Workers' Edge

Since I tend to reopen files repeatedly, I like Microsoft Office's list of recently used files that appears at the bottom of the File menu in Office 2003 apps, and on the right side of the window that opens when you click the Office button in their 2007 counterparts. (These documents are also accessible via the My Recent Documents button on the left side of Open and Save As dialog boxes in Office 2003.)

What I don't like is the default of four documents that Office 2003 shows on the File menu. Since I'm likely to cycle through more than four files at a time, I reset the number to the maximum of nine. Of course, many people prefer to show no recent documents in this list. Fortunately, changing this setting is a breeze.

To change the number of files shown in your recently opened list in Office 2003 apps, click Tools > Options > General, and change the number in the "Recently used file list" up to the top limit of nine, or down to zero, if you prefer to see no files listed. (See below for a Registry tweak that disables this feature in all Office applications.) When you're done, click O.

Increase or decrease the number of recently opened files listed on Office 2003's File menu via this setting.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The list of recently used files is enhanced in Office 2007 by adding these entries to the right pane of the window that appears when you click the Office button. You can show as many as 50 files in this pane, though they may not fit (my version of Office 2007 defaults to showing the 17 most recently opened files).

The file names are now easier to read because they're no longer truncated by the narrow width of Office 2003's File menu. You're also able to keep certain files on this list by clicking their pin icon on the right. Normally, the least recently used file would drop off the list automatically, as the maximum number of files was reached.

Add more files to the recently used list in Office 2007, or reduce the number to zero to show none.

(Credit: Microsoft)

If you find the "Recently used file list" option grayed out in Office 2003, it could be due to a setting in the Tweak UI add-on for Windows that disables this option. To enable it, double-click the Tweak UI icon in the Control Panel, choose the IE tab, and check "Add new documents to Documents on Start Menu." Microsoft has more information about this in a Knowledge Base article.

Another way to customize your list of recent documents is via a Registry tweak. Just be sure to back up your Registry by creating a restore point before you make any changes. Microsoft provides step-by-step instructions for clearing your list of recently used Office files via the Registry.

Tomorrow: tweak Windows XP's list of My Recent Documents and Vista's Recent Items.

If I had a nickel for every time I've typed the word "Microsoft," and another two cents for each occasion I've had to enter "Windows," I just might own the dang company by now.

I'll bet you've got your own list of terms you've typed so often you can barely see the letters on their keys anymore. But there's no need for you to spell them out each time you need to use them. Just enter them once in the AutoCorrect dialog box in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office apps along with the abbreviations of your choice. Then simply type the abbreviation to have the entire word (or words) displayed when you press the space bar.

Start by making a list of the longish terms you type repeatedly. (I'll use the 50 states as an example.) Then in Office 2003 apps, click Tools > AutoCorrect > AutoCorrect Options (or press Alt, T, A in succession). In Office 2007 programs, click the Office button, choose the options button on the bottom-right of the window, select Proofing, and choose the AutoCorrect Options button (or press Alt, F, I, press the down arrow to select Proofing, press Tab to select AutoCorrect Options, and press Enter).

In the Replace field near the middle of the window, enter the full term you want to create a shortcut for. In the With field, type the first two or three letters of the word or term (make sure it isn't itself a word you're likely to type, such as "to" or "of"). For example, I entered each state name in the Replace field, and its two-letter abbreviation in the With field, but I changed "me" to "mai" for "Maine" and "or" to "orn" for "Oregon."

Add the long words and phrases you type most often, along with a two- or three-letter abbreviation, in Office's AutoCorrect Options dialog box.

(Credit: Microsoft)

After your custom list of terms and shortcuts have been added to those built into Office, simply type the shortcut and press the spacebar to enter the full term.

Tomorrow: Transfer your custom AutoCorrect list to another PC.

Microsoft claims that Office 2007's ribbon interface saves time by putting the features people use most often closer at hand. For those of us who spent years learning where those functions were in previous versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the changes aren't the productivity boosters Microsoft envisioned.

I've done more than my share of rummaging around the ribbon in Office 2007 trying to find a particular command, and I've even used Microsoft's user-interface guides to hunt down the feature I needed. Now Microsoft Office Labs has developed the free Search Commands add-on for Office 2007 that lets you type in a command and access it in an instant.

