You don’t want to accidently send your boss those pictures from the weekend right!!??!?!?!

That feature, where the names automatically pop us is called “Auto Complete”.  It is a handy feature if you email people regularly, but can cause you problems if you are not careful.

So – if you want to delete a name form your Auto Complete list in Outlook 2010… what do you do?

Simple!

Just start typing their name in.  When it appears in the auto complete list, simply look to the right of their name.  You should see a cross or a check – ie a delete button.  Just click on that, and that name and email address is removed from your auto complete list.

Easy!

‘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

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

And if you are like 99% of the population, you will double click on that Outlook icon every morning to open it.  Talk about wasting time! 

Did you know that we can automate things so Outlook will automatically start whenever you log into your computer. 

All you need to do is find the “Startup” folder in your Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 start menu.  Once you have found it, simply drag the Outlook icon into that folder.

Actually this works with any program, not just Outlook.  So if you want to automatically start Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer… in fact any application on your computer – just drag the icon into the Startup folder.

So there you have it – one less thing for you to do in the morning!

‘till next time!
TNP