I find that when I’m staring at a blank canvas or a nice and blank “new document” I don’t have a good idea of what direction I could be heading with my thoughts or needs. If you start with a template and see what other people have done with the tool you’re using, it can help get your own gears of creativity spinning and give you an idea of what’s possible with the application you’re getting started using.

If you’re trying to learn what one of the Microsoft Office applications are capable of, starting with a template is a great way to see the power and features of the app.

You can look through templates based on themes, industry or in our case of learning a new program, by “Program Category”. The Microsoft Office Online website has templates available in the following apps:

• Microsoft Office Access
• Microsoft Office Excel
• Microsoft Office InfoPath
• Microsoft Office OneNote
• Microsoft Office Outlook
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint
• Microsoft Office Project
• Microsoft Office Publisher
• Microsoft Office Visio
• Microsoft Office Word

So, whatever the business app you’re more than likely trying to learn, Microsoft probably has a template to help get you started.

Post from: EveryJoe

Use Templates to Help You Learn a New Office Program

The new version of the Office productivity suite will be available soon, although no final release date is yet available. When the new version is available versions of the suite will be replacing the Microsoft Works productivity applications that have been installed on people’s machines for years.

The new Starter version of Office will be coming to the forefront before the Office Web Apps that have been talked about in development to compete with Google Docs. Although it’s probably not a real substitute. A lighter version isn’t a web version. The web version may now become more of the feature set of Windows Mobile devices, which I’m not sure if that really makes sense either.

The delivery mechanism for Office 2010 will also be different for the OEM’s. Microsoft is saying the entire office suite will be installed on all machines. Consumers will be able to purchase cards at the retailer to upgrade to their desired version or not at all and remain with the Starter version of the software.

I’m not sure this is a good option. It seems ridiculous to have the entire productivity suite installed on a user’s machine if they’ll never use the majority of it.

Post from: EveryJoe

Microsoft Replaces Works with Office 2010 Starter Edition

Basic Evernote functionality provides the ability to import files into your notebooks for easy management. By default Evernote will import PDF’s, images, text files and audio files. You can import folders or files as needed or have Evernote monitor a specific folder and automatically import files from that folder.

I decided to combine an earlier tip on customizing your right-click “Send To” function with this Evernote import function and see how it works. I created a folder in “My Documents” called “My Evernote“. I then used the Evernote import wizard to setup Evernote to regularly check this folder and pull in any files that it can into my specified, default notebook.

All I need to do to send a file into Evernote now is to right-click on a file that Evernote will read and use my customized send-to routine to in essence send it directly to Evernote. So far it’s worked fairly well with the PDF’s I’ve tried. I really wish I could send any file, specifically Microsoft Office files, but we’ll see how this goes. Using CutePDF, it’s easy enough to save any document to a PDF file.

Post from: EveryJoe

Send Documents to Evernote Quickly

Milo discovered a product especially useful for enterprises of all sizes called Nightwatchman, a good news that Microsoft didn’t lay off anybody in the Vista team. I knew that they didn’t touch the Silverlight team, but frankly I’m surprised about this because Vista hasn’t been very profitable to Microsoft. Or has it? One bad news is the Windows 7 minimum requirements. It may not be a good experience to try it on my netbook which just meets the minimum requirements and my laptop which is old enough to even miss the minimum. But if anyone is interested, you can get the Windows 7 look into Windows XP. He also found a couple of amusing videos, one called “how to say i love you.” and another a confirmation of love, a marriage at Taco Bell. Recession, aye?

Jason found a few websites that can assist you in unique ways: one for helping educate your kids, one a calendar to help others, and another to scan your computer online. He covered a lot of Windows Powertoys, a mobile media browser and found another reason to continue loving Zune. He also has a couple of how-tos for selecting non-linear text in a word document and sharing Outlook calendar availability. One bad news, I mean another one, is that Microsoft is shutting down MSN Groups.

Claire thought out loud about the gap between Linux and mainstream users, learnt something new about less (which all you Cygwin users may find useful), discovered a wonderful browser called Kidzui which attempts to make the Internet a more kid-friendly place.

Juan wonders whether the Mac is not invincible anymore and whether Apple really needs to make a netbook. He is glad to find a symbol cheat widget and an app that can save his day with a bunch of drawings. The latter isn’t my cup of tea. He along with Jayvee found out about Apple’s stand on piracy.

