BlogOffice

The stick-with-it or throw-in-the-towel decision tree :)

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:26:00 +0000

This isn't about technology, per se--the kind of evaluating we do with a mouse, keyboard, and spreadsheet. It is about a deeper kind of "felt sense" evaluation that can help us determine whether what we're doing has a hope of working, or it's time to (1) try another route, or (2) cash in altogether.

I found this article in Forbes Magazine today very clear and helpful, and I created a decision tree to make it even clearer for myself. I like the idea that part of the determination of whether to have hope in our efforts involves looking around to see whether energy is building for it. Are others attracted to what we're creating? What is the outside world telling us about what we're offering it?

For those of you who are entrepreneurs, like me, I offer this, just in case it's helpful. Feel free to download and share ad nauseum. :)

Coming soon to a bookstore (online or otherwise) near you! :)

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:52:00 +0000

I just received my author copies of Microsoft Office 2013 Plain & Simple, and I love the new look! The cover is vibrant and the interior is easy-to-navigate and pretty. (Okay, I'm a little biased.)

This is an all-new book written on the latest in the long line of Office ancestry. I know chances are good that if you're on this list, you may not be a beginning-level Office user, but if you have a child or parent or relative or friend who is, send them this way! :)

I also was blessed to write Microsoft Office 2013 for Touch Devices Plain & Simple for this release, swiping along with the flow of touch. This one also will be available soon and already has its spot on Amazon. I am grateful that after lo these many years I still enjoy this stuff. In fact, I discovered earlier this week that I'm officially geekier than 4/5ths of the Geek Squad at my local Best Buy. LOL!

If you take a look at the books--or better yet, buy one--and want to leave a comment or a review either here or on Amazon, I'd love it. I do read them all. Usually more than once. And sometimes I send them to other people, too...especially the positive ones. :)

PS> I'm cross-posting this to my author blog because, well, it's my author blog. :)

Crazed merge field destruction

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:29:00 +0000

Often tech problems look at first like they are going to be hopelessly complex and knotted (which means they are beyond my depth), but as I get curious about them and start to pull on the nearest thread, I find they unravel easily and we have our solution. Recently Nancy sent me a note with this frustrating puzzle:

About 2 months ago I copied a merge tag off a website to help add commas and decimals to a dollar amount merge field in Word 2010. Since then, I have not been able to preview my merge documents. When I click the Preview button (which is active), nothing changes on the screen. I still see only merge fields, not real data. I have combed the Internet looking for answers, I have tried every possible combination of settings I can on Word itself, I have created new merge documents from scratch that have no relation to the copied merge field that started this, I have even reinstalled the application - all with no change. This is making me crazy as we produce a lot of merge documents in our office and I can't continue to print out sample docs as previews! When the documents print, the merged data shows up as it should. I just cannot get it to preview on the screen anymore."

I started out by trying to replicate the problem, and with a little creative searching and sleuthing, I had my "I could've had a V8 moment." There's a little-talked-about option in the Advanced tab of the Word Options dialog box, and I think Nancy's copying-the-merge-field-code adventure flipped the switch on that option so all she was getting was codes, codes, and more codes when she previewed her project.

Here's how to flip the switch back to normal setting if this ever happens toy ou. Click File, click Option, and click Advanced. Scroll down to the Show Document Content area and find the checkbox to the left of the Show Field Codes Instead of Their Values. Is it checked? If so, click it to clear that puppy, and then click OK. You may need to restart Word so the program launches the correct settings this time.

Happy, or at least reasonably painfree, merging!

Office 2013 season

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:54:00 +0000

Hello! Long time no post, I know. I have been buried with multiple writing projects, ranging from Windows 8 to Office 2013 to SkyDrive. It's been a busy fall! I'm able to raise my head for a moment after finishing Office 2013 Plain & Simple (coming soon to a bookstore and website near you!) and will be posting Q&As I've been receiving from readers over the last several weeks.

I try to answer all the questions I receive, and some are easy and fast, while others require a bit more research and/or example creation. So if you've sent me a question recently and haven't heard anything back from me yet, my apologies. I do still have your message and will be digging out of them in the order in which they were received. :)

I hope that if you're in the U.S. you enjoyed a fun and filling Thanksgiving yesterday, and no matter where you are in the world, you are feeling the hopefulness of a new season (which may include presents and technology and books!).

