For the last week I’ve been testing a new theme design on this website.  I hope it will make information easier for you to find, and promote a consistent look with my company’s other websites.  You’ll be surprised to learn how we did it.

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Word geeks have long loved impressing our audience during demos by typing “=rand(x,y)” where x is the number of paragraphs and y is the number of sentences per paragraph. What it would do in version of Word through Word 2003 is repeat the sentence “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”

Not so in Word 2007. Now it uses this mundane and “helpful” set of Word instructions–boo. You’d think they’d just go with lorem ipsum if they wanted to use different sentences. Anyhow, the new result repeats the following paragraph over and over:

On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look. You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab. Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you specify directly. To change the overall look of your document, choose new Theme elements on the Page Layout tab. To change the looks available in the Quick Style gallery, use the Change Current Quick Style Set command. Both the Themes gallery and the Quick Styles gallery provide reset commands so that you can always restore the look of your document to the original contained in your current template.

I understand that this offers better demo text than repeating a single sentence, but I wish it could’ve been a little more creative. This is just begging me to write a new random generator that takes lines from Stairway to Heaven or The 9/11 Report or something like that…

I hear people talking all the time about how different Word’s interface looks. But the skeleton of documents looks completely different as well. Here are some initial observations on the differences in default fonts/behavior:

Here’s how it looks:

This is a huge change. People aren’t used to having the cursor skip a line when they press Enter. (Even though After Spacing is more precise and better maintains consistency). I wonder how long it’ll take people to find this command:

On the one hand, they’ll find it and fix their problem…but then if they use it I think people are going to have trouble deciding when to use the Before command when to use the After command. I’m just afraid consistency is going to be difficult for people to achieve at first–when things are unfamiliar and the old way no longer ways.

Well, Microsoft, you’re certainly going to give me work as a trainer…

I’ve recently upgraded my primary workstation to Office 2007, Internet Explorer 7, and Firefox 2. I took the necessary precautions, but honestly everything has worked out smoothly (partly because I’d been using the products in our demo environment for some time). Okay, the only problems I’ve run into are Treo sync issues and Firefox crashing. But while these upgrades are likely fodder for their own post, I’d just like to thank Microsoft for finally allowing the user to resize the Cross-Reference window. I’ve complained about this for years–nothing was more painful than a cross-reference window that was tiny and constantly lost its place when inserting references. Finally it’s been fixed–both problems! Thank you, Microsoft.

I live off my Outlook reminders. But one of the things that’s always annoyed me is that, when dealing with task reminders, you can dismiss them or open the item to which they refer…but you can’t simply mark a task as completed with the click of a button. Up until now I’ve always opened the item and then changed its status to completed.

Today I just realized that you can right-click on a task reminder and choose to mark it complete without opening the item. It’s really that easy:

1. Right click on a task in your “Reminders” window
2. Select Mark Complete

Enjoy!

…or at least it felt that way. You see, I pride myself on having a fairly extensive vocabulary, which occasionally leads to my being pleonastic or pedantic…but nonetheless I’ve always enjoyed richness in words (such as that discussed in the Word Nerds podcast). Anyhow, today I came across a flattering dialog box in Microsoft Word:

For thirty seconds I considered the possibility that Word was not in err and that I had in fact exceeded its capacity for vocabulary. Continue reading…

By now you’ve probably used Search & Replace in Word, and you may have even tried some of the advanced tools within it. However, as an efficiency trainer, I get to see that there’s a huge difference between those who use this tool versus those who have mastered it. The result of mastery? A heck of a lot of frustration and time saved. Maybe even some bragging rights. But enough talk…

Tip 1. Don’t perform a “Replace All.”

Inevitably there’s going to be something that doesn’t fit a pattern. You have two choices, you can refine your search (see below) to a more specific term (which is a good idea, but can be time consuming) or you can take the extra 20 seconds to review each item before replacing it. And, for the record, you don’t need to keep pressing Find and then Replace. By merely pressing Replace (or better yet, pressing R on the keyboard!), Word will move you between each selection and then replace it. A quick glance before each replacement will ensure much more accurate search & replaces.

Tip 2. Refine your searches

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