Compare docs the smart way
You don’t need two windows to compare documents in Word 2007. Go to Review > Compare, and click Compare one more time. Enter two document names and you’ll see the difference.

Look for private data
Before sending a file, use the Inspect Document command (under the Office button, click Prepare). It’ll look for hidden text and other info that Word can strip out.

Add AutoText to Toolbar
You can make AutoText easy to find by adding it to the Quick Access Toolbar. Go to the Office button, Word Options > Customize, and under Choose commands from look for All Commands. Find AutoText and click Add. You’ll now have a drop-down.

Speed up paragraph movements
Move paragraphs with just the keys. Put the cursor a the front of a paragraph, hold Alt-Shift, then use the arrow keys to move the text up or down. Use Alt-Ctrl to select and entire paragraph.

Jump to previous work
When reopening a large Word document, hit Shift-F5 to jump directly to the last spot you were working on.

Make a table of contents
Creating a table of contents for a document is easy, as long as all the headlines and subheads use either Heading 1, Heading 2 or Heading 3 from the Styles section of the Home tab. Insert a T of C page from the References tab and it will fill itself in based on those styles.

Use subheads with style
Don’t make subheads that are mere bold. To make them fit a style, select a subhead, right-click, go to Styles, and then Select Text with Similar Formatting. Double check that the macro didn’t select text you don’t want, then apply a style like Heading 3 from the Home tab’s Styles section.

Change the default font
Microsoft Word 2007’s default font, Calibri is good, but you may not like it. To change it, hit Ctrl-D, select the font you want (along with the size and color) and click the Default button. This changes the default font in the template called Normal, which will be applied to all documents that use Normal.

Translate words, even sentences
Word 2007 will translate words or whole sentences into Arabic, French, or Spanish as you specify. Visit the Review tab and click Translation ScreenTip to set a language. Hover the cursor over a word to translate it or select a full block of text and click Translate.

Insert random text
Need sample text? Type =rand() on its own line and hit Enter. You’ll get fake Latin, repeated “quick brown fox,” or random instructions, depending on the version of Word. Numerals in the parentheses indicate number of paragraphs and sentences” =rand(5,10) inserts five paragraphs with ten sentences each.

Edit Image documents
Office comes with a program called Microsoft Document Imaging. You can use it to perform quick-and-dirty optical character recognition (OCR) on items you’ve scanned (save them as TIFF files). Click Send Text to Word and you can start editing immediately.

Using keyboard shortcuts to choose options is definitely faster than reaching out for the mouse everytime. Office 2007 makes it easy. Tap the Alt key while in any Office 2007 application and the ribbon is instantly covered in small letters indicating the keystrokes. Type the for the different ribbon tabs (H for Home, N for Insert etc) to access individual ribbon controls and more key shortcuts.

Adjust the Quick Access Toolbar

The Quick Acess Toolbar takes up space in the left side of the title bar in an Office 2007 application window. You can move it below the ribbon (right-click next to Add-Ins to get menu) and customize it to include just about any button you want.

Hide and restore the ribbon

To hide the ribbon in Office 2007, double-click the tab, hit Ctrl-F, or right-click and select Minimize the Ribbon. Now the ribbon will be treated almost like a menu, hidden until you click the tab or use the Alt key to bring up keystrokes

Change default save location

All versions of Office have their own default locations for Save As. To change it in any Office 2007 application, click the round Office button and choose Option | Save. In Word, you can then choose Browse to find and specify a new default file location; in Excel and PowerPoint, you have to paste in the drive path to that location from Windows Explorer.

Add tab for getting started

Confused by changes in Office 2007? Download the “Get Started Tab” sets for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint at www.microsoft.com/downloads. Each puts a new tab on the respective program with links to online interactive guides, demos, and training videos on how to master the software.

View documents sans Office

You can open, view and print Office 2007 documents without owning Office. Download the individual viewers for Word, Excel, or PowerPoint from www.microsoft.com/downloads.

Here are a couple of ways to overcome the situation. While, you may not be able to make the original document editable without the password, you can create editable copies. Here’s how.

Situation 1: If the cells that you are interested in are selectable, then you can merely select the cells, copy the contents, and paste them into a new worksheet or file. The new worksheet would be perfectly editable. While, this may appear too simple, many people are not aware that this works.

Situation 2: There is a possibility that the creator of the file has disabled Cell selection while protecting the worksheet. Obviously you can’t use the first method to deal with such worksheets, because without the ability to select the cells you can’t possibly copy the contents.

Call Google Docs or Zoho Sheet to your rescue.

Just upload/import the excel file to either Google or Zoho and magically you are able to edit the file. Better still, export the file again into an .xls file and you can edit the file on your desktop using Excel. There is a slight difference between the way Google Docs and Zoho Sheet behave in this regard. While the exported file from Google is already unprotected, the file exported from Zoho Sheet, needs to be unprotected using the menu. But now you won’t be asked for password to unprotect.