Windows 8 CP--try it, you'll like it (I think)

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:10:00 +0000

Well, I must say I'm a bit baffled by the backlash of bad sentiment about Windows 8 I've been seeing in the tweets and posts of many of my tech writer colleagues--especially those who have been doing this for a while. I'm not sure why people are so up in arms about Windows 8. I for one am ready for a change! I think our use of technology is maturing, our understanding has a new baseline, and by and large the advent of the smartphone has taught us new ways of interacting with our devices in real time. Do we really need to sit chained to a desk, opening menu after menu, pointing and clicking to find what we want? Do we really need that Windows Start button so much? I'm a bit confounded by all the criticism I've heard thus far. I love the freedom, color, and flexibility I've already seen in Windows 8, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a real release copy!

I downloaded Windows 8 Developer Preview the minute the download links became available (actually a few minutes before the public links went live, LOL). And the same story was true for Consumer Preview--I downloaded and installed it as early as I could. And granted, the CP version isn't perfect. Some of the apps are a bit lame. The updatable tiles aren't yet as engaging or used as well as they might be. But the features, folks! I love the features. I love having the flexibility and freedom to use software that seems to follow the way I think. I feel like Windows 8 fits my brain and processing style much more closely than Windows 7 (even though I think Windows 7 has by far been the best Microsoft OS up to this point).

With the awesome, never-say-die team at Que Publishing, I wrote My Windows 8 Consumer Preview to show you how you can do in the new release all those basic tasks you count on your OS to do. I focus on showing off the newest features that are working in CP, and there are quite a number of changing-the-way-we-work items. I just love it. Check out the book and let me know what you think! And before you join the not-so-happy band of Windows 8 haters, give it a look yourself. It just might surprise you.

Too many labels!

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:48:00 +0000

I get a number of messages--for good reason!--about problems with Word's mail merge process. Even though the whole task has been simplified a bit through the years, it does still require some outside-the-box, non-traditional-document thinking. For one thing, you have to choose the type of merge project you want to create. And then you have to attach a data source (or enter the information you want to use in the merge). Then you have to arrange all the fields on the page so you get the effect you want, whether you're creating labels, or letters, or catalogs. Then, after you preview the project to make sure your data shows up in the right place, you need to choose the type of output you want--print, email, or something else?

Choose Rules in the Mailing tab
and select Next Record

One simple fix that causes a lot of consternation involves a field code you insert to tell Word to insert the data for the next record. This is the action that determines whether you get a whole page full of labels or you print one label on each page. And if you've ever gotten waaaay too many labels (as I have) or spent waaaaay too much on labels that you ultimately waste (as I have), this little field code can save you a big amount of frustration.

So the process is this. Set up your merge as you would have it be, choosing labels as the merge type (for a big label merge print job, choose Start Mail Merge in the Mailings tab and click Labels). Add your data list by using Select Recipients. Then, when you go to position the label fields on the page, add the fields you want to include, and then click Rules. Choose Next Record. This tells Word the information is complete for that label and you want to move on to the next.

When you preview your merge, by clicking Preview Results, you should see a whole variety of different labels on that first sheet--no more wasted labels or unwanted repetition. Life is good. :)

One fun thing if you want to get fancy with it is to create a conditional merge print, which prints the next label that meets a certain specification. For example, if you want to send reminders to your students who signed up for a spring seminar, you can use Next Record If...to have Word find the records that have the data in the field you're looking for. It's worth playing with, especially if you love being smart about label use. (Your trees thank you.)

Lots of Q&A coming!

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:35:00 +0000

This is relaxed hippie me when I

don't have a looming book deadline :)

Hi everyone, coming soon--a series of Q&A responses to reader questions that have been piling up in my Inbox! Thanks for your patience about that. Typically when I'm wrapping up a project, all my tech questions get flagged and filed until a clear spot opens up, and that clear spot is upon us (thank you God)! :) So in this space in the coming days I'll be posting reader questions about things like

Word headers and footers
Image obstinance
Pagination craziness
Misbehaving Outlook calendars,
and more.

