Microsoft OneNote 2010, a note taking application, is really gaining a wider reach as more enterprises upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010. Including OneNote 2010 as part of Office 2010 is a great move by Microsoft to get this simple yet elegant productivity application into the hands of more users.
Getting started with OneNote 2010 is quite easy. This post lays out some of the basics for getting started with the application.
Often Microsoft Office suffers from a lack of credit (and support) despite the fact that it is the underpinnings to many a business process. It’s easy to brush it off as just being Office but its important to consider that Microsoft Office as an application suite continues to undergo such a metamorphosis from its inauspicious beginning as a bunch of bundled desktop applications to a front end into how a business operates complete with collaboration, communications, and a potential interface into corporate backend applications.
A nonscientific survey of my local job listings show that Office 2010 is showing up on more corporate desktops and with that many new users are trying to figure out how to get the most out of Outlook 2010. With every Office release, Microsoft shows a little extra love to one application and Outlook definitely saw some product management and developer love in this go around.
I’ve also come to believe that Microsoft Outlook and not spreadsheets is what really runs projects and even businesses so I want to offer up some Outlook setup advice in this post. These are items that are typically overlooked in stock implementations but can save you embarrassment and make you a bit more productive.
There is more to document security than just locking down documents on a SharePoint site where it is only accessible to users with the appropriate security privileges. Microsoft Word documents can hold many secrets that have embarrassed both corporations and United States Federal government agencies in the past. Technical writers should be the ones taking the lead when it comes to securing the documents they produce.
Here are some tips for adding Word document security to your writing and document release processes:
After having a great experience reading the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint, my next read was the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Word. Microsoft Word has always been a bread and butter application for me as both a technical writer and freelance writer. Things have been a bit slow lately, so I am taking advantage of the time to shore up some old skills and learn new ones.
The book’s tendency to overlap screen captures became a bit annoying after the first 100 pages. To a novice Word 2010 user, this space saving move could lead to a minor bit of confusion. Take the screen captures on page 143 of 317 (iBook edition) which borders on abstract art not clear and concise communications. While I am on the subject of screen shots, fading out the bottom and right sides of them while certainly a special effect made it almost look like a rendering issue on the screen. There were also a few places in the text where the pagination would cut into the middle of a procedure that was also a bit disappointing considering the state of epublishing tools today. These lapses in production detracted from the overall writing of the manuscript and exercises.
One of the dirty secrets about Microsoft Word in the technical communications world is that you have to put in the time to make it work. The Secret Life of Word by Robert Delwood from XML Press tackles some of the higher end topics in Microsoft Word like creating macros, find and replace; fields, form fields, and content controls; building blocks; and smart tags in an easy to digest manner that is accessible to even non-Word geek technical communicators.
It uses step-by-step procedures that should help Word newbies to inveterate tinkerers and even experts learn new higher end (and often underutilized) features.
The launch of Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft’s new collaboration tool suite that includes SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online, Office 2010 Web Apps, and Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus brought a lot of headlines because anything cloud is hot right now. Nevertheless, project management features were absent from the marketing push unless you knew where to look.
Eric Lundquist’s recent article about the need for Microsoft Office to retire furthers my opinion of the wide gulf that exists between some technology journalists and real life out there in cubicle land. I am not talking about the next big sexy cloud computing platform or latest mobile computing apps but the people who do the day-to-day grunt work – crunching spreadsheets in accounting, writing technical documents, creating small databases, and presentation development for next week’s sales team meeting.
I am dabbling in proposals again through side freelance project I am currently working on. This time my job isn’t writing boiler plate but the template (though I am offering up a lot of comments and some suggested edits) but to build a bullet proof Microsoft Word template for the client’s sales people to work from when writing a proposal. Their corporate standard is Microsoft Office 2010 so I am welcoming the opportunity to raise my game on Microsoft Word 2010.
Microsoft Office applications have been a major part of my working life for years. Throughout my work as a technical writer and later as a computer book technical reviewer and then freelance writer, I’ve been able to watch the growth and changes in Microsoft Office from all sides.
The most exciting developments for me have been seeing Office applications move to the web and onto mobile platforms other than PCs. I remember the first time I saw a demo of Zoho Business and got first access to Writely (now Google Docs) and could see the potential for such applications on the web. But my question even back then was how smoothly could such applications integrate with desktop applications. This question is getting easier to answer now with many recent developments.
I’ve comes to see the desktop suite extend beyond its desktop origins into both the web and mobile layers. These are natural layers for Office applications since the way people work has changed so dramatically. This new model also accommodates the diffe
© 2012 Will Kelly All Rights Reserved -- Copyright notice by Blog Copyright
About Will Kelly