Amazon has a research task pane that allows you to research and search from products from within Word or Excel and add product info into your document. Snazzy.
Recently in Office 2003 Category
I really like todays free template from A PowerPoint Blog. Oriental 01 has nice, warm, wood tones that don’t overpower with grain textures or other distracting items. I know I’ll use it in a slide deck soon.
We’ve all sat through too many PowerPoint presentations that are far too long, with too many slides (usually poorly designed), and entirely too much text on them. The 10/20/30 rule is Über-elegant. A PowerPoint presentation should have no more than 10 slides, last no more than 20 minutes, and use fonts of 30 pt minimum. Guy Kawasaki expounds on the rule on his blog.
[Via A PowerPoint Blog]
Indezine releases a new, free PowerPoint template every week. They’ll add a little variety to your presentations without making a dent in your wallet.
We’ve all sat through too many boring, hideously unattractive PowerPoint presentations. Everyone’s seen all the themes and animations. Set your presentations apart with Ovation from Serious Magic. It “turns lifeless PowerPoint slides into a stunning presentation in seconds.” It brings broadcast quality animation and backgrounds to your presentaions, making the leap from static slides to sophisticated video.
There have been several great articles published recently about moving from VBA in Office to VSTO. Here’s a quick list:
- Chris Kunicki: Migrating from VBA to .NET/VSTO – Where to Start
- John R. Durant: Migrating from VBA to VSTO Part 2
- MSDN: Migrating a Word VBA Solution to Visual Basic Using Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office
- MSDN: Implement a Microsoft Word-like Object Model for Your .NET Framework Application
- MSDN: Microsoft .NET Development for Microsoft Office, Chapter 2: Basics of Office Interoperability
Google’s released a plugin for Microsoft Word that allows users to compose and publish blog entries to a Blogger-powered blog. Now we can finally use all the text-editing goodness of Word to compose and publish blog entries. SO much easier than composing in Word, spell checking, copying the text, pasting it to a Blogger text-area field and publishing. The plugin adds buttons for Publish, Open Post, and Save As Draft. Download it from Blogger.com
I love FabriKam 3.1. I’ve always had a hard time finding the right user account to use, though. A lot of them are pretty locked down (which is a good thing). The solution? Use BrianC / P@ssw0rd. This is Tip number one from John Peltonen.
If you’re not familiar with FabriKam 3.1, it’s a Microsoft Office learning / testing / play virtual machine (it requires VirtualPC 2004 or Virtual Server 2005). It’s an instant working environment that includes Microsoft Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2000, BizTalk Server 2004, Office 2003 Professional Edition, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server, Visual Studio .NET 2003, and all of the custom solutions and components, and have an instant test environment for learning about these solutions and components.
It’s a free download if you’re a MSDN subscriber. If not, you can order it on DVD.
Anil Dash wrote an article for SixApart last year about using Movable Type to create a Microsoft Word document via WordML (download the schema from Microsoft).
It looks like the template on the SixApart website went missing. You can download the wordml.xml file it references here.
Ed Bott has a post about XML support in Office 2003 vs. Office 12. Anil posted a comment about Movable Type’s ability to create Word documents.
I just stumbled upon this post by the InfoPath team.
Highlights:
- Enables automatic scheduling (and creating) of appointments by looking up Exchange’s free busy information
- Does processing of appointment accept/reject messages. Presents the free busy information in the same way Outlook does, all in the InfoPath view!
- Configurable scheduling window with built-in constraints such as “lunch”, “last” and “optional”
- Smart algorithm for picking meeting times based on the number of interviewers – blending brute force with a Monte Carlo/heuristics-based mechanism.
Nifty!