Tag Archives: office

Office 2010 tips and tricks, right from your…screensaver

Posted by on September 11, 2011 1 comment

Remember the good old “Clippy”? “It looks like you are writing a letter, do you need help?”

A lot of people cursed the cute little paperclip for popping up at any time, but the idea of giving people small tips for common tasks is not that bad. Well, the tips are back, this time in your… screensaver. Microsoft recently released the Office 2010 “Getting Started” screensaver. 

Of course, we are no longer in the nineties, so the tips are animated, flashy… but the content is still very valuable.

Get Microsoft Silverlight

DCSIMG

Some caveats:

  • you need the .Net framework 4.0 (installed automatically if you don't have it yet)
  • the content is pulled from an RSS feed on Office.com, so you do need access to that site
Read all about it on the Office blog
Download the screensaver

Office 365 – first impressions

Posted by on July 3, 2011 No comments

This week, I migrated all of our personal mailboxes to the Office 365 for Professionals and Small Businesses program (also called the “Plan P1″). These are my first impressions:

  • pricing is very good; I already had some Exchange mailboxes, and for about the same price I get more storage (25 GB mailbox!), SharePoint and Lync;
  • there is a one month trial program; however, in the trial, you cannot link your own domain to Office 365;
  • you can add multiple domains to the same account; the fact that you have to point the name servers of your domain to Microsoft was a surprise to me. I expected that it would be enough to point the mx records to Office 365, but apparently in this plan this is not the case. There are some rumours that it works, but it is not supported;
  • you can configure A and CNAME records in the Office 365 DNS manager; it took me a while to figure out that you can use an @ to create a record for your root domain (http://mylearning.be)
  • the Office web apps are included in the package, and are very useful, e.g. if you need to edit Office documents on a mac and have no Office installed;
  • the primary support channel is the Office 365 community; content is relatively good, but sometimes it is difficult to filter issues from the beta program or from the enterprise subscription if you are looking for a specific issue; I filed a service request and got a response within 24 hours.

I’ll post more experiences once I explore the possibilities of the SharePoint part of Office 365, but for the moment I am very happy with it.

More info and trial on http://www.office365.com.

Teaching in the future with Microsoft Interactive Classroom

Posted by on November 1, 2010 2 comments

Sometimes you discover a great learning tool, hidden somewhere on the web. The Microsoft Interactive Classroom is such a tool, and it gives us a taste of what classroom training might be in the (near) future. If you have ever wondered if they was way you could avoid printing tons of paper manuals, if you are tired of distributing PowerPoint handouts that nobody ever uses, this is for you.

Basically, it is an add-on to PowerPoint and OneNote (2007 or 2010). As a teacher, you use PowerPoint to prepare your slides as usual, and you can use the Microsoft Interactive Classroom add-on to add question slides in your presentation. You get an extra tab in the ribbon for that:

Once you start giving your session, you click the Start Session button. This starts a broadcast of your presentation on the network. Your screen will look like this:

With the ribbon, you can annotate your slides (works great if you have a tablet!) but also start polls, display the results of the poll to your students…

But the best feature is yet to come. Your students connect to your broadcasted session with… OneNote! They automatically get a copy of the slides as a separate note page, they can take their own notes on the slides, they see the annotations of the instructor in their OneNote… and after the session they go home with their own annotated lesson material. Of course, they need to be connected to the same network (wired or wireless).

We tried it during an interactive session of one hour with 20 workstations and it was quite impressive. And what is even better: it’s free!

 

More information:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2010/aug10/08-16education.mspx

 

Download:
http://www.educationlabs.com/projects/IC/Pages/default.aspx

Stubborn OneNote: cannot rename notebook section

Posted by on October 6, 2010 No comments

My favorite note-taking tool, Microsoft OneNote, has been bothering me for quite a while with a strange issue: for some reason, it renamed a section called “Customer notes” to “Customer notes 2″, and I could not change it back.

After some investigation, this was the origin of the problem:

  • My notebook was synced to a SharePoint document library
  • It was probably called “Customer notes” before, but a sync conflict added a second section “Customer notes 2″
  • I deleted “Customer notes” and tried to remove the 2 in “Customer notes 2″, but no luck.

The cause: when you have a section that contains attachments, OneNote creates a subfolder called <name of section>_onefiles. When I deleted the section “Customer notes”, it did NOT delete the folder “Customer Notes_onefiles”. That’s why I could not rename “Customer notes 2″ to “Customer notes”, because the corresponding subfolder “Customer notes_onefiles” already existed.

I deleted the old “Customer notes_onefiles” and then I could rename my section. I’m a happy OneNoter again !

Co-authoring with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010

Posted by on July 2, 2010 1 comment

I have been playing with the co-authoring function in Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and the Office Web Apps. Co-authoring allows simultaneous editing of the same document by multiple users. It took me some time to figure out which apps actually support this functionality, because not all of them do.

The following site gives a good overview: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/document-collaboration-and-co-authoring-HA101812148.aspx

The table below (taken from the article) is a good summary:

Application Server Requirements Common Scenarios
Word 2010 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Any document including proposals, plans, vision statements, minutes, newsletters, and reports
PowerPoint 2010 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Any presentation including training, conferences, post-mortems, product overviews, handbooks, and project status reports
Excel Web App SharePoint Foundation 2010
and Office Web Apps		 Any spreadsheet, including team financial modeling, business-to business product line update on a web page, and real-time trading spreadsheet trackers
OneNote 2010 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Any notebook, including recurring meeting minutes, project brainstorming (“group-think”), shared research and reference material, and shared training courses
OneNote Web App SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Office Web Apps