The top 10 Microsoft Office tips of 2008

As you head into the new year, check out this rundown of the highest rated Office tips of 2008. You can read them online or download them as a PDF collection.

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It’s been a busy year for the Microsoft Office blog, with almost 300 posts from assorted support techs, Office experts, and hallway gurus. It’s always interesting to see which tips fly off the shelves (and which ones end up, um, remaindered). And as usual, there have been a few surprises. But certain techniques emerged as clear favorites, and we’ve rounded some of them up for you here. You can follow the links below to read selected tips or download the entire collection as a PDF.

Special thanks to Office stalwarts Susan Sales Harkins and Mary Ann Richardson for all their great contributions.

Happy New Year!

Word

• Create a watermark using a Clip Art Gallery image
• Five Word borders you can apply as you type

Excel

• Add a drop-down list to an Excel cell
• Quickly move data to another workbook without copy and paste

Access

• Use a form to display a list of reports and queries in an Access database
• Add sounds to your Access form events

PowerPoint

• How do I… Add music and narration to a PowerPoint presentation?
• Seven keyboard shortcuts to help make your PowerPoint slide shows glitch-free

Outlook

• Avoid e-mail mistakes with a single setting
• Flash Outlook contacts

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Calendar options for 2009

Whether you build your own or download one of Microsoft’s gazillion Office templates, you can easily produce simple appointment calendars to manage your activities for the coming year.

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Like to-do lists, calendars help provide the illusion of organization and control over tasks and commitments. But not just any calendar will do. At least it’s my theory that if you don’t care about the style and layout of the calendaring software or calendar format you use to track events, you probably don’t need a calendar at all. Maybe it’s a matter of taste or aesthetics, maybe it’s a touch of OCD. But if you’re a calendar sort of person, you have some decent options heading into the new year.

Homemade

Word has always been deficient in offering useful built-in calendar templates — heavy on ugly design elements and light on functionality. So I built this little bare-bones template that automatically inserts the dates for you depending on the number of days you specify. There’s room to jot down tasks, activities, or milestones for some temporary assignment or short-term project — situations where you don’t want to plod through a wizard, choosing between art deco and Danish modern design elements before Word spits out a quasi-usable calendar. This one is plain but practical. (You can stick a little clipart in there, if you feel the urge. Snowflake for January, whatever.)

Prefab

You also have plenty of slicker choices, courtesy of Microsoft Office Online. These are fully assembled calendar templates for various applications and purposes. NINETY-SIX of them altogether, for 2009. Plus 54 templates for the 2008-2009 academic year. There are calendars in Visio, Excel, Publisher, OneNote, and Word format, along with a few predictably ugly PowerPoint templates. Calendars by the month, year, and multiyear. Portrait, landscape, five days, seven. Lunar calendars for different time zones, photo calendars, postcard calendars, Julian calendars. And if you look hard enough, you’ll even spot a basic 12-month calendar for Word 2003 and later without a single scrap of art deco design nonsense on it. If your taste runs that way.

Happy calendaring!

Five ways to select text with your mouse

Selecting text is a common task in Word. You can use the mouse to highlight text by dragging the cursor over it, but that can be tedious and a bit cumbersome — and fortunately, unnecessary. Here are a few easy selection techniques for mouse lovers:

• To select a word, double-click it.
• To select a single line of text, click in the left margin next to the line.
• To select a sentence, hold down [Ctrl] and then click anywhere in the sentence.
• To select a paragraph, click three times in the paragraph. Alternatively, click twice in the left margin next to the paragraph.
• To select the entire document, click three times in the left margin.

Include a subliminal message in a PowerPoint presentation

Some clever effects are simple to create, but not necessarily something you’d think of on your own. Including a subliminal message is one of those tricks. Creating it is simple — thinking of it is the hard part.

To include a subliminal message, insert the appropriate text or graphic object. Then, right-click the item and choose Custom Animation. Click Animation Effects (the yellow star) and choose Entrance. From the resulting submenu, select Flash Once. That’s it! During the presentation, PowerPoint will quickly flash the item, just once, when that slide is current.

Now, the appropriateness of such a technique matters. For the most part, you’ll use this trick in a humorous way — and used correctly, it’s effective and hilarious. Just keep in mind that humor is subjective and use good judgment. I don’t recommend using this technique during a serious presentation. Also, be sure you know your audience well and that they’re open to the message and method.

