dacs.doc electric

One of today’s requirements for being an executive assistant is to be proficient in Microsoft Office. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are like reading, writing and math are to a teacher. Living, breathing and sleeping Microsoft Office are a way of life for this executive assistant. Hearing that Bill had made application suite more user friendly, made the June 5th meeting of DACS a must see event.

Our originally scheduled speaker, John Stroiney, had a change of plans at the last minute and Sonal Shah stepped up to the plate in his place. And as far as this writer is concerned, she hit a grand slam home run. She was one of the best presenters we’ve had in a very, very long time. Her cheerful, friendly attitude kept us wanting to hear more. She knew the software and moved around it seamlessly. Relating her personal experiences with the new improvements helped to bring us into her presentation. She was definitely comfortable with the software as well as the audience.

What’s new

According to Sonal, there weren’t a lot of changes in the new version, just a whole lot of improvements. It’s a new way to work with Office, to simplify the way we work. One of the main features is the TASK PANE. It’s in all of the applications. They open up on the right hand side of screen and show additional commands and features relevant to the application. But the feature that grabbed this writer’s attention was the SMART TAGS—small menus that provide fast access to pertinent details and relevant functions. These are also found in all of the Office applications. Handy, very handy.

Another great feature was the ease of formatting information you bring from one application to another. Just cut and paste. Plain and simple.

Bullets--oh, how I hate to work with bullets--They never line up the way you want them to. Not anymore, with XP and the SMART TAGS. Or how about changing the formatting within a document? How many times have you had to search through your document to find all the occurrences of the way you formatted a title, only to find out later that you missed one. Not any more. XP does it for you. Just highlight what you want formatted, go to Format / Styles, and zippo--it’s done, and it tells you how many occurrences there were.

The feature in Excel that grabbed my attention was the colored tabs at the bottom of the screen. Now, in addition to being able to change the name of each tab, you can also change the color. Life doesn’t get much easier than that.

And then there is Outlook. And more color. This time it is used to color the appointments. Great for keeping one organized. It also has a feature to let you preview emails and meetings. Or how about being able to enter a URL in the subject line for easy access?

And last but definitely not least, Sonal showed us what is this writer’s personal favorite, PowerPoint, which has several improvements. The task panes are a definite plus. Print preview is a new addition, which is going to make life a whole lot easier. Before, you had to see a slide show in order to get some idea of what it was going to look like it print. Now what you see is what you get.

Another feature was the friendly error message "We are sorry for the inconvenience" Now you can tell Microsoft your problem. The program takes a snapshot of what you were doing when the error occurred and it goes to Microsoft. Or, it might ask if you want it to recover your work and restart the program you were working in. It saves the original file without changes and the most recent version before the crash.

New to XP is the voice recognition feature. The document is internally created and allows speech to text and text to speech. It comes in US English, simplified Chinese and Japanese.

Microsoft is starting to crack down on pirating by allowing only two installs of the software and when it is installed it has to be activated online or via a fax.

All in all, it was an excellent program and the prizes were pretty decent too. Thank you, Microsoft.

Sonal stayed awhile after her presentation, to answer the many questions from the audience. Nice finishing touch.