Now that you have notebooks teeming with notes and data it’s time to settle in with OneNote as part of your daily workflow. In Getting Started with OneNote 2010: Part 3, we’ll take a look at how to search through your notebooks for information and how to get information out of OneNote 2010 into other applications and to other project team members.
There is more to sharing Word documents than the ancient tradition of attaching them to an Outlook email. Now Word 2010 makes it easy to share your Word documents over the web or SharePoint without you having to leave the application and creating too many steps between your documents and their recipients
Click File. The BackStage View appears. Click Save & Send to access Save & Send options. Here is a breakdown of options that are available:
Professional documents can go through many changes before you declare them final and ready for publication. Along the way to final document, it is real easy to chock up a lot of questions and ideas that don’t have any place in even the draft document. While Word has some great commenting and track changes tool, it doesn’t take too long until the document can flash an unfortunate author back to freshman comp class. Now, in Office 2010, you can take notes in OneNote and link them to your document.
I’ve written before about securing Microsoft Word documents in the Windows world. It’s an important but often overlooked step of the publications process especially if you produce any kind of sensitive documents. However, what about document security if you are using Microsoft Word 2011 on the Mac?
There is a lot of stuff lurking beneath Word documents that can pose security and privacy risks like author information, metadata, track changes, and comments.
Here are some options for securing your Word documents on the Mac:
Now that Microsoft OneNote is part of the full Microsoft Office Suite, it was only a matter of time that Microsoft would launch a certification program for the product. The MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft OneNote by John Pierce is the official study guide for the certification and while written for readers seeking OneNote certification breaks down all the major OneNote tasks for using OneNote productively. Even if you aren’t angling for OneNote certification, it’s a book worth checking out to learn about OneNote more in-depth.
Pierce is a solid writer with an easy to read style and the book is well paced. All of this is important to me in a certification study guide. The screen shots are clear and accurate (they show what that reader will actually see in OneNote) and don’t degenerate into some college freshman art student’s modern art interpretation of a screen shot like they do in the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Word.
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.
One of the challenging aspects of my current position is working with a lot of non-writers or those in what I consider allied professions – trainers, instructional designers, and project managers – and helping guide them through technical writing and course development tasks. It became relatively clear to me why I stayed a solo technical writer for so many years but I’ve been able to get some more insight into how regular folks use Microsoft Word and other Office applications that I am growing to appreciate.
This experience has also shown me that even with templates in place for each major document type there is no way escaping the need for non-writers to have a base set of MS Word skills if they are thrust into a writing or course development position.
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