In case you don't know, Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 is now available to download. This is a great opportunity to try it out for free and check out all the new features - and there's certainly a lot of them. Sure, there's still bugs to be fixed, but I promise it won't bite. Here's the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/

In addition to the download link, you'll want to check out this two posts from Jensen Harris that contain other links that will help us make a smooth transition.

Some of the Best Beta 2 Resources
Where Did That Feature Go?

Stay tuned for other news and resources about Office 2007 ... this thing is going to take the world by storm!

Now that my kids are out of school, they suddenly have a lot of time on their hands. They are all restless out of their minds!  Particularly my daughter, who only has one thing on her mind ... her 6th birthday party!

Here's the problem; her birthday isn't for another 40 days. We could either be pestered with the question "Is it my birthday yet?", or come up with something she could use to monitor this on her own. So my wife told her to ask her father to create a calendar for her to mark the days leading up to her birthday in July. Here's what I came up with:

Birthday Countdown

This Microsoft Word document uses a combination of three tables, each placed in their own column and accented with simple clipart.  Of course, this could be used for any countdown you like. Also, you may opt to delete all the flower images that I put in for my little girl and add your own clipart.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

If you use Microsoft Excel on a regular basis, then you're probably familiar with tabs. But those of us that are long time spreadsheet users have a greater appreciation for how wonderful they are; that's because workbook tabs weren't always available. Workbook tabs were introduced in Microsoft Excel 95; before that, you only had one sheet per file (I know, scaring isn't it?)

Naturally, the greatest attributes of tabs is being able to organize several related spreadsheets in one file (or workbook), and to link between all of them. Most users know that you can also double click on a tab to rename it. Did you know that you can change the order of the tabs by clicking and dragging them? Good. But ... did you also know that by holding down the CTRL key while you click and drag that you can make a copy of that worksheet?

If you haven't done so, you just right-click on a tab to see the other options available to you. For example, you'll find another to rename, move or copy sheets (for those that are mouse challenged.) Being able to change the color of a tab by right-clicking is a great way add some spice to your workbook.

You'll also find a way to select all of your sheets. But for precise selection (and those that are NOT mouse challenged), you can click on the first sheet and then use the CTRL-click to select other sheet one by one, or SHIFT-click to select a range of sheets. What's so important about selecting sheets you may ask? Something unknown to most users is that whatever tasks you perform in Microsoft Excel (including typing in a cell) happens to all of the worksheets selected, whether it's one sheet or several.

The only thing that used to bother me a little was the size of the tabs ... just a bit small. Ready for something I didn't even know? I learned this morning that you can actually change the size of those tabs (yeah!!!). Check out this neat tip from John Walkenbach's website The Spreadsheet Page. It could change your life!

In case you haven't heard, there's a new virus exploiting Microsoft Word called the Zero-Day Attack. Here are some links to get you up-to-speed. Please read them and protect yourself!

Official Advisory from Microsoft
Beware of Word Attachments
Using Microsoft Word Safe Mode
Other Things You Can Do

Whether you're working a company, working for yourself, or just a home user - security should be a high priority for you. With computer crimes on a continual rise, security has become a top issue in every aspect of our computing. We have secure networks, secure e-mail, secure websites, secure hardware, secure software, and even secure mousepads (LOL - just jokin', but you know what I'm saying) all for the soul purpose of protecting our data from digital predators.

According to Darren Strange, 2007 Office Product Manager in the UK, states in his blog site Office Rocker! that Microsoft has made security "a key focus for every group", including Microsoft Office. Darren has an excellent post this topic, including security features in Office 2003 and in the upcoming version Office 2007.

If you want your Microsoft Office documents to be secure, this post will give you a good start in that direction. Afterwards, I encourage you to learn more about security in all aspects of your computing efforts (well, at least those you care about.)

Well ... not all of your annoyances, but at least some of your technical annoyances. O'Reilly Media, Inc., a leader in technical and computer book documentation (great books, I have several!) has published a series of books called the Annoyances books in which they present a wide range of things that annoy you about computer, software, the web, etc. and explain how to overcome them.

Today, I stubbled across the blog site that O'Reilly has put together that covers a lot of these topics called Annoyances Central, which include annoyances in Microsoft Office. One of the latest posts shows you what to do when Microsoft Word's Find feature can't spell.

