Microsoft Word Tips, Tricks & Templates » News

How to change MS Word’s default color White to Blue

Editor — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:06:30 +0000

You can change the background color of Microsoft Word from White to Blue.

For some people, this makes it easier on the eye as it reduces the glare from the screen.

I have to admit, I prefer blue to white but have difficulties when adding images or inserting text with different color schemes.

Anyway, it’s a nice option to have. Here’s how I do it:

1. From the Tools menu, choose Options.

2. Click Blue Background, White Text.

That’s it!

How to Add Special Effects to your Next Business Report

Editor — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:16:05 +0000

How do I animate text in a Word Document? For example, to make dancing ants or add sparkles to the text.

1. Select the text you want to animate.

2. Click Format, Font, and then the Text Effects tab.

3. In the Animations box, click the effect you want, for example Sparkle Text.

You can preview the animation in the box at the bottom of the menu.

Only one animation effect can be selected at a time.

How to Improve Readability on Laptops and HD Flat Panel Displays

Editor — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:03:00 +0000

If you use a laptop to write, then get this free download from Microsoft. It gives you improved font display quality over traditional forms of font smoothing or anti-aliasing. ClearType improves readability on color LCD displays, such as laptops and flat panel displays. Readability on CRT screens can also be improved.

Tip: Use this online tuner to turn on and tune your Windows XP ClearType settings. If you experience problems download the Windows XP PowerToy version of the tuner. The online tuner does not currently work with Windows Vista.

ClearType improves the readability of text on existing LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays), such as laptop screens, Pocket PC screens and flat panel monitors. With ClearType font technology, the words on your computer screen look almost as sharp and clear as those printed on a piece of paper.

ClearType works by accessing the individual vertical color stripe elements in every pixel of an LCD screen. Before ClearType, the smallest level of detail that a computer could display was a single pixel, but with ClearType running on an LCD monitor, we can now display features of text as small as a fraction of a pixel in width. The extra resolution increases the sharpness of the tiny details in text display, making it much easier to read over long durations.

Get ClearType and read more here.

5 Tips for Keyboard Fanatics & Time Poor Tech Writers

Editor — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:30:24 +0000

Donationcoder continue their excellent series of products with TapTap Hotkey Extender, a tiny super-efficient tray-based utility (under <100k) for keyboard fanatics.

It monitors hotkey combinations not supported by most programs (e.g. like doubletap right shift key). When such hotkey combinations are detected, TapTap will simulate a normal hotkey that the user has configured.

In this way, you can configure any of your programs to respond to these extended hotkey events as if they supported it natively.

For Example:
You might have a program which normally triggers on Alt+Ctrl+F5, but you want to configure it to trigger with a double tap of the right control key. You can use TapTap to detect Right Control Doubletap events, and send a Ctrl+Alt+F5 when it does. In this way, you can control your programs the way you want to, and they never know the difference.

TapTap Hotkey Extender is written in lean and mean C++ and highly optimized for insignificant cpu/memory access. It makes no changes to any system files and is completely safe. Comes with an installer but you can unpack the download manually and run it without installing.

Download it here: http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/TapTap/index.html

Tracking Business Processes from within MS Office

Editor — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:18:04 +0000

Israeli-based ActionBase have released an interesting application that provides Security Officers with “wave” collaborative software that addresses corporate governance, audit trails security. What interesting from a Microsoft Office perspective is that all of this can be done from within Microsoft Outlook and other Office applications.

Tracking Business Process from within MS Office

How does it work?

ActionBase converts regular e-mail into business-class e-mail, whereby all content is located under a one-line item in your inbox.

This means that all process stakeholders and participants in a discussion thread share the same content, can ask questions, respond and comment or add files instead of scattering feedback across different e-mail messages in the traditional paradigm.

It incorporates all actions that were initiated subsequently by any user involved in the process.

The ability to have drill-down capabilities from inside Microsoft Office applications allows process stakeholders to view the big picture — without compromising collaborative functionality.

Key features

Hierarchy model for business processes
Ensures process-related discussions remain associated with their original context, reducing e-mail overload.
Simplifies process-related search and follow-up by providing process visibility, i.e. related attachments and history, audit trails and change history.
Reporting mechanism provide real-time process information.

The company has also expanded ActionDoc (its action-driven Word documents) functionality to turn plain Word documents to executable working documents with a real-time graphical status view over the whole process.

