[thechat] Using Microsoft Office or any other "Office" pack

[Luther, Ron]

Elfur Logadottir asked:

>>I've been asked to teach new law students in our school the fundamentals of
>>the programs they are likely to use in their study. I've narrowed it down
>>to five items, four of which are MS Office Programs, 

>>What parts of these programs do you use and why?


Hi Elfur,


Good luck with the class.  I don't think I do much "trickery" with these 
programs, but here goes:

Outlook - Creating folders/subfolders and rules.  Turning off the *&^&*^# 
'preview' modes and changing the sorts. Modifying a folder to add in a "size" 
column. [I modify the subject lines by pre-pending a sequence number - and 
then use the 'edit-copy' and paste to a subdirectory on the hard drive so I 
can archive old email off to CDRs.]  Oh!  You could warn them that you will 
chop their tonkers off as bandwidth bandits if they paste screen shots 
directly into Outlook messages.

Word - I don't think I use too many of the 'fancy' features. I haven't done 
a mail-merge in over a decade.  [I'm pretty sure my lawyer has 'boilerplate' 
Word templates for wills, prenups, etc. that she uses as a 'starting point'. 
Maybe something like that would appeal to this crowd.]

Excel - I'd ask you to put in a footnote for my old buddy Bill.  (He's a good 
guy - we used to work together in Akron.) His "mrexcel.com" site has more 
tricks and insights into Excel than any other place I know.  I think Bill's 
just published his 3rd book on Excel - the site pimps his consulting biz - 
but there's a heck of a lot of 'meat' there if you look around.

Powerpoint - I hate powerpoint.  Show them that they can cut and paste charts 
and graphs from Excel and Visio into powerpoint.


HTH,

RonL.