Microsoft Office

To mark St Patrick’s Day, Faith Central has compiled 10 celebratory tidbits, some myth, some fact, on the Patron Saint of the Irish.

1. The potato crop was traditionally planted in Ireland after March 17

2. Blue not green is the color originally associated with St Patrick. “St Patrick’s Blue” is used on Ireland’s Presidential Standard or flag, while the Irish Guards sport a plume of St Patrick’s blue in their bearskins. The emphasis on green is thought to be linked to “wearing the Green”, a symbol from the 18th century on, of sympathy with Irish independence.

3. St Patrick is patron of fishermen in the Loire, where a legend associates him with a blackthorn bush. The saint is said to have slept beneath it, and when he awoke the next day, Christmas, the bush flowered, and was said to have continued to do so every Christmas until its destruction during the First World War.

4. A regiment of the Mexican army in the 1846 -8 War between Mexico and America was named after St Patrick. Members of the Batellón de San Patricio included Afro-Americans freshly liberated from the slave plantations of the South, and the soldiers were granted Mexican citizenship afterwards.

5. The first St Patrick’s Day parade took place in 1737 in Boston, followed in 1762 by New York. George Washington allowed his soldiers a holiday on March 17, 1780 as “an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”

6. Until the 1970’s, all pubs were shut in Ireland on St Patrick’s Day, and the sole venue selling drink the annual dog show. Lenten fasting – and the obligation to abstain from meat – were lifted on the day, which most families would begin with Mass.

7. St Patrick’s Day is a public holiday in Ireland and also in Monserrat “the Emerald Isle of the Carribean,” so called because it was settled in 1633 by Irish migrants from St Kitts.

8. According to legend, on the day of Judgement, while Christ judges all other nations, St Patrick will be the judge of the Irish.

9. Since 1962, tons of green dye are tipped on St Patrick’s Day into the Chicago river, although the quantity has reduced, for environmental reasons, from 100 to 40.

10. Should you wish to carry on celebrating St Patrick after March 17, in the United States, you might visit the four Shamrocks in the USA including Mount Gay-Shamrock, W.Va or the nine cities named Dublin, including Dublin, Ohio (the largest Dublin in the U.S.) and Dublin, Georgia.

For all you SharePoint Designer enthusiasts and aficionados out there, I just wanted to let you know that John Jansen, Test Lead for the SharePoint Designer product team, has recently published a book from Microsoft Press:

Titled “Building Web Applications with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Step by Step,” John covers a wide range of topics, including:

Get Started with SharePoint Designer
Customizing the SharePoint Master Page
Using ASP.NET controls with SharePoint Controls
Creating Workflows
Data Sources with ASP.NET and SharePoint
Integrating SharePoint Applications with Access
Creating Data Views in SharePoint Designer

Learn more about the book and find links to purchase it at Microsoft Learning.

You can also view John’s free training videos on SharePoint Designer 2007 on Office Online:

A six-part series on getting the most out of SharePoint Designer 2007
SharePoint Designer 2007 Business Administrator Training

And there’s more SharePoint Designer 2007 training available from John via Total Training (not free):

Total Training for Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Synopsis
The smart way to learn Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Designer 2007-one step at a time! Now you can get two popular Step By Step books in one value-packed toolkit-at a great price. You’ll work at your own pace through the easy numbered steps and skill-building practice files on CD. First, master the fundamentals with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Step By Step-then, learn how to customize your site and make it really work for you with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Step By Step.

Teach yourself how to:
• Create and manage SharePoint sites, including working with lists and libraries • Work with collaboration features to create surveys, discussion boards, wikis, and blogs • Customize your site with cascading style sheets, Web parts, and data sources • Create workflows and applications with custom forms, templates, and dashboards to enhance your team’s productivity • Work with Microsoft Office Excelr 2007, Accessr 2007, InfoPathr 2007, and Outlookr 2007 in Windows SharePoint Services • Plus-get two companion CDs featuring hands-on practice files from both books

With Step By Step, you can take just the lessons you need or work from cover to cover. Either way, you drive the instruction, building and practicing the skills you need, just when you need them!