After you download and install the add-on, the Search Commands tab is added to the ribbon. Click it (or press the Windows key and Y) and type the name of the command you need.

For example, the other day I was looking for the Reveal Formatting option in Word 2007. I eventually found it under the Display tab in Word Options (off the Office button menu). It would've been much faster for me to simply open Search Commands, type "reveal formatting," and enter the number that appears next to that option ("5" in this case).

The free Search Commands add-on for Office 2007 makes finding options almost instantaneous.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Office Labs' only other offering to date is the Community Clips add-on designed to facilitate finding and sharing how-to videos relating to Office 2007. The site describes three other projects: one that creates a wiki on a SharePoint server, one that is intended to improve the Tablet PC pen interface, and one designed to serve as a marketplace for freelancers.

Note that all of the projects are prototypes, and Microsoft collects "usage metrics" in an attempt to enhance them, though you can opt out of sending any data to the company. I don't know about the other Office Labs projects, but Search Commands is an add-on I expect will save me quite a bit of time by slicing the ribbon to ribbons.

At a report-planning meeting last week I volunteered to add a timeline to a Word document that would ultimately become a PDF file. I could've used Word or Excel to create a horizontal timeline with about a dozen events, each denoted by a text box big enough to accommodate five or six words.

Instead, I went to Microsoft's Office templates site and downloaded one of the free service's many timelines for Word. Enter "timeline" (or the term of your choice) in the site's search box to retrieve links to a couple dozen time-related diagrams available for download.

Simply create, reposition, and resize as many text boxes as the timeline requires, and then overwrite the template's text. Makes any changes you want to the format, background colors, and other aspects of the template, save the file with a unique name, and the project's done.

Find free Office templates of every description at Microsoft Office Online.

(Credit: Microsoft)

If you have created an Office template you would like to share with the world, use Microsoft's template-submission tool, which requires an Office Online login (a Hotmail or other Passport account will work). The template has to be less than 2MB in size and meet other restrictions. The submission tool scans the file and attempts to categorize it, but you can pick the category and describe your template. Accept Microsoft's terms of use, and then click the Upload button.

Other free and commercial Office templates
HP offers a great selection of Office templates for small businesses. Some of the site's Powerpoint templates are particularly eye-catching.

For a wider selection of business templates, check out OfficeReady Professional, a $70 collection of templates for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (30-day free trial). The templates can be used to create e-mail and print newsletters, flyers, brochures, stationery, and reports. Sales and marketing plans, invoices, and other business forms are well represented in the package.

Tomorrow: delay sending messages in Microsoft Outlook.

Last week I was working with a group of people on a Microsoft Word document when I noticed that the printout being used by one of the group failed to show the contents of the file's tables. It turns out she uses OpenOffice.org rather than Office, and OpenOffice.org's Writer app missed the table data.

The week before that I had to resend a spreadsheet I had e-mailed to my brother because I inadvertently saved it in Excel 2007's new .xlsx format, and he's using an older version of Office.

Some people would say these minor inconveniences are part of the price of technological innovation, but if you multiply these time-sinks a million-fold they add up to a major loss of productivity. True PC-software standards aren't likely to arrive anytime soon, so it's up to us to ensure that the files we share with others look and work the way we intend them to.

Get Microsoft's Office Compatibility Pack
The greatest challenge in switching from Office 2003 to Office 2007 isn't trying to find the ribbon equivalent of the old toolbar options, it's remembering to save files in the .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats rather than their new XML equivalents. In a way it's a shame not to be able to use the XML formats because they save storage space by allowing files to be much smaller, and they offer other advantages. But there will be people using Office 2003, Office XP, and Office 2000 for many years to come, and not all of them will bother downloading Microsoft's Office Compatibility Pack.

If you intend to share files using Office's XML formats with people who don't have Office 2007 installed on their systems, send them a link to the compatibility-pack download along with the files. Unfortunately, they'll need to visit the Microsoft Update site before they install the pack, and if that entails downloading and installing an Office or Windows update, they may need to restart their system before they can install the compatibility pack and subsequently open the file. Talk about jumping through hoops!

Roll back the file-format clock
Now you see why it's usually easier to use the older .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats. Nearly all modern PC programs accommodate these files, but that's not to say the proprietary Microsoft formats are trouble-free. Microsoft owns another "standard" for word-processing documents that is supported by all versions of Word and designed for interoperability: the Rich Text Format (.rtf). One big advantage of .rtf files is that they can be opened in OpenOffice.org's Writer word processor, as well as AbiWord, KWord, and other open-source word processors.