If you have questions you'd like me to sleuth out or just something that bugs you (or doesn't work the way it should), feel free to drop me a note about it. I often have to do research and testing to try to find the answers to these things (in other words, I'm not the Oz of Tech and typically I struggle with it just like you do), but I do think it's fun. And it keeps me from playing too much Xbox, which is a good thing.

This is only a test :)

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:16:00 +0000

Hi all--my apologies to those of you who receive this by RSS, but I'm testing BlogOffice to see what's up with the site. For some reason Blogger is giving me a Page Not Found error, which makes no sense.

So please disregard this interruption and return to your previously scheduled programming.

Ah, technology. Gotta love it. :)

Solving Word mail merge ZIP code problems

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:23:00 +0000

A reader wrote to me yesterday explaining a frustrating issue she is experiencing with Word mail merge. When she runs labels with data she imported from an Excel worksheet, everything works fine as long as the label data includes a five-digit ZIP code. But when the ZIP includes the "plus four" designation (for example, 12345-6789), the ZIP shows up as 0 on her labels.

I tried replicating the issue, and as long as I used Word's merge fields (for example, the Address Block) everything worked fine. I could also manually insert a ZIP merge field and use Match Fields to point the right data to the field on the label. I noticed that in some cases, however, the labels with the four-digit extension would drop from the merge. Odd!

So I went on a web hunt to see what other people were experiencing. It seems this strange "plus four" problem has been around through several versions of Word. I found this site with a number of workarounds for various label problems--one of which is the ZIP plus four solution. You do have to add some info to the merge field command, but the author tells you how to do it in a step-by-step fashion: http://www.gmayor.com/formatting_word_fields.htm

I hope that's helpful. Happy merging! :)

A "touchable" Ribbon

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:35:00 +0000

I got to play with a Windows 8 Samsung tablet yesterday, tapping and flipping and pinching and snapping it's colorful little cheeks. :) My reaction was similar to the reaction of many so far: fascination. It really is as fast as the videos show--maybe faster. And the techniques feel pretty natural (especially if you have a touch smartphone) and not as interruptive as I was imagining. One thing I've been a bit leery about is the addition of the ribbon UI to Windows Explorer. I wondered how easy it would be to tap exactly what I wanted and navigate without the use of a stylus (which I'll just lose anyway). As I tested it out, the tools on the ribbon were no problem at all--easily tapable, well bordered (so you're not always selecting the wrong tool by mistake). I did have some trouble with the Minimize/ Restore / Close box in the upper right corner of the Windows Explorer window (maximizing when I wanted to close the window), but it wasn't a bad trial for my first time out.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Metro will bring to Office 15 and how it might change the ribbon UI and the general way we access and work with our documents. Will the ribbon somehow scroll off the left side of the screen instead of displaying contextual tabs with further toolsets? Will Backstage view become a side panel that pops up alongside the main work area? Will there be "charms" in our apps that enable us to search, share, and connect devices easily?

And will I be able to play Fruit Ninja while I write and produce a well-written chapter on time (while scoring well on the game)? That's the real question. C'mon, Windows 8, step up.

Microsoft Office Metro-style

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 13:25:00 +0000

Last week Microsoft showed us all kinds of color and movement and flexibility as they demonstrated the new "metro-style" look for Windows 8. Similar to the touch functionality on the Windows Phone 7, you will soon be able to choose, rearrange, pane, and snap your apps (notice they aren't called "windows" anymore) the way you want them to appear. Steve Ballmer said "You ought to expect that we are rethinking and working hard on what it would mean to do Office Metro style," when he was asked what's coming for Office.

Back in July, Ballmer gave a presentation at the Worldwide Partner Conference in LA which included some of the visuals (which included a PowerPoint live tile) that will reportedly be shared among multiple Windows spheres: the PC, phone, Xbox 360, and Office. Here's a write-up from Winrumors about that presentation, along with a short video showing off the developing style.

Windows 8 will have lots of touch and movement, but Microsoft says they aren't abandoning the mouse and keyboard, so we'll have to see how gracefully it all works together. I love the touch on my phone, but I rarely use it to do more than call family, check and return email, and tweet (well, and play a game of Fruit Ninga occasionally). Working with documents still feels too limited to me, and I avoid it when I can. Before I'll love touch in Office 15, I'm going to have to see real practical benefits with solid and fast functionality. A pretty look and fun movement won't mean much to me when there's a big deadline looming.