ActionBase is currently offering a free trial, tailored to specific regulatory, auditing and organizational challenges.

More at www.actionbase.com

New Wikipedia of Organization Charts

Editor — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:44:15 +0000

No Inc have taken AJAX and “Web 2.0-ness” to create CogMap, which is a terrific Wikipedia of organization charts.

Their own site is an organization chart wiki! This means that it is a collection of organization charts online that anyone can edit, add to, and help maintain.

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CogMap is a tool for sales people, entrepreneurs, and recruiters to understand organizations and keep information up to date. If you are like us, you had some of these things happen to you:

Worked at a company without a published organization chart and had no idea who worked for anyone else
Tried to figure out who to call at a company and come up empty
Bought a list of people to call and had all the information be wrong
Met people that all had different titles and been unable to tell who was the decision-maker in the room!

There are several demos over here http://www.cogmap.com/help.php including one on Microsoft.

How to Quickly Reduce Microsoft Word File Size – Secret #1

Editor — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:13:26 +0000

Ever had your Microsoft Word file explode from 1MB to 10MB in just a few minutes? In the tech writing world, Microsoft Word tends to get a bad rap.

One of the arguments put against Word is that its fairly unstable and prone to creating ‘horrors’, such as bloating in size until your (Microsoft!) operating system grinds to a halt.

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Compared with Adobe FrameMaker, this is true. FrameMaker is very stable, BUT can be awkward to use. Not even cut and paste…

I’ll admit it! I prefer Microsoft Word any day.

Bloated file sizes are a real problem. No-one will deny this. But, in the course of creating some long documents in MS Word, I’ve learned a few small secrets.

And these small secrets are guaranteed to save you ALOT of time.

The first offender is Bullet Lists. If there is one thing that’s guaranteed to destroy Word, its bullet lists.

Here’s what tends to happen.

When you click on the Bullet List from the Word toolbar, Word ‘points’ this Bullet List to the Normal.dot file.

In other words, it uses the default settings in the Normal.dot and applies these settings. Fine. No problem!

But… if you then cut and paste a Bulleted List from another document into your working file, Word gets very confused.

“What Normal.dot file do I now link to?”

AND, if you then use a special bullet style, it has a nervous breakdown…

What happens? Suddenly, your machine starts to grind while Word struggles to resolve this issue. And as it can’t, it crashes!

Here’s what to do instead!

In Word, create separate styles for each different bullet lists that you need, for example Bullet Regular, Bullet Indent, Bullet Square and so on.
When you need to use a bullet list, select the correct style from the drop-down menu.
If you want to import a bullet list from another document, first select the Clear Formatting option from the drop down menu (this removes all formatting) and then cut it into the working document. Then apply the correct style.

Follow these three steps and you’ll keep your Word docs happy and healthy.

In the next article, we’ll look at another way to reduce large word files.

This is our first ‘insider secret’ on taming Microsoft Word. What’s been your experience?

PS: Please drop me a line at ivan klariti com and we’ll share it online.

ivanwalsh.blogspot.com

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When is a Word document not a document?

Editor — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:33:47 +0000

The new Word Blog over on MSDN keeps cranking out the good stuff.

Scroll down this page and read the Q and A about document types.

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Q: When is a document not a document?

A: When it’s a form.

“This is another question that we spent a lot of time discussing when we started to think about building what became content controls. We didn’t just want another tool for doing online forms in Word – not only is there a great tool to do it today, but people already know how to do that in Word and don’t need another way to do the same thing.

Review The Office 2007 UI Bible

Editor — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:25:37 +0000

Jensen Harren has compiled the 200 or so posts he’s made since starting last September.

To make it easier for the rest of us he and a colleague created a Table of Contents of all the posts.

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“I’ve been meaning to sit down and create a kind of table of contents for all of the posts here—a starting point for people to read about the Office 2007 UI. But then, I found out that someone already did the work for me. Patrick Schmid, a OneNote MVP and friend of the Office 2007 UI, put together what he called the Office UI Bible on his blog—a fully organized catalog of many of my posts.”

This is worth bookmarking if you’re interested in the new Office user interface.

Visio Hyperlink Problem in Internet Explorer 7

Editor — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:40:48 +0000

Visio is used by many Technical Writers and Programmers to create diagrams and flowcharts. Some of you have encountered issues involving hyperlinks in Visio’s HTML output and Internet Explorer 7. For example, clicking a hyperlink in a drawing saved as HTML from Visio 2003 results in an error that says “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site. Operation aborted.”