Post from: EveryJoe

A Massive Tech Channel Roundup

e.g. The drive on which you installed Windows usually has the following folders:

Documents and Settings
Drivers,… and similar ones
Program Files
WINDOWS

In addition, I have folders called cygwin, Downloads, and SysinternalsSuite. Until recently, I also had Msocache. Msocache is not always in C: but could be on any non-removable and non-network drive with over 1.5GB free disk space.

The Msocache folder is created during the Microsoft Office installation and is called the “Local Install Source”. It contains a copy of the install source files and is a hidden folder. The folder is not necessary after the installation and it is safe to get rid of. Save up to 270 MB disk space.

The Microsoft Help and Support site has a helpful article about Msocache explaining in detail its purpose, and ways of removing it. “Do not delete the MSOCACHE folder by using Microsoft Windows Explorer,” the article warns.

In the past and more recently too, I have deleted the folder directly and I had no problems. But I now learnt that it is not the right way to do it.

Post from: EveryJoe

You Can Delete Msocache

Microsoft has a knack for spreading misery in simple ways. An appreciable quality during Christmas time. A recent example is the “updated” Microsoft Office Outlook versions which stopped carrying a “Minimze to system tray” option from the Tools -> Options.

I spent way too much time under the presumption that it may have just been moved to some other incovenient location because it immediately didn’t register in my mind that I had a Microsoft app before me. Why exactly would someone take pains to remove something already existing and working normally can be a philosophical debate that can take us all the remaining days of this year and more. And I don’t wish to do that for this vacation. I should probably be thankful to them because this is their way of offering me another blog post.

So. There is a way around. Thankfully.

1. Open the Registry Editor (Press Win+R, type “regedit”, Enter).
2. Navigate down the tree: My Computer -> HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft -> Office -> <Version-Number> -> Outlook -> Preferences. <Version-Number> is the version number of the Office you are using and can be found in any Help -> About of a Microsoft Office application: 10 for Office 2000; 11 for Office 2003, 12 for Office 2007.
3. Create a New Value of type “DWORD Value” (through Edit menu or right-click). Name in MinToTray. Modify its Value Data to 1 to enable system tray minimization.

You should be able to minimze Outlook to the system tray now.

P.S. This is a fairly straight-forward thing to do, but you might want to save the curent registries (export) before tweaking.

Image Source: Regedit Screenshot taken on my laptop.

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Minimize Microsoft Outlook to System Tray

Jayvee inspects the culture of FAIL on the Internet and finds that video advertising is going to decline. Actually, the rate of growth of online advertising has reached a saturation point even though online advertising itself is continuing to rise.

In these tough times, when the economy has been slowing down, Clair suggests that choosing Linux and open source software has become more necessary. For those who are already in that path, there is a free Ubuntu training course. Ubuntu is Linux for human beings, isn’t it?

A survey found that only 1% of people are using Google Docs, and many of those use Microsoft Office already. However, Colleen feels that the Microsoft’s stranglehold on office suites may be slipping away with Microsoft promising and postponing their next release and the availability of too many options for the users.

Juan says that 2008 is the year of iPhone, which is not very debatable in the user sense though this is also the year for RIAs, Twitter (@bsravanin) and cloud computing. But then, he is an Apple guy. :-) He also shares the offer that MacUpdate is having as a holiday promo. A good offer, far better than dreaming about the Apple 24″ LED display which is about $900!

Speaking of promos, Jason has a post about the Sears Wish Promotion, similar to the HP Magic Giveaway which has recently ended. There is already several Top 10 lists too, like the top 10 viral videos of 2008. I personally don’t like the fact that these lists do not consider the rest of the year that is still to be lived through. The more important news is, in case you haven’t already heard, that a serious security flaw has been exposed in the Internet Explorer and it is advised to not use it for financial and other sensitive transations of any kind.

While you wait for the security update, be sure to take note of the 8 security bulletins that Microsoft is ending the year with. Various OS users may want to check out the 2008 Service Pack 2 beta releases.

Post from: EveryJoe

Tech Channel Roundup of Year End Retrospections and Forecasts

I’ve trained myself to add the attachments before composing the mail and to fill the address fields after composing the mail. Just so that I would neither forget an attachment, nor send to the wrong person. You could try that, or an easier way is to use an attachment reminder.