Next BUILD keynote coming up!

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 16:12:00 +0000

Hi there--I'm sitting here listening to this jazzy music, waiting for the BUILD keynote (day 2) to begin streaming. You can watch it here with me if you like: http://www.buildwindows.com/

Earlier today Sinofsky posted on the Building Windows 8 blog some of the win 7 hardware we can use to test out the developer preview, if we are so inclined:

HP Elitebook 2740p and 2760p convertible

ASUS EP121 tablet

Dell Inspiron Duo convertible

Lenovo x201, x220t convertible

3M M2256PW 22” display

He also listed a huge range of devices they've used in the test labs. Be sure--if you spring for a new system--to get something that supports touch so you can really put Win8 through its paces. :)

BUILD photos :)

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:39:00 +0000

Just in case you're curious: Here are some photos from the keynote.

Filling in the gaps on Win 8

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:34:00 +0000

Well, the big Microsoft BUILD conference kicks off in Anaheim in just a few hours. I have all systems go (literally) for the keynotes, the blog posts, the tweets, the articles. But mostly I am ready for Microsoft to begin filling in the gaps on what we don't know about Windows 8 so far--which is a lot. :) From what I've seen (which is not much, just what's been publicly available so far on posted video), I like the approach, the look, the movement, the strategy. I'm not so sure how the dual approach (the touch metro Start screen and the familiar Windows desktop) will work together. Will it confuse people? Will it be more trouble than it's worth?

And of course I write a lot about Microsoft Office applications, so I'm wondering also about how touch will arrive in the next version of Office. I could see that the ribbon might be touch-friendly (for some of us, anyway). But what other changes will need to happen for the next version of Office to make the most of a verson of Windows "built from the ground up"? We shall see.

Since green technology is also a love of mine, I'm curious about how Windows 8 will work with the cloud. Office 365 launched in June and is doing pretty well (two outages that I know of so far but nothing major, and folks seem to be really liking and using the tools); how will Windows 8 make saving to and from Office 365 and interacting with colleagues even more seamless? (One feature that will be cool is two-way video chat, which I've heard is coming with the new Mango phones. Can't wait!)

So there's lots to anticipate, and what we hear today may energize the developer community and excite tech writers like me...or not. Some pundits are saying Microsoft really needs Win 8 to be a big win in order to stay relevant in today's tablet-and-phone-driven tech world. I see Windows 8 as more of an opportunity for Microsoft than a do-or-die gamble; I think Microsoft has weathered many storms (for example, Windows ME and Windows Vista) and no matter how we react to Windows 8, she will keep on keepin' on.

Want to follow BUILD? @bldwin, @jeffjames3, @thurrott (and many, many more)

Trying for publishing convergence :)

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:46:00 +0000

This is more of an update than a Microsoft Office tip, trick, or snafu...but since creating the Office 365: Connect & Collaborate site, I've been trying to streamline my communication efforts so all the various places I post are updated as seamlessly as possible. Toward that end, I've finally seen the light and created an Amazon Author Page at AuthorCentral (sheesh, I wish I could make that picture of me smaller!), and I was a bit chagrined to realize that I am the author of 70 (yes, no kidding, s-e-v-e-n-t-y) books on Amazon.com. That makes me tired just thinking of it!

I've also linked my writing blog to Amazon (and added Twitter as well), so hopefully if you're curious about an upcoming book or a book outside my normal tech writing domain, you'll find what you'd like to know there.

I've also been writing regularly for CNET's TechRepublic and have just started blogging for PC World, and of course continue doing articles for the trusty Windows Secrets (love them). And that's on top of the books for Microsoft Press, Que, Wiley, and Pearson Ed (and others). So yes, I guess I see how I got to 70 books. Good thing I love to write.

More tech stuff coming soon, and please visit my new Office 365: Connect & Coblogerate blog if you're curious about the cloud. :) Also, the Office 365: Connect & Collaborate newsletter will go out this week, so sign up now if you'd like to receive it!

