Microsoft Office Rules

Not ashamed to recommend Microsoft Office - and yes, it does work better on PCs

I'm finally learning how to use Microsoft Office. An odd post, to be sure, considering that I have created Office documents for the entirety of my working life and that I was forced to become a bit of a power user as a managing consultant over a good part of that period. But I was always wrangling with the peculiarities of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in trying to bend their features to my will. I never ventured into the land of "true" power users, cranking out macros and coding up Visual Basic customizations, but I attempted a number of hacks and workarounds to the core functionality for what I needed those applications to do in creating client-worthy documents.

But no more. My hard drive crashed, and I am three weeks in to a laborious back-and-forth process to finally restore my personal computer to its prior incarnation. I have too much data, and I need to consolidate. Strange place to start in really learning Microsoft Office, but the logic is this - my data explosion and difficulty in managing content is directly related to the amount of work I do to create Microsoft Office documents. If it is not for the tens of thousands of images that I have captured on digital cameras or the thousands of songs that I have ripped into MP3's, it is the variety of Office documents that have cluttered my hard drive for work and personal projects.

So, I decided to finally figure out how these applications really work and what they try to do in order to make my life easier - and more streamlined - in handling Office documents. It turns out that Microsoft has a come a long way (baby!) and that the current iterations of Office 2010 applications work together better than ever. And with a little sweat and tears, one can draw more blood from this application suite to complete the task at hand than ever before - and without a lot of the crazy workarounds. Which ultimately is helping me organize my document libraries and figure out what I need and keep, what gets consolidated, and where the rest of my document overload goes. I hate to admit, but Microsoft Office rules - once you understand what its rules are.

Comments

New York Pause

Heading to the Helmsley Sometimes I work in NYC, and this is my office. More precisely, there is a desk in the upper floors of this distinctive building that has a major thoroughfare running through it that I inhabit while typing up documents and conducting meetings in the city. It is nothing exceptional, usually the work and sometimes the desk at which I sit, but the surrounding city is commanding, ever-thriving, and never-still. If I pay close enough attention, I am reminded of the countless things that make this city unique among the many cities I have had the pleasure to live in and visit. But on this brisk morning, when winter gusts barrel down Park Avenue as I hustle the blocks from Lex to the building entrance security guards, I pause long enough to snap this picture. That pause is enough reminder that I am lucky to be here, and New York City is ready to give me its best shot (I'm still not sure if the city is better personified male or female). But that is all t

Party Like It's 1999

A coworker sent me a meeting invitation to the end of the world. Fitting. I'm not sure if I should accept or not (suppose it depends on your views of the end of the Mayan calendar ), but somehow it reminded me of the Prince song on a related subject . Fitting as well that this coworker was not born when Prince extolled the virtues of partying like it's 1999 (side note: I did party like it's 1999 while studying abroad in Milan at that time, which was a heady experience with the coming of the Euro and all. How times have changed, how the mighty have fallen...). Time change, sometimes faster than we think, and our cultural references become dated. Perhaps just like the Mayan calendar falling out of fashion over the last few centuries, until its end becomes a modern cultural phenomenon - or not, depending on your view of things. In either case, it's worth partying like it's 1999 regardless because hey, it will be Friday when this all goes down, and Fridays

In Memory of Rose

Pets have an uncanny ability of ingraining themselves into the fabric of a household, so much so that their disappearance can cause great grief and disorientation to their owners. Such is the case with Rose, who passed from our household on Sunday. An older dog when we took her in to our home last year, Rose was supposedly the runt of her litter, a fact confirmed by her diminutive 5-pound Pomeranian frame - too small for her breed but too big to be classified a "teacup." This suited her just fine, however, as she came to embody a singular personality as a dog among people, often little acknowledging some dogs and appearing frightened by others just as a hesitant human being might act around jumpy canines. Rose embodied all of what defines unconditional love. She was raucous when we would leave the house and even more raucous when we returned, partly due to separation anxiety but mostly due to her sadness and excitement of being around us; she let us know her affection b

Journal : OpenRoadWorks

Search This Blog