Microsoft Office

Find out how to use Microsoft Word to create a holiday letter to send to all your friends and family as well as mailing labels for a mass mailing. Also learn how to make holiday decorations with Word.

GOALS
After completing this course you will be able to:

Create and decorate a newsletter.
Create mailing labels for your envelopes.
Create some holiday decorations.

ABOUT THIS COURSE
This course includes:

Three self-paced lessons and three practice sessions for hands-on experience.
A short test at the end of each lesson; tests are not scored.
A Quick Reference Card you can take away from the course.

COURSE TEXT
The holidays are always a busy time of year. This time, get organized and let Word help you out.

Learn how to create and decorate fantastic newsletters that you can send in a mass mailing to your friends; run a mail merge to create labels for your envelopes; and have some fun making holiday decorations that you can get the whole family involved in.

To learn more about this course, read the overview in the center of this page or the table of contents in the left column. Then click Next to start the first lesson.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN
This course contains details on using mail merge to create labels; for more information about mail merge, see Use mail merge for mass mailings and more.

Many people try to keep in touch with friends and family during the holiday season. Writing a holiday newsletter is often a chore, but it can be fun if you use Word to lay it out, decorate it, and add pictures or family photos. You can also save time by using a ready-made template.

In Word, a style defines a set of formatting properties that are indirectly applied to characters, paragraphs, list, or tables. Instead of directly applying bold, then 14 point font, and then red to text, you can use a style to indirectly apply these three things in a single click. This is useful because you can quickly and consistently apply rich formatting, and can later change the definition of the style all the text the style is applied will change.

For example, the Heading 1 style in Word 2003 specifies the font, font size, and font color properties (among others) as: Arial, 16 point, and automatic, while in Word 2007 Heading 1’s font, font size, and font color properties are: Cambria, 14 point, and blue-Accent 1-Darker 25%. Because these properties changed Between Word 2003 to Word 2007, applying the Heading 1 style in Word 2003 will give you a different looking heading than if you did the same thing in Word 2007. And if you are not a big fan of Heading 1 in 2003 or 2007, you can change the font, font size, and font color properties in both versions and those changes will be applied to every instance of Heading 1 in the given document. Quick, consistent, and rich formatting that can be changed once and trickle through the whole document.

How styles relate to one another

You may be wondering how Word deals with all this style. I can get you 80% of the way there with a relatively simple explanation. The remaining 20% is more complex and less common, so I’ll go there only if I need to in later posts.

In short, styles build on top of one another. For example, if you have a numbered paragraph in a table, then the style layering logic in Word essentially works like this [Word is "speaking" in the example]:

“Document Defaults, tell me what properties to apply to paragraphs and characters by default.”
“Table Style, tell me how the table should look—i.e., row shading, borders, etc.—and if you have any additional paragraph and character properties (i.e., stuff not in the Document Defaults). If you have additional properties, I’ll add them. If you have any of the same properties as the Document Defaults—such as line spacing—but different values for those properties—such as 1 vs. 1.5—I’ll use yours.”
“Paragraph Style, do you have any additional paragraph properties (i.e. stuff not in the Document Defaults or Table Style) that I need to apply to this paragraph? If you specify the same paragraph properties as the any of the previously applied styles I’ll use yours.”
“Numbering Style, tell me how the numbered list should look and if you’ve got additional paragraph properties that I don’t have yet. Of course, if you have different values for properties that I do already have, I’ll use yours.”
“Character Style, do you have any additional character properties (i.e. stuff not in the Document Defaults or Table Style) that I need to apply? If you have the same character properties as the any of the previously applied styles, I’ll use yours.”
“Is there any direct formatting—bold, italics, underline, font color, etc.—applied? If so, I’ll use those.”
This story hopefully illustrates that:

Multiple styles can be applied to the same part of a document, so properties defined in styles are applied in a specific order.
The properties set by one type of style can be supplemented or superseded by other types of styles.
The general hierarchy of style types is [from lowest to highest priority]:
Document Defaults
Table Styles
Paragraph Styles | Paragraph Part of Linked Styles
Numbering Styles
Character Style | Character Part of Linked Styles
Direct Formatting

In Outlook 2007, with WordMail, we have made it easier to differentiate between different email responses. We added what we call thread shading to emails. Every time we see a new email response (or thread) we shade the entire “extra” content part. Now reading an email allows you to more easily see where one response or thread starts and ends. Check out this screenshot from Outlook 2007:

Thread Navigation and Shading
Reading emails has remained pretty much the same since it first came out; you read an email as one long piece of text. You have to keep scrolling down a message until you have read all responses, where each of the responses are usually separated by the presence of some “extra” content like lines or message headers, which contain information like who sent the email, to whom, when it was sent, etc.