Changing the default font in Word 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:50:00 +0000

I just had a good reminder that when you've worked with technology for a long time, it's easy to overlook some of the basic techniques that can be really helpful in regular day-to-day work. A reader wrote this week, wanting to know how to change the default font in Word 2010. It was a good reminder to me that although it's important to explore exciting new features, I want to make sure I cover the tasks we do regularly as well. So here's how to change the default font in Word 2010...and I'll throw in the same technique for paragraph spacing, too:

Little things like that can drive you batty (my experience), but once you've got them, you've got them. If there are basics that baffle you, send them to me and I'll figure them out and post the answers--because you're not alone; if something is bugging you, it's bugging others too. :)

Windows Live and Office 365: What's the difference?

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 12:20:00 +0000

Good morning! I have a new article out today in Windows Secrets: How to tell Windows Live from Office 365. I wrote this article in response to some reader questions about the overlap of online services, and as I say in the article, if you've been following the morphing of services (from MSN Spaces to Windows Live Writer, for example, or from OLSB to Office 365), you may be wondering whether the two products are the same tools in different wrappings. Well, the short answer is that they're not, but if you want more detail, take a look at the article.

I've also updated some resources, added an Office 365-specific blog (with a discussion board!), and I am gearing up for some video tips on the Office 365: Connect and Collaborate site. Thanks to all who have signed up for my newsletter (first one coming in September!) as well as the video tips.

If you haven't checked out Office 365 yet, take a look. We're just at the beginning of its development, but I think there's a LOT of potential here and some great applications are already popping up.

Getting Site Stats in Office 365

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:04:00 +0000

If you were a former Office Live Small Business user, you are probably familiar with the webtools included with Office 365. It's a nice set of basic tools for creating pages, adding text and images, changing the format, applying themes, customizing the header, and adding webparts. But one important piece of the puzzle appears (at first glance) to be missing in Office 365: web analytics. How do you know how much traffic you're getting? Or who the referring sites are? Or what browser your visitors are using?

Luckily this is a simple--if not obvious--fix. Although the buzz was that this was just missing "in the beta," here we are in release with no webtools on the ribbon. One poster in the Office 365 community suggested to add the following to the basic URL of your live site (and it works):

/_layouts/usage.aspx

So this means if your site name is Applesauce, the URL would look like this:

http://applesauce.sharepoint.com/_layouts/usage.aspx

Remember also to enter the keywords and descriptions for your pages so the search engines are picking them up. You'll find the Search Engine Optimization tab (where these options are found) in the Choose Page Properties dialog box. Just click the page you want to optimize and click Properties; click the Search Engine Optimization tab, enter your keywords and description, and click OK.

PS> If you're curious about Office 365. you can sign up for Office 365 video tips I'll begin posting in September.

My Office 365 book is now a free ebook!

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:06:00 +0000

This is exciting. :) In keeping with the green practices encouraged by cloud computing, Microsoft Press has decided to offer Microsoft Office 365: Connect and Collaborate Virtually Anywhere, Anytime as a free ebook! This will extend the book's reach, save quite a few trees, offer readers a more sustainable option for learning about Microsoft's cloud approach, and much more! And we'll be able to update easily as new features get added to the cloud. It's a win-win-win. :)

Ah, the lazy beauty of Homegroups

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:19:00 +0000

This morning I'm sitting in my sunroom writing a new batch of articles for CNET's TechRepublic (hi, Jody) and wanted to use a cool Excel worksheet I'd created a while back for one of the examples. The trouble is that the file is upstairs in my office on my beta machine, and I am feeling very relaxed and in-the-zone writing with the sounds of crickets and locusts and cardinals surrounding me. But wait! I forgot that I created a homegroup as part of writing My Windows 7 PC for Que. I opened Windows Explorer, clicked my beta machine in the Homegroup category, navigated to my Documents folder, and located and opened the worksheet. All without getting up off the loveseat. Now that's something to love about Homegroups--a significant contribution to your peace of mind. (But don't forget to get your exercise later.) :)

Simple is good.

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 17:18:00 +0000

Well! This new design is certainly light and clear. :) I'm working on a relaunch of BlogOffice that will better accomodate my recent slate of projects (including Office 365, which I love) as well as new media bits and presentations. I hope you're having a great summer and looking forward to a fascinating fall. (How can it not be, with Mango right around the corner?)

Testing, Testing…is this thing on?