Key Book Benefits:
• Combines two beginning SharePoint books in one package at a discounted price. • Covers all the fundamentals, including building custom SharePoint sites and applications to enable collaboration and enhance productivity. • With Step By Step, you can read from cover to cover or pick just the topics you want. •Useful to both beginning-level and experienced SharePoint users. • Features easy-to-follow lessons and hands-on skill-building exercises. • Includes two companion CDs with practice files, project templates, and other resources.

You can integrate your accounting system (accounting system: The accounting program.) with Business Contact Manager for Outlook so that you and your co-workers can access your customers’ (customer: A person or company to whom your company sells products or services.) financial information while using Business Contact Manager for Outlook. The financial information remains in your accounting system.

Important To integrate your accounting system with Business Contact Manager for Outlook, you must be the database owner (database owner: The person who created the database, and has full control, including granting access permissions or deleting records. When a database has been restored, then the person who restored it becomes the owner.) for the Business Contact Manager database that is integrated. You may also be required to be an administrator (administrator: The person in charge of managing a Windows computer. The administrator is responsible for installing software, assigning passwords, and managing files.) or system administrator on the computer where your accounting system is installed.

For more information about how to integrate your accounting system with Business Contact Manager for Outlook, see Help in your accounting system.

When your accounting system and Business Contact Manager for Outlook are integrated, your Account records (Account record: The location for storing Account information, including information that is entered on the Account form, linked records, and communication history items.) are added to your accounting system as customer records, and your product and service items (product and service items: Goods and services that you purchase or sell, or offer for purchase or sale.) list is also integrated.

Note Product and service items from the Items list in your accounting system are integrated into the Product and Service Items List in Business Contact Manager for Outlook. Product and service items from Business Contact Manager for Outlook are not integrated into the Items list in your accounting system.

From the OneNote Self-help board:

I am using OneNote 2007 SP1 with Windows XP. When I am typing a note the
text will disappear at times and a conflict page will be created containing
the text I typed. I will re-type the deleted text and continue on; however,
the same process will happen again a minute or so later with yet another
conflict page created with the new text. How can I keep this from happening?
It appears it is related to OneNote trying to synchronize changes and the
conflict pages are there for me to resolve later on; however, this is very
frustrating.

I should point out that the software is installed locally and the OneNote
data files are stored locally. I am not sharing the OneNote files with
anyone…nor do I want to. I changed the Sync setting to “Work Offline,” but
this seems to have no affect. What am I doing wrong?

In addition, I frequently see an error message at the top of a section that
says “This section is corrupted. Click here to try to repair this section.”
Is this a related problem? I will often repair the section only to see it
become corrupted again later on. I never experienced these problems in prior
versions of OneNote. Help!!!!

Sounds like your section got corrupted somehow. Since repair doesn’t
seem to be working, I’d recommend copying all the content into a new
section and deleting the corrupt section once you have a copy of everything.
The conflict pages are likely a sideeffect of the corruption. Ideally,
you wouldn’t be seeing conflict pages at all in a single-user scenario.

The Sharepoint blog has a great intro how to access Sharepoint via Groove:

There are times when, in order to be productive and get work done, you need access to the data stored in SharePoint without access to the SharePoint server itself. Examples are: the classic “on the plane” scenario, working from home without corporate network access, and collaboration by working remotely on documents stored in a central SharePoint server when network latency is high. The productivity of people working in these situations can be dramatically improved if data can be taken offline, modified locally, and then synchronized back when network connectivity is available. Office has a great program named Groove that can be used to synchronize documents with a SharePoint server. In this post, we’ll go through the 4 steps necessary to get started with Groove and use it with SharePoint document libraries.

Step1: Start Groove
Groove is distributed with Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise. After you finish installing Office Enterprise 2007, Groove is available on the Start Menu in the Microsoft Office group. Start Groove by clicking its link (Microsoft Office Groove 2007).

Step 2: Create a New Groove Account
If you already have a Groove account set up, you can skip to step 3.

