Thursday, March 08, 2007

 

Great Feature in IE7


Okay, this doesn't have anything to do with Office 2007, but it's something I discovered in IE7 this morning and I have to share it. I've been longing for this feature for a long time. My pet peeve with previous versions of IE was that it limited me to only one open web page at a time, unless I wanted to have a bunch of open brower windows while I worked. IE7 fixes that with the advent of tabbed browsing (which I love). With tabbed browsing, you can have multiple pages open in a single browser window and easily move between them by clicking the tab you want (which is handy when you're researching a complex topic and working with lots of resources). Cool feature--one I already knew about.

I was still disgrunted, though, because there was still a lot of clicking and selecting required. I wanted my favorite sites (especially the ones I use to get blogging news first thing in the morning) to open right up without a lot of effort on my part. Guess what? IE7 has said, "You wish is my command!" Just this morning I found that you can actually set up multiple home pages so that all the sites you want open automatically as tabbed pages in your IE7 browser window as soon as you fire up the browser in the morning. What a great little feature! And it's been right under my nose for months and I hadn't even noticed it. Enjoy! :)

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

 

Free e-book produced in Word 2007


Well, in case I haven't raved enough about Word 2007, let me tell you how I spent a few blissful hours yesterday. Several years back, I researched and wrote a detailed book for the parents of teenagers who were feeling at a loss about how to handle all the changes going on in their teenagers' lives. The changes might be outward things, like green hair and piercings, or attitude changes (like, "yesterday my child thought I was smart, and today apparently I'm an idiot!"), or inward changes in how the teenager sees, makes sense of, and engages the world (or not).

Yesterday I felt a bolt of inspiration and found the old Word files I'd originally used to write the book. I opened the master copy in Word 2007 and scanned the file. It was a boring, text-only document, one that at the time I had used as the text source for the final files I composed in InDesign.

I paged quickly through the document, doing a few edits, updating some info and examples, and doing a search-and-replace for the title of the book. I added a cover page and some up-front content; and then tried on a few themes (by choosing Themes in the Page Layout tab). After I found one I liked, I used the Styles in the Home tab to apply different styles to the special elements--tips, tables, and more--throughout the book. I added a TOC and a footer; I checked the citations. I then created a PDF of the file (by clicking the Microsoft Office button and choosing PDF or XPS in the Save As list) and uploaded the file to my server space.

The result--a totally updated, revised, and reformatted 200-page book in less than three hours! If that's not convincing evidence that the new themes and styles features in Word dramatically simplify life, I don't know what is. :)

By the way, please feel free to download the book and share it with anyone you know who might be interested.

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Saturday, March 03, 2007

 

Help with Deployment


I was online tonight researching something entirely different and found this Office 2007 Deployment Wiki, hosted by Channel9. Click here to check it out. There are deployment guides for both Office 2007 and Office 2003, and it could serve as a handy resource when you begin to roll out the new software. :)

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