I've added this to my blogroll (on the right) and will share with you content from it that I find helpful.

Using the Drop Cap feature in Microsoft Word is a great way to add a little something special to documents that need more elegance. It's very easy to do, you simply click inside the paragraph where you'd like to have a drop cap (dropped capital letter), and then select Drop Cap from the Format menu. From there, you'll be able to select the type you want, how many lines to drop the capital, and the font for it (I always change it to a pretty script font

What you may not know is that you can drop more than just the first character of a sentence, but actually an entire word. To do so, simply click your cursor right behind the drop cap you created (but inside the frame of it), type the rest of the word, and delete the duplicate in the paragraph itself.

The Drop Cap can also be found in Microsoft Publisher; however, you won't be able to drop an entire word like you can with Microsoft Word.

Matt H. Evans, CPA, CMA, CFM has shared his knowledge in financial management for several via his website ... which attracts over 100,000 visitors per week. And from the very beginning, he has offered free Excel spreadsheets that you can download to perform several tasks (i.e. cash flow analysis, stock value, capital budgeting, etc.)

Matt's spreadsheets have always been a great example of how you can use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to their full potential. In addition to his own spreadsheets, this section now includes spreadsheets from other sites. Those interested in these downloads will also find the remainder of his website a very useful resource in financial management.

Google Trends is a brand new tool that gives you the chance to compare anything you want. For example, according to Google, I found out that the West coast is much more popular than the East coast. I simply typed "east coast, west coast" and it returned a trend graph showing actual stats from the Google search engine in a timeline, along with dates of important events related to the search criteria.

In the Micro Persuasion weblog, Steve Rebel list 25 things he learned from Google Trends - one of them being which Microsoft Office application was the most popular. I knew the answer already (I'm sure you do, too); but it was still interesting to see the numbers that support it.

Very cool tool. Google has done it again!

Spreadsheet programs (like Microsoft Excel) are built and optimized for solving complex math problems. But I would guess that the percentage of people that use them for that are less than 0.1 %. Instead, spreadsheets are widely used for organizing data; which is logical since data is usually organized into tables - which is essentially what a spreadsheet is - a big table (or grid). Plus, spreadsheet programs a lot easier to work with than database programs, which makes programs them the popular choice for presenting data.

The nice thing about Microsoft Excel nowadays is that you can organize your data and use it to produce a useful document. Below is an example of a spreadsheet I used to create a basketball league for a youth church league that I ran. I used the same spreadsheet document to list out the teams & dates and to figure out the game schedule by moving teams around. Then applied a small amount of formating it and used it to generate a PDF document of the schedule that I distributed to the coaches.

Basketball Schedule

Obviously, the possibilities are endless. There are many more examples of how you can use Microsoft Excel to produce documents that are quite useful. I will continue to share them as fast as I can. Of course, if there are other documents that you would like to see, be sure to request them here.

In Microsoft Word, you may have noticed 3 buttons at the bottom of the vertical scroll? Aren't you curious what they do? Perhaps you either tried them and didn't know what to do with them, or you were too scared that you'd mess up something.

Well, have no fear ... Jensen Harris has written a great post on exactly what these buttons do, that have actually existed since Microsoft Word 97. After you learn what they are, you'll find them quite useful.

Whenever you're given an opportunity to create or use a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, it means you or someone on your team is going to communicate something important to someone else. This naturally creates a little excitement and a lot of nervousness; and unfortunately, this tends to make creating your PowerPoint presentation a very stressful time.

If you don't forget for who the PowerPoint presentation is intended for (which of course is for your audience, not you), the content of your presentation should be simple to put together. However, if you need a good reminder of that, be sure to read this article I wrote about that. The only left after that to make things as smooth as possible is how you your presentation. Below are features in Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 that you will help you with that.

View Menu ~ Slide Sorter
This is probably the most versatile tool in Microsoft PowerPoint. The original intent of the Slide Sorter is to make it easy to change the order of your slides by clicking and dragging them around. After creating the first slide, I also use the Slide Sorter to copy and paste the rest of the slides I need that use the same layout - which can save you a lot of time. The best time-saver is being able Select-All (Ctrl+A), Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click several slides and perform a task on all of them that are selected. Now you won't have to apply 8 seconds to a slide 20 times; just concentrate on your content, and then configure the slides quickly with the Slide Sorter.