Partially hide the Office 2007 Ribbon

Anyone who’s taken a good look at Office 2007 knows about the infamous Ribbon. Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay. The main complaint I hear is that you can’t customize it, not easily anyway. Another complaint is that the Ribbon steals too much space. That is true — it’s definitely larger than the standard menu bar. Fortunately, you can hide the Ribbon to free up a bit of space, using one of the following methods:

• Choose Minimize The Ribbon from the Quick Access toolbar’s drop-down list.
• Press [Ctrl]+[F1].
• Double-click the active tab.

Any of these toggle methods will hide or display most of the Ribbon. However, the tabs stay — you can’t totally get rid of the Ribbon without some serious programming tricks or using a third-party product.

Fix various Word document issues via copy-and-paste

Working on a long, complex Word document recently, with several layers of tracked changes, I was preparing the document for final distribution. While trying to clear all the tracked changes, I noticed that after accepting all changes, there still remained one that displayed each time I opened the document. Whenever I accepted it, saved the document and closed it, it would return to haunt me the next time I opened the document. The change was to the document’s table of contents, located on page three, but the change “bubble” showed up at the very top of page one. Clearly something was amiss with the document, something that tends to happen with Word documents that have been through the blender a few times.

I tried a number of techniques to resolve the problem, such as accepting the change in each possible method (by clicking the bubble, from the reviewing pane, and from the reviewing toolbar), by saving the document as a new file, and by deleting the change and re-doing the …

10.5: Avoid Mail’s ‘no sound for new messages’ bug

Apple Mail.app does not play the new mail alert sound in a consistent manner, and this bug has been there since the first release of 10.5. This occurs when Mail.app uses IMAP’s IDLE command to discover a new message — if that’s the case, then the new mail alert is not played. The alert is only played when Mail.app uses the periodic polling to discover a new message.

Therefore, the solution is to turn off the IDLE command, and make the polling interval shorter. In Mail, open Preferences and go to Accounts » Advanced in all your mail accounts and turn off the Use IDLE command feature. Next, go to the General section of Preferences, and set Check for New Mail to Every minute — you can set a longer interval if you want, so long as you don’t set it to Manual.

Now your mail alerts should play for every incoming message, but you will see your…

Use Secrets to greatly simplify ‘defaults write’ hints

If you’re not aware of it, Secrets is a preference pane that makes it easy to implement the many different defaults write modifications that exist for both Apple and third-party applications. I haven’t checked out every entry in the program, but I suspect that it has the vast majority of the defaults write hints we’ve posted here over the years. Once installed, you can see modifications by program, and easily update the list to show the newest additions. You can even add a secret to the database yourself, if you discover a new one.

The upside of using Secrets is that you don’t need any Terminal skill to use it, and you don’t need to remember any obscure defaults write commands. There’s not r…

Reboot a hung system with Spotlight and Terminal

I hate switching off the power on a hung system. As a last resort before doing that, when logging out or even Force Quit won’t work, I’ve had some success with this method. Invoke Spotlight with Command-Space. Even if you don’t see the search box appear, keep following these steps. Type Terminal and hit Return. With a bit of luck, you’ll see a Terminal window open.

Log into Terminal as an administrator, for example: ssh admin@mycomputername.local (replace admin with the short name of an administrator account, and mycomputername.local with your computer’s Bonjour name (see the Sharing preference pane).

Enter the admin password when prompted. If you get a message that the system can’t verify the identity of the computer and asking you if you want to proceed, type yes. Once logged in, you can try any Terminal command and see if it works. Usually, I just type sudo reboot and enter the admin password when prompted.
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One possible fix for a non-ejecting disk image problem

There have been a number of reports that the Leopard Finder silently ignores your wish to eject disks and disk images, no matter if you click the Eject button in the Finder’s sidebar, drag the disk to the Trash, or right-click and choose Eject. The only simple work around was using the hard disk utility.

I had the same problem with my MacBook Pro for the last couple of month — and accidentally found a solution looking at the recent version of Onyx. In Onyx, you have the option to remove the Eject Disk menu item from the File menu of the Finder. It turned out that at some point in the past I had removed that item, and then forgot about doing so. Restoring the missing menu solved the above problem.

Of course, I do not know if this is of any help for other people with the same disk eject problem.

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