Microsoft Office

From the Microsoft Small Business Office Onlne weblog:

Before you begin
You will need to register for a free PayPal Business Account. If you already have a PayPal personal account, it is easy to upgrade to the business account. Inside the PayPal Business Account, there is a section called Merchant Services. I encourage you to sniff around this portion of the site, because along with the Create Buttons feature, PayPal offers a lot of free and useful e-commerce tools to keep your business running smoothly.

Create a PayPal payment button
PayPal offers not just one, but 5 payment button choices. This is fantastic because you can select a button that is a perfect match for your site’s needs. The buttons to choose from are:

Add to Cart — Use it to sell multiples and variations of an item; it includes inventory tracking.

Buy Now — Designed for single purchases and/or the one-at-a-time customer.

Donate — Similar to the “buy now” single purchase button, but meant for donations.

Buy Gift Certificate — A single-purchase button that allows you to sell gift certificates in amounts you specify.

Subscribe — Great for reoccurring payments like membership dues or subscription fees.

So you can see that the benefits of PayPal buttons are not limited to only e-tailers with products to sell. Take your time deciding which button best suits your site. Be sure to factor in the goals you want to accomplish.

Next, sign in to your Office Live Small Business account. You will need to navigate to your site’s Page Manager and then select the page in which you want to embed the payment button. You can also insert the same payment button site-wide if you want to have a button that acts more like a permanent reminder or as a means of highlighting a special offer.

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Branding

When your documents, presentations, and workbooks have a unified and polished appearance, they make a positive impression. Now you can “brand” your Microsoft Office documents quickly and easily by applying a document theme — a set of colors, fonts, and other formatting details that work together to give your documents a stylish, professional design. Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 offer a wide range of predefined document themes, and you can also create your own by customizing existing themes. Document themes are shared across the programs so that all your Office documents can have the same look. Watch this demo to see how easy it is to get great results.

You can quickly and easily format an entire document to give it a professional and modern look by applying a document theme. A document theme is a set of formatting choices that include a set of theme colors, a set of theme fonts (including heading and body text fonts), and a set of theme effects (including lines and fill effects).

Programs such as Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint provide several predefined document themes, but you can also create your own by customizing and then saving an existing document theme. Document themes are shared across Office programs so that all of your Office documents can have the same, uniform look. However, unlike Word and Excel, PowerPoint includes background style customization options. For information about adding and customizing backgrounds, see Add a background to your presentation.

Click the blue link above for more information.

Office Live Small Business

Store Manager

As a result, as of March 1, 2009, we no longer offer new subscriptions to this service.

We’re committed to making this transition as smooth as possible for you. We’ll be providing the subscription to Store Manager to you for free during the last three months that it’s available. Please read on for more details and your options moving forward.

How your account will be affected
No more subscription charges. As of March 5, 2009, you will no longer be charged a monthly subscription fee for Store Manager. This will allow you to complete any online sales at no cost for the remainder of this feature’s availability.

The Store Manager feature is being discontinued in two stages.

Shopping cart will be turned off on May 2, 2009. On May 2, 2009 the e-commerce shopping cart feature of your Web site will be automatically removed and customers will not be able to place new orders.
Remaining features will be discontinued on June 2, 2009. As of June 2, 2009, you will no longer be able to use Store Manager to process payments or access data and reports.

e-mail marketing

How your account will be affected
No more subscription charges. As of March 5, 2009, you will no longer be charged the monthly subscription fee for the E-Mail Marketing service. Also, the number of messages included in your subscription will be raised to 2,500 per month. Any messages that you send over the new 2,500 limit will be charged at the standard $.05 per e-mail.
Normal delivery until June 2nd, 2009. All campaigns will be sent as scheduled until June 2, 2009. Any campaigns scheduled beyond this date will be automatically canceled when the service is discontinued at that time.
E-mail campaign contact list still available. Your e-mail campaign contact list will not be affected, even after the E-Mail Marketing feature is discontinued. You can access your contact list from Contact Manager and, if you choose, export your contact information using Microsoft Office applications such as Excel, Outlook, and Access.

adManager

How your account will be affected

Campaigns in progress. Any keyword advertising campaigns that you have set up using adManager will continue to run and incur click charges as normal until June 2, 2009. After this date, your campaigns will be canceled automatically and no additional charges will be incurred.