Slide Show Menu ~ Rehearse Timings
I don't have to create a lot of presentations that are on a timer; but when I do, most of them I can get away with applying the same number of seconds to all of them.  But if they have to be different, I never know how many seconds each slide should stay on the screen - and the good news is that I don't have to.  Using the Rehearse Timings feature in Microsoft PowerPoint gives you the power to run your slide while it records the seconds for you. This is great for when you need your slide presentation to match a voice recording, or a music track.

File Menu ~ Package for CD ...
For those of us that don't have a laptop and need our presentation to show on another computer; the Package for CD feature has a lot of advantages over just copying the PPT file onto a floppy or CD. In prior versions of Microsoft PowerPoint, you had to remember to copy the PowerPoint viewer in addition to your presentation - in case the machine you ran it on didn't have the full version of PowerPoint. The Package for CD feature not only includes it for you, but also creates a PLAY.BAT file that you can just double click to start your presentation. Using this also ensures that your presentation is able to run to its full capacity in case the computer you used doesn't have the right version of Microsoft PowerPoint.

When I begin my IT career, I started out as a computer instructor. I learned a lot of different programs, and then I got to teach others how to use them. Some of them I already knew like the back of my hand ... WordPerfect. Back then, it was king of all word processing programs - whether you used WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows, or old faithful WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

But I was forced to also teach this new word processing program called Microsoft Word (perhaps you've heard of it.) There was resistance at first, being so used to WordPerfect. So I complained about subtle differences from the start, including how you couldn't see the "Reveal Codes" behind the document like you can in WordPerfect.

Despite my concerns, I was scheduled to teach it anyway. But then I began feeling comfortable using Microsoft Word. It was easier to use, so much so that I never needed to see Reveal Codes. This also made it easier to teach to others, which was good because we taught Microsoft Word about 5-7 times more than the WordPerfect class. Once it was packaged with Excel, PowerPoint and Access in Microsoft Office, I was hooked.

After my teaching days were over, I hardly ever used anything but Microsoft Office. But a few years ago, I was given a free copy of Corel WordPerfect. After trying it out, found WordPerfect to be as great a word processing program as ever. It still had all of the important features that you could find in Microsoft Word; but the fact remained that Microsoft Word was still easier to use.

Aside from that, QuattroPro was no match for the spreadsheet capabilities found in Microsoft Excel; and there's nothing out on the market to this day that can compete with Microsoft PowerPoint when it comes to creating presentations. Overall, I found it to be a solid office suite, and still is with its latest version Corel WordPerfect Office X3.

You can now get a 30-day free trial of the Standard Version when you register to their website. I'm pretty sure that I'll download later on and post a product review. It'll be interesting to see if Reveal Codes is still there, and more importantly if it's more user-friendly. However, I imagine it won't be enough to overcome my favoritism towards Microsoft Office 2007.

Ten years ago, who knew that there would be an office suite package that you can use on your web browser. But of course back then, the internet was used mainly to search for information - and still is. And though Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox, and others have made terrific advances in expanding their capabilities - web browsers are still very limited in its ability to create feature rich applications that you can create for your desktop ... or are they?

New technologies (like ASP.NET) and the use of advanced techniques (like AJAX) have made it possible to create web applications that actually behave like desktop applications, which has paved the way for all kinds of possibilities on web that were not imaginable before ... like web-based office suites.

I'm not talking about just online calendars and contact managers - there's a whole gob of those; I'm talking about web applications that provide the ability to create letters, spreadsheets, newsletters, brochures, etc. like you can in Microsoft Office. Googling the keyword "microsoft office alternatives web-based" will give a bunch of websites where you can research.

The one that I like the most so far is gOffice, that promises Microsoft Word import/export features in the near future; but for now, I love being able to produce the high quality PDFs from it. It also has a spreadsheet and desktop publishing programs that do the same, with other features coming soon. Other web applications, like ajaxWrite and Writely, only give you word processing capabilities. The fact the all of these offerings are FREE isn't bad, either.

But are web-based office suites good enough to replace old reliable desktop applications like Microsoft Office?" It's too soon to tell; but in order for them to a major player, there are still a lot of web browser limitations to overcome in order to provide anywhere near the amount of features that you'll find in Microsoft Office 2007. All the same, I applaud the progress we've made in creating feature rich web applications; and it'll be interesting to see how they can go in the future.