Word 2010

So if you are a bit of an Office freak like me, you will know that Office 2010 was RTM’d last week (Released to Manufacturing – a fancy way of saying “yep, its ready”).  It will be available in the shops in the next few months, but if you are a corporate customer with a volume licensing agreement – or you have a subscription to MSDN or TechNet – you will find you can get the Office 2010 bits, and product keys already.

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

Hi there!

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

With 2009 almost behind us, now is the time to start creating your own 2010 calendars using Word 2007.

It is a lot simpler than you think!  Here is how you do it.

1) Make sure you are connected to the internet

2) Click on the Office Orb in the top left hand corner of the screen (the old file menu)

3) Click on “New”

4) In the “New Document” dialog box that appears, on the left hand side you will see a long list of different template types you can find on Microsoft Office Online.  click on “Calendars”

5) Click on “2010 calendars”

6) Pick your favourite design from the dozens that appear!  Once you have selected the one you like, just click “Download” in the bottom right hand corner

7) After Word downloads the Calendar, it will appear ready for you to use, edit or print straight away.

How easy is that!  Happy New Year!

‘till next time!
TNP

Hey if you have upgraded to Office 2010, you might have noticed an unreal new feature which allows you to very quickly paste a screenshot into your Word 2010 documents, Excel 2010 workbooks, or PowerPoint 2010 decks!

Here is how!

1. Open up your Word 2010 document
2. Click on the “Insert tab” in the Word 2010 ribbon
3. Look for the “Illustrations” group
4. Click on “Screenshot”

Once you click on “Screenshot, you have two options.  The first is to simply paste in the screenshots that Word 2010 has already taken for you!  For example, if you have four different applications open, Word has figured out that you might want a screenshot of one of those applications – and simply lets you pick which one you want to use (very smart!).  All you have to do is click on the screenshot you want to use!

The second is to take a screen clipping – which allows you very fine control over which part of your screen you want to take a screen shot of.  Simply click on “Screen Clipping” and then drag your mouse to select your screenshot.

Either way, getting screenshots into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2010 just became a whole lot easier!

‘till next time!
TNP

So you have upgraded to Word 2010!  If you have made the leap from Office 2003 or earlier, you might have a few challenges finding some of the features you use regularly.  One of those great features is Undo!  (I think Undo is the feature I use the most!)

To undo in Word 2010, you can either do it using your mouse, or using some shortcut keys.

To undo using your mouse in Word 2010:

• Look towards the top left hand corner of your Word 2010 window.  Just above the office button you will see a number of small icons along the top of the screen (by the way – that is called the “Quick Access Toolbar”).  Click on the one that looks like an arrow that points backwards – that is the undo button. 
• If you want to undo more than one mistake action – click on the little down arrow beside that button, and it will give you a list of actions you can undo!

To undo using shortcut keys in Word 2010:

• Simply hold down the “CTRL” key, and press “z” (CTRL+Z)
• To undo more than once, just keep pressing CTRL+Z

So there you have it – the easy way to get rid of your mistakes in Word 2010!

‘till next time!
TNP

(PS. try this article if you are looking to undo in Word 2007)

Hi there!

Some of you will already know that Microsoft is currently testing the next version of Office… called Office 2010. Whilst it is not available in the shops yet, yours truly has been helping out the folk at Microsoft to find bugs, quirks, or other annoying things in the product so you don’t have to.

The best part about me helping to test the product is that I am going to start sharing with you some of my favourite parts of Office 2010 – and start publishing some Office 2010 help, tips, tricks and tutorials so you can hit the ground running once the product is released sometime in the near future. Excited? I thought you might be! So here we go – my first post on Office 2010!

Blogging from Word 2010

Whilst this post has so far introduced you to the new Office 2010 content that will be published on The New Paperclip shortly, it is also my first test of the blogging feature in the Word 2010 Technical Preview. To be honest I never really used the feature in Word 2007 – I have been a fan of Windows Live Writer and have used that very successfully for a number of years – I thought I would bite the bullet and see if Word 2010 cuts the mustard.

In particular interest to me is how Word 2010 will manage posting categories, tags, images, text formatting, post scheduling and more. So let’s take a look at my first blogging experience with Word 2010.