A Groove account allows you to synchronize documents in a SharePoint workspace between Groove clients even when they do not have connectivity to the SharePoint server. This is useful when you have an offline collaboration session. A Groove account is required for Groove to operate.

Usually your company will have Enterprise Groove Server installed. In this case, when you start Groove, it will retrieve your account configuration from your network domain and prompt you for your password. Keeping the account configuration in Enterprise Groove Server is convenient because it keeps track of all the Groove workspaces you are using, so it’s easier for you to use them from different computers.

To see the rest of the explanation, click the above blue link.

From the cool new blog, I heart Onenote:

Ever wish there were some more great tips for using OneNote? Look no further, for the gang at i heart onenote have come to the rescue. Here are the top ten:

10. Ctrl “.” (period) to toggle bullets on and off. Tab to indent.

9. Ctrl-1 to triple-toggle ToDo checkbox (Todo|Done|nuthin). Customize the built-in tags and use Ctrl-1-9 to tag things, Ctrl-0 to remove tags. Don’t forget View/All tagged notes to query across all your notes and build summary pages pulling out quotes you liked, questions to follow up on, ToDos, etc.

8. Right-click on image (e.g. screen clipping), copy text from picture (also works great when searching for a screen clipping - Find (Ctrl-F) will find text inside your images!)

7. Using Live Mesh (mesh.com) to put notebooks in folders that are synced across my many machines

6. Win-N for a new “always on top” side note. Great for taking notes while reading other stuff like web pages, docs, PDFs.

5. Shared notebooks with my team (File/New/Notebook, select shared when the instructions ask you). anyone can edit at any time, even offline! Don’t forget to use features like ‘View/Pages I Haven’t Read’ and ‘View/Pages Changed Recently’. Also right click on anything to see who added it. Work disconnected if you like - your changes will sync and merge cleanly later. Offline/online, easy to use super capable group wiki!

4. Tab key after text to create tables on the fly. Type the first column heading, then Tab (Table magically appears!), next column heading, Tab and so on. Enter when finished the header row, keep going. Use Enter twice on an empty row to break out - never touch a mouse while taking notes!

3. I’m falling behind with my notes! Click “record audio” button to capture what people are saying so I can participate instead of take notes. Take the occasional one word note to indicate what was happening. Later click on those words to hear what we were saying. Great for brainstorming and interviews!

2. Flag OneNote items as Tasks to track in Outlook with Ctrl-Shift-1 through 5. The task is created in Outlook, and the done/not done status is kept in sync with OneNote.

1. Win-S to take a screen clipping and auto-file it in OneNote! Bonus: right click on the system tray OneNote icon, customize screen clipping to send only to clipboard to paste in other apps or OneNote as you like. (my all-time fave)

For the rest, click their link.

Like to share your working day? Thats great, just don’t share your entire life. Inside Office Blog has these tips:

Should you share your technical expertise, goals, or accomplishments at work? Yes! Share a caricature of your boss or love letter from an office romance, however, and you might soon need to share your resume.

Perhaps your team is using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or another program to share information online.

You might have a My Site, which is a great place to track information, promote your expertise, and find others with similar interests. You can use privacy settings to control which categories of people get to see what, in case there’s information that you don’t want everyone to see.

Some files are less safe for work than others, though, so you might keep them offline or at home, especially if you think you might forget the privacy settings. Here’s a short list:

Your cover letter for another job opening
List of reasons you hate your job/boss/co-workers
Order for shoes, tunes, or whatever you buy when you should be working
Your “I’m outta here” manifesto (that you’re saving up for your last day)
The “office pool” worksheet where your buddies bet on your manager’s last day
Caricature of your boss that you doodled during a boring meeting
Latest standings in your favorite online game
Recent letter from a torrid office romance
Business plan for your other job (that you do during office hours)
Your tax return.

For tips on good information to share about yourself, see Michael Sampson’s 10 Tips on Establishing Your Profile in SharePoint My Site.

