Just upgraded to Office 2010 or are about to? Here are three things you might want to set up straight away to ensure you are getting the most out of your new software.
Customising your Quick Access Toolbar - Your Quick Access Toolbar is the bar that appears at the top left of your screen and can provide you with quick easy access to your favourite commands. Each Office application has one of these, which you can easily customise by clicking on the downward facing arrow at the end of the toolbar and selecting More Commands. To see a short video about customising your quick access toolbar, click here.
.
Customising your Ribbon - One of the great new features in Office 2010 is the ability to customise the ribbon, the tab menu system that runs across the top of the screen, so that you have easy access to the commands that you use most. With this feature you can customise one of the existing tabs or create a whole new tab of your own. To access this feature just right click anywhere on the ribbon and select Customize the Ribbon. For more instructions on how to do this, click here.
Choosing your colour scheme – Finding the default grey colour of Office a little boring or distracting? Both Office 2007 and 2010 allow you to choose the colour scheme for Office that best suits you. To do this in Office 2010 just click File, Options, select the colour you would like from the Colour Scheme dropdown box, and click Ok.
Want to learn about other ways you can customise your Office applications? Click here to read about how to customise you recent documents list, or here to find out about customising the look of your Outlook Calendar.
Looking for an easy way to store your notes, ideas, and lists online? Simplenote is a free text note taking tool with a lot of great features.
With Simplenote you can:
Access your notes from anywhere – With Simplenote you can access your notes from any web browser, your desktop, or your mobile device. Any notes you make will be synchronised across all your devices.
Go back in time – Simplenote stores multiple versions of your notes, which means you can easily go back to a previous version.
Easily find what you are looking for – Simple note allows you to search your notes, tag them with categories, or pin them to the top of the list if they are important. All this makes finding a particular note much easier.
Collaborate and publish – Need to work on a list with others or post some instructions? Simplenote allows you to share your notes with others.
To visit the Simplenote website click here. To visit their download page and find out about products that work with Simplenote, such as their free iPhone and iPad applications, click here.
If you’re looking for a note taking tool that allows you to store more than just text, click here to learn about Evernote.
Looking for a fun way to brainstorm and assess the quality of your ideas? BBC Pinball is a set of four free tools that lets you bounce your ideas around in interesting ways.
Included BBC Pinball is:
Dot Dash – A pinball themed mind mapping tool.
Drop Zone - A tool that makes sorting your ideas into categories a game.
Wild reels - A tool that can combine your ideas in new ways.
If you would like to try out BBC Pinball click here. If you’re looking for a more serious brainstorming tool, click here to read about other free options.
A few weeks ago I upgraded from Office 2007 to 2010. I haven’t had a chance to use all the new features yet, but here are 3 I have found quite useful so far.
Recovering an unsaved document - Have you ever accidentally closed a file without saving it? If you are using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint from Office 2010 you can get that file back. Click here to read how.
Inserting a screenshot - Ever want to show someone exactly what you are looking at? The Screenshot feature in Office 2010 allows you to easily capture a static image from any open window on your computer, and then insert that image into your Office document. Click here to find out how.
Conversation Clean Up – This new feature allows you to easily eliminate redundant messages from your inbox. Redundant messages occur when you use the reply feature to have a conversation via email. Each new email contains all the previous messages in the conversation, so the older emails sitting in your inbox are not really needed. The Conversation Clean up feature can find and delete these redundant messages for you. Click here to read more about this feature.
If you have recently upgraded to Office 2010 you can find lots of excellent training materials here on the Microsoft website. If you would like to receive weekly emails containing Office 2010 tips, click here to learn about the LANcom Microsoft Office Secrets.
Want to customise your organisation’s Facebook fan page? PageModo is a free tool which allows you to create a customised ‘Welcome’ or ‘About’ tab, without any technical skills.
So how does it work? PageModo provides you with a number of professionally designed templates to choose from and then you just add your own photos, videos, and text. Once you have created your tab on the PageModo site, you can click install and connect it to your page.
If you have visited the LANcom Facebook page you may have noticed that we have created custom tabs to display our services and our newsletters. We created these using basic Html code and the Static FBML application, but if you’d like to create a custom tab without Html knowledge PageModo is a great alternative.
To visit the PageModo website and try it out for yourself, click here.
Microsoft research has set out to solve the problems associated with typing on a tablet PC by putting the keyboard on the back of the device.
RearType, which uses a QWERTY keyboard split in two, allows you to easily type while standing or walking and doesn’t take up display space with a keyboard.
RearType could also make typing on a mobile device faster for some users. In a brief study users with only one hour of training achieved an average of 15 WPM, and one user managed to reach 47 WPM.
This technology is still in development, so there are no plans yet to make it commercially available, but if you would like to read more about this from Engadget click here.
Recently updated to Windows 7 or are about to? Animated Explanations has created this great short video covering a few of the main new features and how to use them. This covers the Live Taskbar Preview, Snap and Shake, Jump Lists and Pin, Windows Search and the Homegroup feature.
Thinking about getting an iPhone 4 and want to know what people who already own one think? A US research company called ChangeWave recently under took a survey of 213 new iPhone 4 users to find out how happy they were with the phone.
Here’s a basic look at the results.
72% of those surveyed were very satisfied, while 21% were somewhat satisfied, and only 6% were somewhat or very dissatisfied. When it came to meeting expectations 34% said their expectations were exceeded, 50% said their expectations were met, and just 13% did not have their expectations met.
When asked what feature they liked best screen resolution came out on top with 49%, followed by the 5 megapixel camera with 31%.
Despite the widely publicised antenna problems, only 5.2% of those surveyed had experienced dropped calls.
To read more about these results from ComputerWorld click here
Need to check your work for typos? Listening to your words spoken out loud can often help you pick up on typos you missed. There are many free text to speech tools available you could use for this, but here are two I have used.
The Microsoft Word Speak feature – If you are using Office 2010 you can easily use the built in Speak feature to hear your text out loud, for instructions on how to use this click here.
IVONA Recordings – Invona is website that converts text to audio recordings for a price, but just using the text to speech tool on their site is free. What’s great about this tool is that it sounds a lot better than other text to speech tools. It offers a number of different voices and even different accents for you to choose from. All you need to do is copy and paste your text on to the site and click the play button. Click here to visit this site.
Customising your Quick Access Toolbar - Your Quick Access Toolbar is the bar that appears at the top left of your screen and can provide you with quick easy access to your favourite commands. Each Office application has one of these, which you can easily customise by clicking on the downward facing arrow at the end of the toolbar and selecting More Commands. To see a short video about customising your quick access toolbar, click here.
Customising your Ribbon - One of the great new features in Office 2010 is the ability to customise the ribbon, the tab menu system that runs across the top of the screen, so that you have easy access to the commands that you use most. With this feature you can customise one of the existing tabs or create a whole new tab of your own. To access this feature just right click anywhere on the ribbon and select Customize the Ribbon. For more instructions on how to do this, click here.
Choosing your colour scheme – Finding the default grey colour of Office a little boring or distracting? Both Office 2007 and 2010 allow you to choose the colour scheme for Office that best suits you. To do this in Office 2010 just click File, Options, select the colour you would like from the Colour Scheme dropdown
Microsoft research has set out to solve the problems associated with typing on a tablet PC by putting the keyboard on the back of the device.