Unfortunately, there's no .rtf equivalent for spreadsheets. The simplest, most universal format for spreadsheet data is Comma-Separated Values (CSV), which all versions of Excel--and all other spreadsheet programs--accommodate without a problem. Excel also supports the old WK1 Lotus 1-2-3 format, which lets you perform calculations but is much simpler than Excel. Software developer Joel Spolsky offers an in-depth look at your Office-format options. Most of the information is from a programmer's perspective, but it's useful for your average, everyday user as well.

Save the file as a PDF
If the person you're sharing a file with needs only to view and perhaps comment on it rather than editing or otherwise altering it, send them a PDF version of the file. I described how to add PDF-creation capability to any PC for free in a previous post. The upcoming version 3 of OpenOffice.org is expected to allow you to import PDF files, but I haven't found a free program that lets you open and edit PDFs the way you can using Adobe's Acrobat or other commercial PDF apps.

Tomorrow: easy ways to find system information in Windows.

I was thinking about upgrading to a wide-screen display, but then I realized that the programs I use most often are up-and-down, not side-to-side.

So instead of shelling out a couple hundred dollars for a new monitor, I maximized my available screen space by tweaking the full-screen views in Word, Excel, and other Office apps.

Access menu options in full-screen view
To get the big-picture view of your documents, worksheets, and other Office files, there's no substitute for the full screen. You may think Office's full-screen option is an all-or-nothing affair: Either you see no menus or toolbars, or you see all of them.

In fact you can access just the standard menus (File, Edit, View, etc.) in Office 2003's full-screen mode by pressing F10 or Alt, and then pressing the underlined letters to access that menu's options or simply moving the mouse pointer to the top of the screen. The menu disappears once you've selected an option, or you can remove it manually by pressing F10 or Alt again, or Esc.

You can access other toolbars from full-screen view in Office 2003 apps by right-clicking the Close Full Screen button and choosing the one you want from the pop-up menu. Then press the Alt key to toggle between the toolbar you selected and the standard menu. Close the toolbar by right-clicking the Close Full Screen button again and unchecking it. Press Esc to exit full-screen view.

Open any toolbar in Office 2003's full-screen mode by right-clicking the Close Full Screen button and choosing it from the pop-up menu.

(Credit: Microsoft)

There's no reason to leave the toolbar you need at the top of the screen. Move it to either side of the screen, the bottom of the window, or float it anywhere by dragging the "handle" on the left edge to your desired location.

If no single toolbar has the options you use most often, create your own by right-clicking any toolbar and choosing Customize > Toolbars > New. Give the toolbar a name, select a template (choosing Normal.dot makes it available to all documents), and click OK. Fill your new toolbar by clicking the Commands tab, selecting an entry in the Categories window, and dragging the desired command to the toolbar. When all your options are in place, click Close.

Add items to your custom toolbar by dragging them out of the Commands list and placing them onto the toolbar.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Bonus tip: Access items on Windows' Start menu from full-screen view by pressing the Windows key, or Ctrl-Esc if your keyboard lacks such a key.

Keyboard shortcuts for moving around big Excel worksheets
Most of the worksheets you create in Excel will be deeper and wider than you can view in full-screen mode. The fastest way to navigate a monster worksheet is to use keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl-right arrow moves you to the last cell containing data in the selected row; Ctrl-left arrow to the first such cell in the row; Ctrl-down arrow to the last cell with data in the selected column; Ctrl-up arrow to the first such cell in the column; Ctrl-Home to the top-left cell of the worksheet; Ctrl-End to the bottom-right cell; Ctrl-Page Up moves you to the next worksheet; Ctrl-Page Down to the previous one; Alt-Page Up moves you one screen to the left; and Alt-Page Down one screen to the right. Microsoft provides a complete list of Excel keyboard shortcuts.

What about Office 2007?
While Word 2007 and Excel 2007 retain the Full Screen views of their predecessors (press Alt-V, U), you can't access the main menus (File, Edit, etc.) the way you can in Office 2003 apps, nor is the mini-Full Screen toolbar visible for accessing other toolbars, though you can view standard formatting options by right-clicking anywhere in the document or worksheet. Word 2007 adds the Full Screen Reading view, which preserves your Quick Access toolbar and View Options at the top of the screen, while also showing two pages of the document side by side. You can scroll to other pages two at a time by clicking the hand icon that appears in the bottom-right corner of the window, and the bottom-left and -right corners of subsequent pages of the document. You also get a jump menu at the top of the window for moving to specific sections or pages of the file.

