dacs.doc electric

 

Minding your business with
Microsoft Office

By M. Gaberel

 

Microsoft’s presentation to DACS at the November 4, 2003 general meeting will be on the topic of its Office product. I have been using the Microsoft Office software for years now, and I was wondering what Microsoft can add to the products?

At home I have Office XP, and at work Office 2000. For sure, I never use all the features of Office products I have access to on a daily basis. I was reading through the upgrade that Microsoft added to Office 2003. Microsoft has a page that specifically shows the features as either new to Office 2003 or improved (see the link from DACS’ web page) and I noticed the following upgrades that I found to be of interest:

Word editing restrictions

Lock down portions of your Word documents to prevent anyone from editing your work. You can allow reviewers to make changes, but only if they turn on revision marks. Or you can make the entire document read-only with key portions that can be edited only by specific individuals.” At work, I put some documents on the network, but they are either full share or read-only. It would be very convenient to be able to put some portions to be edited only by certain people.

There are also new items in Outlook that sound most convenient as follows:

Arrange by conversation

Arrange your Inbox by conversation (or thread) to see all messages on a particular topic, all conveniently grouped together. You can even quickly move or delete entire threads.” As I cannot remember all that happened six months ago on a particular topic, this new feature would evidently be very helpful.

Quick Flags

Flag messages by priority or time sensitivity, and then find them in whatever folder they reside. You no longer have to keep email messages in your Inbox to remind you of action items.” As communication is done or confirmed with email oftentimes, to be able to flag messages that are not in my inbox would be a real convenience.

Search Folders

Save your Outlook 2003 search results as Search Folders that you can quickly access instead of having to search again each time. Store the resulting email messages in any folder, and still access them quickly.” Every day I need to search emails for topics that need to be reevaluated. To be able to save those searches would be a real time saver.

Many more features will be explained and presented at the November general meeting. The above, however, are features that I would find most useful in my day to day activities.

The biggest challenge, of course, is to convince my boss to upgrade the software.

The general meeting will take place on November 4, 2003, as usual at Danbury Hospital Auditorium, starting at 7 pm with computer related questions and answers, followed by brief club announcements. The Microsoft presentation will start at 8 pm. The general meetings are free and open to the public. More information is found at dacs.org.


Marlène Gaberel is a DACS board member and VP for Public Relations. You can e-mail her at: marlene_gaberel@yahoo.com.

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