By Nancy Buchanan, for Office at a Small Business:

Great hints and tips that you can actually use for home, office or small business.

Stake out network connections
When I am home or at my home office, I take a notebook computer wherever I am. With a wireless network I can access all of the files I store on my Office Live Workspace from whatever room I am in. If I am waiting for a delivery, for example, I can work from the den by our front door quite easily. If I need to access other files, I simply bring an Ethernet cable with me and plug into the nearest Ethernet port so that I can access my file server or one of the NAS devices.

When away from home or my home office, I look for Wi-Fi signs that tell me that I can get a connection from my laptop computer to the Internet. You will see these signs at most coffee shops, airports, and libraries. From these locations I can access my Microsoft Office Live Workspace files and work comfortably, often with a tall single mocha within easy reach.

Surround yourself with computers
When your files are centralized and you have a network connection, you can work from just about any computer. That’s why I have my super cool Windows Vista desktop as my primary computer in my office, but also have 2 inexpensive laptop computers I take with me – one for the house that goes wherever I want to work, and one for the car in a discreet case with all of the power supplies and cables and connectors I might need. With computers where I need them I can sneak in a half hour of work here and there while I am taking the kids from activity to activity after school.

Tip If you use Outlook Personal Folders (PST files) to save e-mail messages to, if you close Outlook on every computer before you leave it you can open those same PST files on other computers. So when I am home or in the home office I store the PST files on the server and then open them from whatever computer I happen to be working on at that time.

From Nota Bene: :Learn from a pro: Real-world draft management in OneNote 2007

Some of the best computer tips out there aren’t ever “in the manual,” so to speak. We search the Web to see if someone before us has solved a problem or found an easier, better, and faster way of doing something we want to do. More recently, the convergence of blogs, broadband, and high-quality video have made this a great experience. Whether someone has taken the time to document a step-by-step tutorial about how they use a program, or whether they shoot a quick video about it, the best ideas can come from watching someone else work — letting us peek over their shoulder while they complete a real-world task with the software they’ve chosen, and then learning from their technique and style.

On Microsoft’s Office Online Web site, we recently launched our new Podcast site, which houses a large variety of free videos for all things Office. You can watch these videos from your Web browser or download them to your Zune or your iPod for later viewing. If you like a particular channel or series, you can subscribe to it (via RSS or via the Zune or iPod marketplaces) and get notified whenever new episodes are available.

As part of our new podcasting efforts, I’m very pleased to announce today the premiere episode of “A Writer’s Guide to Microsoft Office” — a new podcast series written and hosted by my teammate (and former editor), Joannie Stangeland. In her first episode, Joannie shows us how she uses a variety of OneNote 2007 features to manage poetry drafts that she prepares for submission to publishers.

To view the video, clik the blue link above.

Microsoft is looking for their newest office (tentatively called Office 2010) to work with other Office programs

Microsoft engineers at the Redmond campus are busy at work with the next iteration of Microsoft Office, tentitively called “Office 2010″.

The hints, innuendos and rumors that have been posted all over the internet (as well as this site) is looking to be more true than not.

The three year wait between Office products is on schedule, according to Ina Fried’s article (link above). The new software is to work with open formerly rival office programs, such as Open Office, Google Docs and the like.

Microsoft is also working to make Office 14 (Office 2010) work with Microsoft phones (and phones in development) and the new up and coming Office Web Aps, that will include Word, Excel and Powerpoint (the Campus’ office mainstay programs). These are to be accessible online, either from their Cloud, including Live Mesh, Windows Live SkyDrive, and Office Live Workspace. Though, I have seen a rumor that Microsoft may combine all their workspaces into one online application. They are already making changes to their Office Live Small Business framework.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft combines Office 14 with web aps, fully compatible with Open Office, Google Docs and not only with Microsoft phones, but the iPhone, as was reported in the above article. As of now, there are compatibility issues with Microsoft Office 2007 and the above said issues, though Office 2007 Word does have a way to save in the 97-03 formats, I wonder if Office 2010 will have a similar venue, to ’save as’ OOo or google doc?