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Then you may want to read this post as it offers some ways to work around it. Visio’s HTML output and IE7

How to update the Date automatically when you open Microsoft Word 2003

Editor — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:42:42 +0000

You can update the Date and Time in Word when you open it. There are two steps involved here:

To add a date that Word will updated automatically, you need to insert a ‘field’.

1. To do this, go to Insert, Date and Time and choose the format you want.

This inserts a field in the page which displays the time. This time, by the way, is determined by your computer’s clock.

2. Check “Update Automatically” so that it will update when you print.

The second approach is if you want to change the format of the date field or work with the other features.

To do this:

1. Click File, Insert, Field, Date and Time.

2. Select Date from the field names list and pick a format that suits your needs.

Tip: to manually force an update, click in the date and press F9.

Quark’s XML Authoring Tool Now Supports Microsoft Office 2007

Editor — Sat, 30 May 2009 01:02:00 +0000

Technical Writers who want to create documents in MS Word and also use Quark will be pleased to read this press release. Quark XML Author 3.0 for Microsoft Word allows users to create XML content easily within Microsoft Word, This XML authoring tool allows non-technical business workers to use Microsoft Word to create intelligent content with little or no training.

“Quark XML Author enhances the user-defined XML support within Microsoft Word and allows users to create XML content easily, which eliminates many of the barriers associated with the adoption of XML,” said Ayca Yuksel, Senior Product Manager from Microsoft. “Through our partnership with Quark, we’ve enabled many Microsoft Word users to author structured XML content that can be managed in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.”

QuarkXPress to InDesign: Face to Face

ISBN: 0764583794
ISBN-13: 9780764583797

Melissa Webster, Program Vice President for Content and Digital Media Technologies at IDC said, “Business users use Microsoft Word for authoring and they’ve been very reluctant to adopt the specialized XML authoring tools that were designed for technical communicators. At the same time, XML is key to realizing the full power of dynamic publishing. What’s needed is a solution that turns Microsoft Word into an XML authoring tool, and that’s what Quark XML Author provides.”

Quark XML Author 3.0
Quark XML Author 3.0 supports Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Vista from a single XML Author code base, which offers stability and uninterrupted productivity to users who have or are in the process of upgrading to the most current versions of Microsoft Office. The new version of Quark XML Author also offers native user interface support for French, German, and Japanese languages, which increases user productivity and collaboration among global teams.

In addition, Quark XML Author 3.0 offers new style and formatting functionality that gives users more control over their content, including:

New integration with Design Science’s MathType Editor for equations
Improved tool bar for use with the Microsoft Office 2007 native ribbon interface
Improved feature that allows for bulk changes throughout a document
Advanced indenting and style capabilities for list items and paragraphs

Users of Quark XML Author for Microsoft Word are able to upgrade to version 3.0 automatically. The new version is backward compatible with Microsoft Office 2000-2007 and is bi-directionally compatible with Quark XML Author 2.x files. It will be available on April 30, 2009.

To learn more about Quark XML Author for Microsoft Word, visit: http://dynamicpublishing.quark.com/xml_author.

How it Works

This shows what happens after the user has chosen to create a new XML document. It’s easy to see where to start.

In this illustration, Quark XML Author uses the Word Style dropdown list to show all of the valid types of content that the author can insert at the current cursor location.

Working hand-in-glove with Microsoft® Word, Quark® XML Author lets users create content in a familiar, simple, and full-featured user interface. Allowing users to continue using Word vastly eases the transition from the hand-crafted publishing process of the past to the dynamic publishing process of the future.

Quark XML Author remains invisible until the Word user tries to edit an existing XML document or create a new one. At that point, Quark XML Author slips in and modifies the operation of the user interface to correspond with XML requirements.

While many functions continue to operate normally, others change in subtle ways to give users appropriate choices to ensure they are creating correct XML.

Quark XML Author for Microsoft Word
In its 2008 acquisition of In.vision Research, Quark gained XML Author for Microsoft Word, formerly known as In.vision Xpress Author. Quark XML Author enhances Microsoft Word’s native XML support by allowing users to create narrative XML documents directly — without seeing tags, being constrained to boxes, or being aware of the technical complexities associated with XML. Equally important, XML Author ensures that the content an author creates is constantly validated against the XML standard — eliminating the need to rework content at a later time.