An attachment reminder is a simple function that makes one pass across the text in your composed mail searching for the substring “attach” (and perhaps common spelling mistakes around “attach”) and gives you an error message if you haven’t made an attachment. These are tiny apps (rather plug-ins) and you will be able to find one for most email clients with a straight-forward search.

Following are three widely used ones.

1. Forgotten Attachment Detector: Gmail’s attachment reminder. Go to Gmail -> Settings -> Labs. Scroll down a bit to find the feature and enable it.

2. Outlook Attachment Reminder: Mark Bird’s attachment reminder is an Outlook macro that you can easily add following the instructions in the attachment reminder’s home page.

3. AttachmentRemember: This Thunderbird attachment reminder is an add-in (.XPI) with a wide range of features (custom words and sentences to scan) and is available in multiple languages.

Let me know if you have trouble with any of these attachment reminders.

Post from: EveryJoe

Forgot the Attachment!

On to the tips to speed up Outlook!:

TURN OFF YOUR ANTI-VIRUS EMAIL SCANS
This step is only advised for people who more or less know what they’re doing on a computer. With that note aside, this step alone makes probably the biggest difference in performance increase. Most people experience slow downloads and sending of emails because their anti-virus is taking forever to scan all incoming and outgoing emails for viruses. You should turn off scanning incoming emails if you’re smart enough to know that you should never click on an .EXE file. This gives you a huge performance boost AND your scanner will probably scan the file if you run it anyway. You should turn off the scanning of all outgoing emails if you don’t normally send attachments or don’t send risky program-attachments. Again…you shouldn’t worry too much about it because most people who use a free email service already have their emails scanned.

DECREASE YOUR EMAIL FOLDER SIZE
Your Outlook or email program is probably running slow not so much because of the size of the PST file or the total of your emails. Microsoft Outlook is probably running slow because your most commonly used folders have too many emails in them. A GOOD tip for this is to decrease the number of emails inside your “Inbox” folder. The obvious reason is because this is your most commonly used folder and probably the default folder that your email client opens up with. You can decrease emails in your Inbox folder without deleting them by creating sub-folders. You should be doing this anyway to be better organized. (You can also take a step further by creating message rules and email filters to have emails automatically filed and placed in specific folders right as they arrive.)

DISABLE UN-USED OUTLOOK ADD-INS
You probably have a ton of extra components that you never use. Common examples of synchronization, fancy toolbars, or other bridge type components that allow Outlook to work with other programs on your computer. Just go to the ADD-ONS manager and disable these 3rd party features that you never use. If you don’t know what something is, just un-check it anyways since add-ins are not required for Outlook to function. Many people have noticed huge increases by disabling add-ins from time to time.

TURN OFF RSS FEEDS FOR OUTLOOK 2007
Microsoft Outlook normally installs with a set of RSS feeds; if you don’t read RSS or even know what it is, just disable this feature to save precious CPU resources. Go to Tools > Account Settings > RSS Feeds > Select all the RSS feeds and click REMOVE.

Tips from Rfuz

Post from: EveryJoe

How to speed up Outlook 2003/2007

I needed to transfer my Thunderbird 2 emails to MS Outlook a few days ago and here is what i needed to do to migrate back Outlook. This Thunderbird 2 email transfer guide works for Outlook Express, Outlook 2000, Outlook 2003, and Outlook 2007.

On to the steps to export emails from Thunderbird to Outlook.

First, go to your Thunderbird 2 application folder and copy out your database files. They are in unix format can be found at

for Windows XP users – (C:\ … )
for Windows Vista users – C:\Users\***your windows username***\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\

Copy all the folders in this location to another place so that you can work on the copies and not the originals just in case something gets damaged or corrupted. For the purpose of this demo, we’ll copy them to the desktop.

The tell-tale sign is that they are named after the email folders in your Mozilla Thunderbird 2 application.

Now, go FIle > show file extensions, and then rename the extension of all your emails to .mbox

Next, download IMAPSize – from http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/
Install the program after you’re done downloading it and open it up.

Open IMAPSize, and click on Tools > mbox2eml and use the tool to convert your .mbox to regular format. You can choose your desktop as the save location.

Now go into the newly created folders on your desktop and drag the individual emails into Outlook Express if you’re using Windows XP and Windows Mail if you’re using Windows Vista. From here…. EXPORT your emails to Outlook.

Voila, you’re finally done!

Source

Post from: EveryJoe

Convert Thunderbird 2 emails to MS Outlook