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.
The final phase of the deployment is the Product Innovation Phase where SharePoint My Sites and social computing become tools driving product innovation inside a company. These tools help further employee engagement and put crowd-sourcing sessions online across a company’s secure network to engage marketing, sales, and internal product experts to brainstorm new products, services, and ideas to increase customer satisfaction.
Takeaway: Yammer, the enterprise social network, has a capable iPhone app that can help mobile users stay in touch with their coworkers. Will Kelly demonstrates the basics of the Yammer iOS app.
Yammer, the enterprise social network and recent Microsoft acquisition, is actually quite iPhone friendly. The Yammer iOS app lets iPhone users get access to their organization’s enterprise social network, so they can monitor their feed plus send and receive messages from other network members.
One of Yammer’s goals is to replace the email inbox, and the Yammer iOS app helps extend this new breed of social enterprise to mobile users.
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.
I am a sucker for practical technology books especially about Microsoft SharePoint so Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Creating and Implementing Real World Projects hits my sweet spot with its well paced projects that take readers through all the stages to create and implement a SharePoint project using out of the box features. It puts me in my mind of the excellent SharePoint 2010 for Project Management book by Dux Raymond Sy.
The projects based approach to this book is a real selling point especially since you don’t even need to be a fully trained SharePoint developer/administrator in order to follow them and the create the projects. The book’s projects run the gamut from a project management solution, a basic FAQ solution, to a resource scheduling solution. Project complexity grows as the book progresses but each project sticks to the format of Identifying the Business Problems; Gathering Information; Designing the Solution; Building the Solution; and Managing the Solution.
While Microsoft Word Track Changes and Comments are well known document review tools for editors and reviewers, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 also has its own set of review tools you can use when you’re reviewing the next big client presentation. Like it or not, a lot of the civilized business world runs on PowerPoint presentations making it in everybody’s best interest to get reviewers using electronic review tools to review PowerPoint slides.
In this post, let’s take a look at those review tools:
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:
Security and Privacy for Microsoft Office 2010 Users by Mitch Tulloch is a book I’ve been trying to find for years. Throughout my time as a technical writer, I’ve bumped into some minor to major security and privacy issues related to the development and distribution of Microsoft Office documents including some that caused a measure of embarrassment to people. By extension of my work as a technical writer, I’ve had to give both formal and one-on-one training about some of the topics in this book and can tell you it is easy to say it’s just Microsoft Office until something you don’t want to leak out gets out in one of your documents. read more
One of the hidden gems of Office 2010 is that it now includes OneNote 2010 – the latest release of Microsoft’s simple yet elegant note taking application. Formerly, you had to purchase OneNote separately making it a special software request inside many corporations and not standard issue. Now that it comes with all versions of Office 2010, my first hope is that it helps slay the useless tradition of taking meeting minutes, but before that comes collaborating with OneNote.
OneNote can serve as an effective backchannel for collaborative note taking, whiteboard session captures, and capturing the myriad of bits and bytes that comes with running a technology project.
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.
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