Why Quark XML Author?

Quark® XML Author meets the needs of IT staff for XML document quality while impressing end users with its simplicity for creating intelligent XML documents.
In contrast to niche applications, Quark XML Author provides an enterprise option that allows users to create XML documents that conform to any schema or DTD.
Quark supports industry–specific schemas for life sciences, the intelligence community, manufacturing, and technical documentation that can be deployed out–of–the box for a quick start.
Quark XML Author delivers hundreds of features that can be combined in thousands of ways to meet a broad range of enterprise needs–easily outweighing custom–built, Word–based solutions that achieve limited success and drive up costs.
Quark is a Microsoft® Certified Gold Partner and member of the Office 14 Developer Advisory Council.
Michael Boses, Quark’s director of XML products, provides leadership in the DITA community as Co–chair for the OASIS DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee.

"Quark XML Author provides knowledge workers with an easy XML authoring and content contribution tool to improve productivity and reduce cycle time. The fact that this tool is for the mainstream – and not just for someone who knows XML – makes it that much more powerful and positions Quark for increased success as a leader in the dynamic publishing market."

Quark – Press Release Detail

Get SharePoint Designer 2007 for Free

Editor — Fri, 01 May 2009 01:00:37 +0000

You can now download SHAREPOINT DESIGNER 2007 for free as MS have decided to phase out the product. Formerly known as MS Frontpage, this is a very powerful HTML editor and worth the download.

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To get an idea, check out the video to learn more about details and future direction

. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 provides the powerful tools you need to deliver compelling and attractive SharePoint sites and quickly build workflow-enabled applications and reporting tools on the SharePoint platform, all in an IT-managed environment.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42

Mobile Work Teams Get Windows Mobile 6.1

Editor — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:42:41 +0000

Treo Pro promises mobile workers an easy-to-use smartphone for businesses that want to simplify their IT infrastructures. Treo Pro includes email, Wi-Fi and GPS capabilities. It can deliver increased security, easier device management and access to information on the corporate network that Windows Mobile 6.1 provides.
Treo Pro’s design blends a high-resolution color touch screen and a QWERTY keyboard with a removable battery that packs up to five hours of talk time.

One-touch Wi-Fi button — Easy, fast Wi-Fi connection experience (802.11b/g).
Today screen enhancements — Web search directly from the Today screen.
Ringer switch — Silences the device immediately.
Screen saver — Lets users know at a glance — without turning on the device — what time it is and whether they have missed a call or have a new SMS/MMS message.
New voicemail indicator — The center button flashes to let users know that a voicemail is waiting.
Dedicated email and calendar buttons — Fast one-button access.

Lower Costs, Increased Productivity

With Treo Pro, businesses can take advantage of a tightly integrated Palm and Windows Mobile 6.1 solution for their mobile work forces, including:

Microsoft Direct Push Technology — Connection to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 SP2 or 2007 gives users up-to-date email, contacts and calendars.
Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 — With the deployment of Mobile Device Manager, the Treo Pro can deliver increased security, easier smartphone management and access to information on the corporate network.
Applications for Windows Mobile — Businesses can extend mobility beyond email to optimize business processes.
World phone — With high-speed UMTS/HSDPA network capabilities,(4) Treo Pro is a sleek world phone that’s ideal for companies with an international work force.
Integrated GPS — Users can access maps, turn-by-turn directions and point-of-interest (POI) searches.
Familiar Windows experience — Users can browse the web with built-in Internet Explorer Mobile; open, view, and edit Word and Excel compatible files; review PowerPoint presentations and PDF files; and open ZIP files remotely.

Visit: Treo Pro smartphone is available at www.palm.com/TreoPro

Office Live Store Manager in Beta

Editor — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:20:48 +0000

James Senior over on Technet introduces Office Live Store Manager, which is currently in private beta with several small business customers.

He highlights that ”The store manager portion of Office Live enables this small business to have an online store tightly incorporated within their website with the minimum of fuss.”

James gives an example of Office Live Store Manager helped Larouex Gourmet Foods, makers of fine tasting food products in Washington State. He visited their online store where they have some sauces and meats available to buy.

Before Office Live they used Paypal and had some complicated ASP pages to get around the problem of selling online. The promise of Office Live Store Manager is to offer a one-stop-shop for all online activities for small business.

Visit James’ blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/james/archive/2007/09/17/office-live-store-manager-private-beta.aspx