Here are a few tips to make you more productive with Word 2007.

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. Read the full story

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Never leave the key board

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. Read the full story

Microsoft as changed its default file format in Office 2007. For example, .doc has become .docx and .xls has become .xlsx. The new formats now heavily depend on the XML file format. So, while you can open files of the older format using Office 2007 (in Compatibility mode), you won’t be able to open files saved in the new format with older versions of Office.

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.

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Versions earlier to Word 2007 used to have an AutoSummarize option in the Tool menu. The idea of the tool was to basically summarize long documents so that you could get the gist of the content. But honestly, it was not a tool you could really rely on. While, the summaries produced by it were far from perfect, it could help you when you have a really long document to go through in a limited time.

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.

Read the full story

Most of us who have used Microsoft Word would also know about it’s AutoCorrect feature. Normally we use it to replace certain long text with a shorter form to reduce key strokes. For example you can set the AutoCorrect to replace ‘yf’ with ‘Yours faithfully’. This is how most of us use it.

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.