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:43:00 +0000

Well, Blogger threw me a curve ball (and lots of other folks, I bet) by discontinuing their support of ftp…so maybe I'll just blog from Word 2010, which is convenient and simple and, of course, right here. J This is a test post, and I do realize that it is circulated via email to subscribers (I need to figure out how to turn that off—I hope it doesn't annoy you. I added the subscription feature so many years ago, pre RSS, that I've forgotten how I did it now.)

Blogging from within Word in 2010 is the same process we experienced with 2007; you create a new blog post by clicking File > New > Blog Post, type your content, format as you'd like, and click Publish in the Blog group of the Blog Post tab. Pretty simple, and quick, too.

Word will prompt you to set up your account before you post to it, of course, but that process is pretty painless as well. I will be testing over the next week or so to see whether posting directly to my site with both web design software and Word 2010 gets confusing. Maybe I will bypass Blogger altogether. We shall see.

New, free ebook on career skills! :)

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:18:00 +0000

I'm excited to let you know about the publication of my newest book, called Own Your Future: Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft. My editors and I were excited to put this book together because it's one way we can contribute to the need for retooling and polishing tech skills in today's economy. And Microsoft Learning completely underwrote the project, so it can be made available for free, which makes it even better.

Written with community college students in mind (though it's got good stuff for anyone who wants to brush up job prep skills), the book includes lots of "test yourself" activities, links, and resources for learning. Here's the link to the free download: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=184952.

Feel free to download it yourself or share it with friends, family, or anyone who is thinking through career-related issues. I'd love to hear what you think, too--so feel free to leave a comment here or drop me a note.

What we do matters

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:32:00 +0000

This is a great time to be working in technology. Instead of being the geek that works quietly on who-knows-what in the cubicle at the end of egghead row [yes, that's where my office was years ago :)], what we do on a daily basis helps connect people to disaster relief, enabling us to send donations--instantly--via text message, making collaboration possible on climate change, and much, much more.

I heard something on NPR this morning that shined a light on the importance of something very simple--like spell check. You can visit the NPR site for the full article, but this idea elicited a "wow" from me on my predawn drive taking my son to school:

One reason, State Department official Patrick Kennedy told the Senate Judiciary Committee, was because someone misspelled the suspect's name after his father reported concerns about his son to the U.S. Embassy. As a result, the concerns were not added to Abdulmutallab's visa information. Kennedy said the State Department now has a version of spell-check software available to check names after visas are granted."Lives at risk because of a misspelling? That's what it sounds like. Thank goodness the plan was thwarted and people are now looking at the situation from all possible angles. It has become a teachable moment: a big one. But it does underscore the importance of the work we do on a daily basis and shows that even those tiny, seemingly unimportant details can make a much larger impact than we may know at the time. (The Word equivalent to a butterfly flapping it's wings in China, I guess.) Something to think about, at any rate. :)

Telling Word 2010 what to do

noreply@blogger.com (Katherine Murray) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:51:00 +0000

Okay, this is really cool. A few years ago Word promised speech recognition (I can't remember which release that was now...maybe Office XP) and, as those of us who tried it soon realized, we spent more time teaching Word how to recognize our voices than we actually spent accomplishing anything. Not too surprisingly, speech recognition as a feature within Word faded away with a subsequent release as "a good idea, but..."

Yesterday as I was working on a new chapter in the upcoming Microsoft Word 2010 Inside Out, I tried using Windows Speech Recognition in Windows 7. After a little tutorial and a couple of how-tos (a total of about 10 minutes), I was dictating content directly into my chapter. Very cool, and almost completely pain free. I won't dictate text as a matter of course (as a piano player, I like to type), but it was exciting to see the feature working so well. It's also a nice backup in case I wipe out on my cross-country skis sometime this winter and need to give a banged up wrist a little rest. :)

If you haven't yet tried speech recognition in Windows 7, give it a try. All you need is a suitable microphone, and Windows 7 does the rest. There's still some training involved, and every once in a while the thing won't know what to do with your words (the software still translates "as you can see" as "as you can C"), but the feature is worlds better than it was a couple of years ago. It just may save you a little time and trouble--and perhaps breathe some freshness and fun into that Word content you create day in and day out. :)