In previous versions of Outlook, reading an email usually meant a lot of scrolling or use of the keyboard to move up and down an entire email message. You needed to notice the “extra” content to figure out when an email response started or ended.

We didn’t stop there. Sometimes you want to be able to skip over whole responses or threads at a time, or even skip to the first or last response within an email. In Outlook 2007 we have made this scenario easy. Moving your mouse over any of the shaded regions will reveal our thread navigation controls.

With these thread navigation controls you can easily navigate to the next, previous, first, or last thread within an email. Emails are becoming more and more popular, with some of us getting hundreds a day. Hopefully this feature will make reading emails a bit easier.

Panning on Tablet PCs
If you are using a Tablet PC, we have added another way for you to easily read and navigate your email through the Panning Hand feature. The Panning Hand command can be found at the top of the vertical scroll bar.

When the Panning Hand is turned on, you can use the Tablet PC pen to scroll up and down an email.

Smart Scaling of Images in the Reading Pane
I don’t know about you guys, but I love being able to quickly read my emails with the Outlook Reading Pane. Unfortunately, the Reading Pane only has a small portion of the total width of my screen’s real estate. Usually, that’s not a bad thing, but if I receive an email with a very large image, my Reading Pane becomes harder to use for reading. The reason is because now I not only have to worry about vertical scrolling, but also horizontal scrolling.

In Outlook 2007 we have made reading such emails easier. Outlook detects if an image is too large based on the Reading Pane real estate size, and it appropriately scales down the image to fit it on screen without the need of a horizontal scroll bar. Check out the same email within Outlook 2007. You can now see the entire chart all within the Reading Pane.

We hope this feature makes it easier for you to read your emails more efficiently (no need to double-click an email message to view it outside the Reading Pane).

Hit Highlighting for Instant Search Results
The last thing I want to show you guys in this post is how we improved the user experience of search with WordMail. In Outlook 2007 you can search for specific emails by using the Search control. Doing so will not only find email messages that contain that string, but WordMail will also highlight and show you where in the email the text can be found.

From The Microsoft Office Word Team’s Blog: When you think of stories in Word, you likely think of the things you read in books, magazine, and newspapers. After reading this post, when you think of stories in Word, you’re list will be different.

Internally, Word thinks of all documents as a collection of stories. But these stories are not the “Once upon a time…” type. Instead, they are distinct regions of content that makeup a Word document and share properties and functionality. Put differently, behind the scenes, Word breaks all documents up into a collection of chunks with shared properties and functionality. Officially, these are called stories.

The canonical Word story is the “main story” or what most people would call the body of the document. But, Word also considers all of the following stories:

Comments
Endnotes
Footnotes
Footers
Headers
The main story
Textboxes
The glossary document
Essentially, this means that to Word, comments, the body of your document, footers, etc. are basically the same. And this is good because if a feature works in one story, there’s a very good chance it works in all stories. This is why you can track changes in not only the body of your document (i.e., “main story”), but also in headers, footers, endnotes, text boxes, etc.

Put simply, this common story architecture enables as much Word goodness in as many places in Word as possible.

Why Do I Care?
When you understand how Word thinks of your document, you can better understand how Word treats your document. For example, except for the glossary document (defined later), all stories in a document utilize a common set of properties that determine the presentation of the contents within each story. These shared properties include font information, style definitions, numbering definitions, and document settings.

Read more by clicking above.

From the Office blog: a great way to avoid a security breach is to click the Office Button (the orb in the upper left hand corner of Word 2007), click Prepare, click Encrypt Document, and enter your password.

The nitty-gritty details from David LeBlanc’s Web Log:

Let’s start with the worst of it – XOR. You may note that I consistently refused to ever say “XOR encryption”, preferring the more accurate “XOR obfuscation”. Not only is it the worst way to protect a document, but it was horrible to try and explain. We did all sorts of silly things to make this hard to figure out, it did nearly nothing to actually protect the data, but it sure was no fun to try and document in a normative style. I believe this obfuscation dates back to around 1994. Here’s some pseudo-code to show you the sheer horror of it all – this is from one of the two password verifier approaches:

FUNCTION CreatePasswordVerifier_Method1
PARAMETERS Password
RETURNS 16-bit unsigned integer
DECLARE Verifier AS 16-bit unsigned integer
DECLARE PasswordArray AS array of 8-bit unsigned integers

SET Verifier TO 0×0000 SET PasswordArray TO (empty array of bytes)
SET PasswordArray[0] TO Password.Length

APPEND Password TO PasswordArray
FOR EACH PasswordByte IN PasswordArray IN REVERSE ORDER
IF (Verifier BITWISE AND 0×4000) is 0×0000
SET Intermediate1 TO 0
ELSE
SET Intermediate1 TO 1
ENDIF

SET Intermediate2 TO Verifier MULTIPLED BY 2
SET most significant bit of Intermediate2 TO 0
SET Intermediate3 TO Intermediate1 BITWISE OR Intermediate2
SET Verifier TO Intermediate3 BITWISE XOR PasswordByte

ENDFOR
RETURN Verifier BITWISE XOR 0xCE4B
END FUNCTION

If this makes sense to you, and you want to know kre, click either of the links above.

Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

Overview
Users of the Microsoft Office XP and 2003 programs Word, Excel, or PowerPoint—please install all High-Priority updates from Microsoft Update before downloading the Compatibility Pack.

By installing the Compatibility Pack in addition to Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, you will be able to open, edit, and save files using the file formats new to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007. The Compatibility Pack can also be used in conjunction with the Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003, Excel Viewer 2003, and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 to view files saved in these new formats. For more information about the Compatibility Pack, see Knowledge Base article 924074.

Note: If you use Microsoft Word 2000 or Microsoft Word 2002 to read or write documents containing complex scripts, please see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925451 for information to enable Word 2007 documents to be displayed correctly in your version of Word.

Administrators: The administrative template for the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint converters contained within the Compatibility Pack is available for download.

System Requirements
Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000 Service Pack 4; Windows Server 2003; Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 1; Windows XP Service Pack 2
Recommended Microsoft Office programs:

Microsoft Word 2000 with Service Pack 3, Microsoft Excel 2000 with Service Pack 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 with Service Pack 3

Microsoft Word 2002 with Service Pack 3, Microsoft Excel 2002 with Service Pack 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 with Service Pack 3

Microsoft Office Word 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, Microsoft Office Excel 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 with at least Service Pack 1

Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003

Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003

Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2003

Instructions
To install this download:

Ensure your system is up to date by installing all High-Priority/Required updates on Microsoft Update (required for Microsoft Office XP and 2003 users).

After installing all High-Priority/Required updates with Microsoft Update, download the Compatibility Pack by clicking the Download button above and saving the file to your hard disk.

Double-click the FileFormatConverters.exe program file on your hard disk to start the setup program.

Follow the instructions on the screen to complete the installation.

To remove this download:

On the Windows Start menu, click Control Panel.

Select Add/Remove Programs.

In the list of currently installed programs, select Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office system and then click Remove or Add/Remove. If a dialog box appears, follow the instructions to remove the program.

Click Yes or OK to confirm that you want to remove the program.

From Zeyad Rajabi : My last blog post series was about building blocks and backwards compatibility. In this series, I’ll cover how Word is used within Outlook. We typically refer to the experience of using Word within Outlook as WordMail. In my next few posts, I will talk about what to expect from WordMail, improvements in the reading and search experiences, and, lastly, tips and tricks composing emails with WordMail.

Why was this design bad? Well, having two different rendering engines led to differences in the way emails looked at compose time vs. receive time, especially when dealing with East Asian features like vertical text. So much for WYSIWYG. In addition, authoring emails within Internet Explorer (when the abovementioned “Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages” was turned off) was frustrating due to the lack of features contained within that authoring experience.

In Office 2007, we made a big change to the reading and composing experience within Outlook. We fully integrated Word as the core renderer and composer of emails. That’s right, we use only Word to read and write emails for all message formats. Why, you might ask?

The main reason is that we wanted to provide our customers with a consistent end-to-end user experience when composing and reading emails. Using Word to read and write emails allows for a truly WYSIWYG experience with Outlook 2007. In addition, Internet Explorer, at least prior to version 8, focused on the rendering of HTML content and not on the content itself. Using Word allowed us to build richer reading experiences based on the content of emails. Lastly, from a maintenance point of view, the fact that Word and Outlook are part of the same Office umbrella makes releasing and supporting much less complicated.

The goodness of Word for composing emails
It’s no secret that in today’s world of fast-paced communication we are writing a whole lot more emails than Word documents. That begs the question: Isn’t an email just a type of document? If so, why not bring the goodness of Word authoring to email?

With Outlook 2007 and WordMail, you have all the power of Word for emails as well as for documents.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 helps people create and share professional-looking content by combining a comprehensive set of writing tools with the easy-to-use Microsoft Office Fluent user interface. Here are the top 10 ways Office Word 2007 can help you create professional-looking content faster.

1. Spend more time writing and less time formatting.
The Office Fluent user interface presents the right tools when you need them, making it easy to format your documents quickly. Now you can find the right features in Office Word 2007 to make your documents communicate more effectively. Using Quick Styles and Document Themes, you can quickly change the appearance of text, tables, and graphics throughout the entire document to match your preferred style or color scheme.

