’t!)

Anyone thinking what I am thinking?  There is a huge opportunity here to increase productivity of Office users across the board, simply by working with users to identify what shortcut keys have the biggest impact, and helping them to master them.

Now there are two ways to go about that.  The first is probably the most pervasive already – lists of shortcut keys.  You can find them anywhere, simply by Googling (or Bing’ing) “Word Shortcut Keys”.  People download them, print them out, and put them on their desk beside their computer.

But what happens when you have a list of shortcut keys? 

1) You don’t learn them, you just refer to them

2) You don’t actually work through the shortcut keys to understand what they are capable of

3) You are probably less productive when you take into account the time it takes to look up the shortcut key every time you use one!

The second way is to work through a learning program which helps you understand the impact of, remember, and give you confidence to use key shortcut key combinations when you need to.

How many learning programs like that exist?  None.

Well until now…

I have put together a audio course called “Five days to Word 2007 shortcut mastery”.  Now this isn’t for everyone.  If you are comfortable with your list of shortcuts that you refer to all the time – then great!  If it works for you then there is no reason to even think about enrolling in this course.

On the other hand, if you still struggle with remembering, or understanding what shortcut keys are available in Word 2007, then this course is exactly what you are looking for.

Before you ask… no, it isn’t free.  But this is the kind of specialist training that you can’t really find anywhere else at the moment, and it has the potential to help you save hundreds or even thousands of dollars in lost productivity yourself.

Want to learn more – visit www.shortcutcourse.com.

‘till next time!
TNP

tags: shortcuts, training, word 2007

So you have a heap of headings in your document.  One way to make communicating with others about your document a whole lot easier is to add numbers to each of your headings.

You know what I mean… “John, take a look at section 4.2 and let me know what you think!”

Well it is really easy to add numbers to your headings in Word 2007 – as long as you have used your heading styles properly!

All you need to do is:

1)  Make sure you are on the “Home” tab in the Ribbon

2) Look for the “Paragraph” group

3) Look for the “Multi-Level List” button.  You will find it beside the “Numbering” button – chances are it is the third from the left in the top row.  Click on that button

4) Select your preferred heading numbering style from the list library.

There you have it, some awesome looking numbered headings, and a lot less headaches!

‘till next time!
TNP