However, if you have any of the three prior versions of Office - 2000, XP, or 2003 you can install the Office compatibility pack and then you would be able to open the new format files with your existing Office installation.

You can download the Office Compatibility pack here.

Suggested Reading:  Exploring the insides of a .docx word document

Apparently, this feature is missing in Word 2007. You can’t find it in any of the ribbons. As if to confirm the removal of the feature in this version, if you search Help you won’t find any reference about it.

However, the fact is that the tool is still available in Word 2007, just a little buried inside. Here is what you need to get it on top.

• Click the Office button.
• Click on the Word options button and choose Customize.
• In the Choose commands from drop-down menu near the top left, select Commands Not in the Ribbon.
• Select AutoSummary Tools from the list below and then click the Add button.

Now you can access the AutoSummarize feature from the Quick Access Toolbar.

Surprisingly, to get under the hood of a .docx document you don’t need to have Word 2007 at all. All you need to do is change the .docx extension to .zip. Better make a copy of the file before you meddle with it, in case something goes wrong.

Now you can open the zip file by double clicking on it if you are using Windows XP or you can unzip it with a tool like Winzip. You would find that there are several .xml files inside the folder. The screenshot below shows the contents of a sample .docx file containing an image.

To send someone the document without the image, merely delete that part of the package without even opening the file in Word. Whenever you open a .docx file that has been renamed from .zip with one of its components, for example an image, removed, Word would try to repair the file, and in the process would put a placeholder in place of the deleted image. You can remove the placeholder by merely double-clicking on it.

If you want to actually edit the text of the document, open only the document.xml component in a text editor like notepad or wordpad and make the changes. Being an xml file it might take you some time to find the text and also understand the structure. If the file contains comments that you want to remove, strip them out by deleting the comments.xml component. Other elements are styles.xml which holds the documents style definitions; headers.xml which has section heads (listed as Header 1, Header 2 and so on) and theme1.xml which hosts any templates used to style the document. Document.xml.rels has the instructions for reassembling the components into the complete document.

So as you can see, in theory, you can edit quite a bit of a .docx word file even without having Word 2007 installed.

BASIC SHORTCUT KEYS

MICROSOFT WINDOWS SHORTCUT KEYS

WINDOWS KEY (WINKEY) SHORTCUTS

MICROSOFT WORD SHORTCUT KEYS

MICROSOFT EXCEL SHORTCUT KEYS

OUTLOOK SHORTCUT KEYS

But few people are aware that the AutoCorrect text can include images too. For instance, you can set up an AutoCorrect entry so that whenever you type ‘logo‘ it is replaced by your company’s actual logo graphic. This makes it easy to insert any image that you use frequently.

The best example would be to use a scanned version of your signature to ’sign’ any document that you would like to distribute via email or fax.

You would first need to scan your signature and save it as a graphic file. Make sure that there isn’t too much white space around the signature. If the scanned signature has lot of white space you can use any photo editor to crop the signature alone. Once you have scanned, cropped and saved your signature as an image, you can proceed with the following steps:

• In Word, select Insert > Picture and browse to the folder where you saved your signature image and select it. Click Insert.
• Once the image is inserted into the Word page, select the signature.
• In Word 2007, select Office > Word Options, click Proofing, and then click AutoCorrect Options to display the AutoCorrect dialog box.
• Select the AutoCorrect tab if it is not already selected.
• In the Replace text box, type an abbreviation or code for the signature, say ‘sig‘. Ensure that the ‘Formatted Text‘ option is selected.
• Click Add.
• Click Ok and then click Ok again in the Word Options dialog box.

Now whenever you want to insert your signature, just type ‘sig‘ and press Enter. Instead of Enter you could also press spacebar or tab.

While it is hard to believe, Excel makes mistakes multiplying 77.1 by 850, 10.2 by 6,425 and 20.4 by 3,212.5. Basically Excel 2007 has problems with certain calculations where the result is 65,535 or 65,536. The problem was first identified with 65,535 but later tests showed a similar phenomenon with 65,536 as well.

Microsoft employee David Gainer says that Excel was actually performing the calculations correctly, but when it comes time to show the answer on the screen, it messes up. Gainer said the bug is limited to six numbers from 65,534.99999999995 to 65,535, and six numbers from 65,535.99999999995 to 65,536.

The number 65,536 is 2 multiplied by itself 16 times, and a common delimiter in programming, which relies on binary numbers. The “problem” decimals 65,534.99999999995 and 65,535.99999999995 each have 16 characters, and Excel may be having trouble interpreting values between those and the next round number.

Hotfixes

Microsoft has already announced a Excel 2007 hotfix package for the issue. You can download it here. You may also want to read the KB article on this here.

Microsoft is in the process of adding this fix to Microsoft Update so that it will get automatically pushed to users running Excel 2007. Additionally, the fix will also be contained in the first service pack of Office 2007.