The way people use Microsoft Word largely hasn’t changed much since the product initially launched. However, since Office 2003, Microsoft Office application and Word in particular have become more integrated with other applications and the cloud.
If your usage of Microsoft Word largely hasn’t changed much in the past few years even though you and/or your employer are upgrading to Office 2010 then there are some underutilized features you might be missing but could benefit your work.
A marketing consultant friend of mine recently posed a challenge to me, how would I build a modular proposal template using Word 2010? The users of the template would be a sales team – all with varying MS Word skills – and the company has an evolving brand and ever-growing product line up. The client was also using Office 2010 and I was looking forward to getting a Word 2010 client project under my belt.
His client also was trying to get away from too much cutting and pasting across proposals and had an eye for more standardization in their proposal process. A master document approach never became part of the equation nor did too much inserting kung fu. Master Documents are an urban myth in the Microsoft World and anyway I like to keep things simple and easy to use especially if I am handing a document or template off to non-writers.
One of the most useful – yet potentially embarrassing –features of Microsoft Word is Track Changes. Using the Track Changes feature lets you electronically markup your Word documents with edits, additions, and revisions. Think of it as an electronic red pen so to speak.
The potential embarrassment of the feature comes in when you don’t accept the Track Changes. Comments, edits, and revisions not fit for public consumption can leak out. Even if none of the comments are critical it is just plain sloppy to have a recipient open up a document that still contains markups.
Here is the advice I give people about using track changes:
Having your resume online is the nice bond paper of twenty years ago now that so many companies have an online first approach to recruiting employees. However, the state of network security in some organizations might be directly at odds with the tools job hunters use to post their resumes online.
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:
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