2. Communicate more effectively with SmartArt diagrams and new charting tools.
New SmartArt diagrams and a new charting engine help you create great-looking content with 3-D shapes, transparency, drop shadows, and other effects.

3. Quickly assemble documents using Building Blocks.
Building Blocks in Office Word 2007 can be used to assemble documents from frequently used or predefined content such as disclaimer text, pull quotes, sidebars, cover pages, and other types of content. This will help ensure you don’t spend needless time recreating content or copying and pasting between documents; it also helps ensure consistency across all of the documents created within your organization.

4. Save as PDF or XPS directly from Office Word 2007.
Office Word 2007 offers you a choice for sharing documents with other people. You can convert your Word documents to Portable Document Format (PDF) or XML Paper Specification (XPS) format without the addition of third-party tools to help ensure broad communication with users on any platform.1

5. Publish and maintain blogs directly from Office Word 2007.
You can now publish blogs directly from Office Word 2007. You can configure Office Word 2007 to link directly to your blog site, and use the rich Word experience to create blogs with images, tables, and advanced text formatting features.

6. Master your document review processes using Office Word 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
With built-in workflow services in Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can initiate and track document review and approval processes from within Office Word 2007 to help accelerate review cycles across your organization without forcing people to learn new tools.

7. Connect your documents to business information.
Create dynamic Smart Documents that update themselves by connecting to your back-end systems using new document controls and data bindings. By using the new XML integration capability, organizations can deploy intelligent templates to assist people in creating highly structured documents.

8. Remove tracked changes, comments, and hidden text from your documents.
Detect and remove unwanted comments, hidden text, or personally identifiable information using the Document Inspector to help ensure that sensitive information doesn’t escape when your documents are published.

9. Use the tri-pane review panel to compare and combine documents.
Office Word 2007 makes it easy to find out what changes were made to a document. A new tri-pane review panel helps you see both versions of a document with deleted, inserted, and moved text clearly marked.

10. Reduce your file sizes and improve corrupt file recovery.
The new Ecma Office Open XML Formats offer a dramatic reduction in file size as well as improvement in recovery for damaged files. These new formats provide a tremendous savings to storage and bandwidth requirements, and reduce the burden on IT personnel.

This is an end user compatibility pack guide. The bottom line for end users and compatibility is: end users don’t want to care and shouldn’t have to care. They simply want to get their work done. They do not want to think about compatibility. If they do think about compatibility, they will only think about it if it impacts them getting their work done. That being said, what do end users need to know or not know about Word 2007 to ensure that they can get their work done?

End Users Don’t Need to Know

…because it is not new to Word 2007 and therefore will not change their ability to get work done

• Word 2007 creates files that can be viewed by anyone for free (via the Word Viewer & Compatibility Pack)

• Word 2007 creates files that can be opened and saved in previous versions of Word (via the Compatibility Pack)

• Word 2007 has new features that cannot be edited or cannot be represented in previous versions of Word

• Word 2007 will not change the layout of documents created in previous versions of Word

• Word 2007 can save files in the .doc (Word ’97-2003) file format

End Users Need to Know

…because it is new to Word 2007 and may change their ability to get work done

• Word 2007 creates files in a new format (.docx). Other users need to download a free tool called the Compatibility Pack to open and edit these files.

End Users May Want to Know

…because it is new to Word 2007 and can improve their ability to get work done

• Word 2007 provides a way to check for features that cannot be edited or represented in previous versions of Word (via the Compatibility Checker)

• Word 2007 provides a way to ensure that features that cannot be edited or represented in previous versions of Word cannot be put into documents (via Compatibility Mode)

• Word 2007 provides a way to refresh some of its new features after they have been saved in Word 2003

Source

HowTo: Make a smooth transition from Office 2003 to Office 2007 | HowTo: An interactive guide for Office 2007

In our last meeting together, we ended the discussion with the easy way to create tables in Microsoft Word. Today, we’ll look at how to spruce up your Word docs by adding tables with color. First, go to TABLE-DRAW TABLE and create a new table within your document. THEN just take a look at the pop-up toolbar that is labeled “Tables and Borders”. Choose a cell within your table and click on the paint bucket in the top right area of the toolbar for Tables and Borders. From there, you can choose any color you want - and WALLAH!, the table cell has a beautiful background color. I always choose these colors BEFORE adding text inside the cells. If you have text in a cell - and the new background color makes the text hard to read - just highlight the text and change the text color by using the standard text color tool at the TOP of the WORD PROGRAM - upper right. If this seems a bit tricky, you can play with it until you get it down pat. You can also review the help file within Word for useful tutorials on using tables. I hope this helped! If you have any questions, just email me and I will do my best to help you! Cheers!