To write a blog post in Word 2010

The first thing you need to do open up the new blog post template! Click on the Office button in the top left hand corner of the Word 2010 screen. In the menu that appears, click “New”, and then select “New Blog Post” from the available templates gallery. Then all you need to do is click “Create” and you are almost on your way!

Linking to your blog provider

TheNewPaperclip.com and all my other blog based publishing enterprises run on the WordPress engine – which Word 2010 links into incredibly well. The first time I opened the new Blog Post template in Word 2010, a dialog box appeared asking me to register my blog provider. (Note, you can access this dialog box any other time by going to the “Blog Post” tab in the ribbon, clicking “Manage Accounts” and then clicking “New”). I selected WordPress, typed in my website details, username and password, and within seconds Word 2010 was successfully talking to my blog. The first thing I noticed here that was different to Windows Live Writer is that Word 2010 did not download my blog theme so I can see exactly how the content will look when published as I write it. Not necessarily a bad thing as far as I am concerned, but you may disagree.

Creating the content

No matter what tool you use to create your blog posts, the content is the most important part. And realistically the tool you use has nothing to do with the quality of the content. That being said, the blogging tool you use has a lot to do with your productivity and how you present the information you want to include. This is where Word 2010 comes into its own.

Formatting Text

The standard stuff you would expect is all there – with the same familiar shortcuts you would use in Word normally. You want bold? Select that text and CTRL+B it!

Images

This is what I really like about using Word 2010 for blogging. The new “Screenshot” feature will be incredibly useful for when I am creating content for TheNewPaperclip. Here is a great example – at the moment I have a copy of PowerPoint 2010 running in the background. In the past my workflow would be to switch to PowerPoint, take a screenshot using the Print Screen button on the keyboard, open up MSPaint, paste the screenshot, resize or crop to my liking, save the image, switch back to Windows Live Writer, insert that image I just saved, and then do some finite resizing and positioning.

In Word 2010, all I need to do is click on the “Insert” tab in the ribbon, click the “Screenshot” button, and then select the screenshot of PowerPoint 2010 that Word has already generated for me in the gallery. This automatically drops the screenshot into the blog post, and now all I need to do is crop and resize using the standard word “Picture Tools Format” tab. And the best part is I can use all those funky picture formatting styles to add the perfect border to the screenshot! Like this one…

<Note – after publishing this post I realised that my picture upload settings were wrong – so you can’t see how awesome this PowerPoint 2010 Screenshot actually looks – with reflection and everything! Oh well – managing Word 2010 blog account picture upload settings sounds like a great post for later on!>

To add Alt Text to the image I just inserted into the blog post – just right click on the image, select “Format Picture…”, click on “Alt Text” and type text that is appropriate.

Categories and Tags

Inserting categories was a breeze. I just clicked “Insert Category” from the blog post tab on the ribbon. I could select from the categories that already exist on the blog (like “Level 200 – Regular User”), and I could also create a new category – in this case “Word 2010″. Tags are a different story though – on the face of it I can’t see any way to include them – I am guessing there is a plugin required.

Publishing

Which one came first – the chicken or the egg? Well the first time I publish a post using Word 2010 will be this one, so I can’t tell you exactly what the experience was like until I have actually posted it! That being said there are two publishing options I can see in the ribbon – the first is to publish a draft to your blog engine, and the second is to publish a final post. Speaking of which, I might publish this post now, and then try out the “Open Existing” feature to see if I can edit the post later on with a few more thoughts about at the process.

Hopefully see you on the flip side!

’till next time!
TNP

<Content added after the original post was published – using the “Open Existing” post feature in Word 2010>

Ok – that was pretty painless. Only issue I encountered was that I had my picture upload settings all wrong, so none of the images came through – but that is pretty easily fixed. The one big disappointment was that there was no scheduling feature like I am used to in Windows Live Writer – but again I am sure there are some ways to get around that – like posting drafts to WordPress, and then adding a step to the workflow where you log into WordPress and schedule them from the administration console. Oh and one really annoying thing I just picked up – when you republish using the “Open Existing” feature, your fonts change from what the blog uses in its stylesheet, to a default serif font like Times New Roman. Not very good – that is another frown I can send to the Office team – and hopefully that will be fixed up by the time you get the product of the shelves sometime in the next 12 months.