By Microsoft Office Live Small Business Blog:It’s certainly not news anymore that credit is tight for small-business owners. But relief may be in sight, The Washington Post reports, thanks to two new initiatives.

First, the SBA has announced it will give banks that provide SBA loans greater freedom in setting interest rates. It is also suggesting that banks allow borrowers more time to make payments, and is encouraging smaller and rural lenders to make SBA loans.

Compared to the prior year, loan volumes for the SBA’s biggest loan program —the 7(a) loan program — dropped 30 percent for the year ended in October 2008.

Second, the Federal Reserve recently announced a $200 billion plan to increase lending to consumers, including SBA loans. This is scheduled to begin in February.

Combined, the two efforts have led to “cautious optimism” that the small-business lending markets, which are nearly frozen, will begin moving again, said Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee.

Here’s what the two new initiatives look like:

Two new initiatives are in the works, intended to offer small businesses some breathing room.

The first comes from the SBA, which has given banks offering SBA loans some leeway in setting interest rates, a rather technical adjustment that is expected to increase lending. The agency has also encouraged banks to give customers more time to make payments and is reaching out to more rural and smaller lenders to encourage more financial institutions to make SBA loans. Though, most banks are looking for higher credit scores when it comes to small business loans these days. In the past 625/630 was an acceptable score, but we’re kind of moved up and are looking more at 650 while some lenders are cutting off at 700

Also recently, as part of an effort to get credit flowing again, the Federal Reserve said that it was creating a $200 billion plan to increase consumer lending, including small-business loans partially guaranteed by the Small Business Administration. The lending is scheduled to begin in February.

CherylE over on the Office Live Small Business blog has some great tips and hints on how to give advanced design features a try.

You shouldn’t be scared to play with these features. Most of them affect only one Web page at a time, so you can add a new page and play as much as you want without risking any of your existing Web page customizations.

Turn on and find the advanced design features
Let’s take a look at easy ways for you to take advantage of the advanced design features. The only thing you need to do to see all of these features is to activate them in your Office Live Small Business account. This activation is an option in the Site actions drop-down list at the top of Page Manager. For more detailed instructions about activation, see “Activate the advanced design features.”

OK, they’re activated. So where can you find them? They’re sprinkled throughout the Web design tools in new menu options and new tabs in dialog boxes that you’re probably already using.

New design tabs for existing modules
Even without activating the advanced design features, you can create a form on one of your Web pages that collects data for a list in one of your business applications. For example, the owner of the Fourth Coffee site adds a form to collect online orders for pots of coffee to go. For more information about adding a form to a Web page, see “Collect customer information through a Web page.”

Forms are added to a Web page using a form designer module. When you activate the advanced design features, a new tab is added to the Form Designer dialog box. This tab, named Layout, includes several new design options for your form. Don’t get scared away when you first open the tab. The second and third design options require writing XSLT code. The first option, however, is a list of new form layout templates. You can select any one of the four templates to quickly give your form a whole new look by automatically aligning all of the items in the list. To see how a form appears with each of the templates applied, see “Customize a form on a Web page using the advanced design features.”

You can also display a list from one of your business applications on a Web page without using any advanced design features. For example, the owner of the Fourth Coffee site displays the dates and times for concerts at his store on a Web page named Events. For more information about displaying a list to a Web page, see “Display a list to your public Web site.”

Lists are added to a Web page using a list publisher module. When you activate the advanced design features, a new Layout tab is also added for this feature. This tab also allows you to edit XSLT code, but the first option is to apply one of four list layout templates. With a single selection, you can completely change the look of the list on the page. To see how a list appears with each of the templates applied, see “Customize a list on a Web page using the advanced design features.”

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