Archive of posts tagged Office 2007

Get Started tab can help you make the transition

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Microsoft is offering 3 free downloads that add a “Get Started” tab to Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007. This tab is something they probably should have included in the product itself when Office 2007 came to the market about a year ago, but at least you can download and install it now yourself.
The tab contains some useful links to ease the transition to the new version of the Office packages.

The icons on the Get Started tab are similar for each of the products. This is the Excel version:

  • Interactive Guide is a direct link to the interactive guide that Microsoft put on the Office webpages, which helps in finding a command in Office 2007, if you know where it is in Office 2003. I talked about it in one of my first posts on this blog. Very helpful, and now just a click away!
  • Up to Speed with Excel 2007 is a direct link to the Introduction training pages on Office Online.
  • Excel 2007 Overview and Get up to Speed with Excel 2007 are videos that demonstrate the new features and the basic stuff you need to know about the product.
  • Discuss Excel 2007 leads you to the Excel newsgroups, community blogs, MVPs (Office Experts) and webcasts.
  • Training leads to free self-paced courses.
  • Videos take you to some general Office videos/demos.
  • Excel 2007 will take you to the Office Online page for Excel, with an overview of all available help and training option.

Everything you reach is already available on the Microsoft Office website, but with this tab, the most useful pages are immediately available. Nice.

Here are the links:

PowerPoint Quickie: Replace Fonts

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When I started this blog a few months ago, I promised myself I would not let it die after a few weeks, unlike many other blogs. But I have to admit, keeping it alive has been more of a struggle than I thought. It just takes a lot of time and energy to regularly publish something that is worthwhile reading. I’m not running out of ideas, I’m just having difficulties finding the time to put them into quality posts.

Anyway, at least this is another Quickie for you. Sometimes, when you receive a PowerPoint presentation or some Powerpoint slides that you want to reuse in your own presentation, the fonts of text boxes don’t match. The previous versions of PowerPoint had a nice feature to replace a specific font with another one for all slides of your presentation.

PowerPoint 2007 still has that feature, but I couldn’t find it. So I went to the Office website and looked at the Interactive Guide for PowerPoint that shows where to find a command in office 2007 if you know where it was in Office 2003.
It turned out it was surprisingly straightforward: it’s on the Home tab of the Ribbon, in the Replace-button.

Don’t click the button itself, but the drop-down arrow next to it, and you’ll be able to replace fonts quickly.

Reason #4 why I like Office 2007: the new file format

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The new file format that Office 2007 uses is an XML-based file format, which is stored on the hard disk in a compressed format. A standard ZIP-compression is used, which means that you can open Office 2007 files in a zip-compatible application.

This opens a lot of possibilities, but what I really like about it is that you can easily extract images or other embedded documents out of Word, Excel or PowerPoint files.
Better yet, this (finally!) gives me an easy way to find out why a PowerPoint presentation has a huge file size, even though I used “Compress Pictures…” before I saved.

I could put this into practice today: a colleague asked for my help because he had a PowerPoint presentation with about 30 slides, some of which contained pictures, and the file size was 11MB. Too large to send as an e-mail attachment in our organization.

I first looked at the obvious things: no master slides that were not used, no pictures that were scaled down to 25% or less, all pictures compressed and cropped… nothing that would explain the 11MB.

So I opened the file in PowerPoint 2007, saved it as an .pptx-file, opened that with WinZip and sorted the list on file size. The result? The presentation contained 6 images in .wmf-format, which apparently take a lot of space.

I could not have seen that in PowerPoint 2003: the images themselves were less than 300×300 pixels and were scaled at 100%, so everything looked OK.

After replacing the pictures with a .jpg-version, the PowerPoint presentation shrank to a mere 3 MB!