Unfortunately, while you can add comments to the document in this mode, you can't make changes to the file itself. That's why I'm glad you can still work in full-screen mode, though you lose easy access to toolbars. Perhaps there's a way to return toolbar access in this mode in Office 2007's ribbon apps that I don't know about. Or maybe somebody has written an add-on that returns this functionality. I'll keep looking and let you know what I find.

Tomorrow: take a look under Windows' hood with Process Explorer and Event Viewer/Windows Event Log.

One of the most notable additions to Microsoft's 2007 Office System was the Trust Center, which centralizes the security options in Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and the other applications in the suite. Of course, this being Office, it figures that many of the most important security features--including the new Document Inspector--also reside elsewhere.

To open the Trust Center in the 2007 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access, click the Office button, select the Options button at the bottom-right of the window, choose Trust Center in the left pane, and click the Trust Center Settings button in the right pane. In Outlook 2007 and Publisher 2007, click Tools > Trust Center.

The Trust Center in Microsoft Office 2007 apps centralizes most of security options in the programs.

The security options presented in the Trust Center vary from program to program, but you'll likely want to start by clicking the Privacy Options button. The third and fifth options under Privacy Settings in the right window are checked by default: Download a file periodically that helps determine system problems; and Check Microsoft Office documents that are from or link to suspicious Web sites (this last option is missing in Outlook 2007).

The 2007 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher list an option to remove personal information from file properties on save (this may be grayed out), as well as a Document Inspector button, which searches the file for comments, revisions, and hidden metadata. You can also access the Document Inspector in Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 by clicking the Office button and choosing Prepare > Inspect Document.

Listed under the Trusted Publishers tab are the companies and organizations whose macros and add-ins have an approved digital signature. With Office 2007's default security settings selected, you see a warning in the Message Bar at the top of the file window whenever a macro or add-in from an entity not on this list tries to run. Click the Options button on the bar to open the Security Options dialog box, which provides information on the blocked content. Here you can choose to let the add-in run, trust all files from the publisher, or block it (the default setting). You can also click Show Signature Details to view more information.

You can also choose to allow all files from specific folders or other locations to open with no security warnings. Just click the Add new location button in the Trusted Locations window and enter the folder or network path, if you check "Allow Trusted Locations on my network (not recommended)" at the bottom of the window. Microsoft warns against enabling this option for a reason: It provides malicious VBA scripts entering via this location unfettered access to your applications, where they can wreak all sorts of havoc.

Add folder or network paths to your Trusted Locations list in Office 2007 to avoid the security warning when files they contain open.

The other Trust Center Settings tabs let you disable all add-ins, or adjust your macro and ActiveX settings. The default settings meet the needs of most users: "Prompt me before enabling all controls with minimal restrictions" for ActiveX, and "Disable all macros with notification" ("Warnings for signed macros; all unsigned macros are disabled" in Outlook 2007).

Outlook 2007 adds the E-mail Security dialog box, where you can choose to encrypt outgoing messages and attachments, and to read your incoming mail as plain text rather than as HTML. This option helps prevent malicious content in a message from running automatically (see yesterday's post), and you can view the HTML version of messages from people you trust by clicking the warning at the top of the of the window and choosing Display as HTML.

Many of the permission-restricting options in Office 2007 apps require Microsoft's Information Rights Management/Windows Rights Management Services, but you can limit who can read and work on your files without these services in Word 2007 by clicking Review > Protect Document > Restrict Formatting and Editing. In Excel 2007, click Review and choose one of the "Protect" options in the Changes area of the ribbon. You can restrict the Word styles that can be used, or password-protect the file, though the user-authentication options once again require IRM/WRMS. You can also assign a password to a file in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint by clicking the Office button, choosing Save As, clicking Tools at the bottom of the Save As dialog box, choosing General Options in the drop-down menu, entering the password, and clicking OK.

Add a password to a file in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint via the Tools button in the Save As dialog box.

Tomorrow: keep your passwords in order, with or without a password manager.