Here’s the situation: You’re working on a document for work, and suddenly you realize that you’re using the same terms over and over again. However, you can’t think of a different way to describe what you’re writing about. What can you do? You can either whip out the dead weight that is a standard printed thesaurus, or you can simply use the one that is included in Microsoft Word.

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If you haven’t yet experienced the sublime joy of reviewing other peoples documents, you don’t know what you’re missing (and you should probably keep it that way). However, it’s pretty much unavoidable that in some point in your career you’ll have to do this. Once you go through this process a few times, you’ll realize that there are a few things that you keep seeing over and over again. No matter how many times you make a comment about it, these issues just won’t go away. With that in mind, I’ve listed two of the most common mistakes that I’ve come across below. Despite my best efforts, I see them in almost every document I review.

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If you use Excel 2007 (Currently my company has not upgraded yet), you might be interested in reading the thread below from the google user groups:

Microsoft Excel 2007 Calculation Bug

It looks like a problem with the floating point representation of certain numbers. Fortunately, from what I can see this specific problem is unique to 2007, so if you haven’t upgraded yet you should be ok. Otherwise, if you use 2007 I’d read up on it to see if this affects you in any way.

Microsoft PowerPoint presentations have become a stable of “The office meeting”. It used to be strictly reserved for more formal meetings, however with its increasing popularity there are really no restrictions on what types of meetings it is used for today. However, while it is a fantastic tool and very versatile, there are situations where it is overkill to use a PowerPoint presentation. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. Sometimes the benefits of creating a PowerPoint presentation just don’t outweigh the costs.

The following are the situations I’m talking about:

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So I decided I’d try and get myself out of 2003 by upgrading my Microsoft Office Professional suite to the 2007 version. However, I really wanted to try it out first before I committed to upgrading. The question is: Where do I find it? Surprisingly enough, Microsoft actually offers a free 60 day trial for the different 2007 Office components. Better still, these trials provide full functionality as opposed to the watered down versions you sometimes get with trial software. I was a little surprised because I don’t remember Microsoft offering free trials of their previous office versions (I could be wrong though, it’s been awhile since I bought one).

Here’s the link to the download page: Microsoft Office 2007 Free Trial. I’m going to download it and give it a test run, I’ll post my thoughts at the end of the trial run.

This is a passionate plea from not only me, but millions of other people who have to deal with Excel spreadsheets on a daily basis: Please refrain from using 8000 colors if you’re creating a spreadsheet. I received a spreadsheet the other day and there was at least 15 different colors used to differentiate the data. The result was that it took me twice as long as it should have to review it. This is a disturbing trend that seems to be getting worse, and I really want it to end.

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I thought I’d mention this site, as it’s a great resource for Microsoft Office articles. Basically, it aggregates these articles from multiple sources (with the author’s permission) and provides a little synopsis for each one and a link to the original article. I like this site because it’s quick loading and it provides an easy to use interface. Another good feature is that it’s not littered with ads like a lot of the other aggregation sites out there.

It’s definitely worth perusing if you have a chance, as there articles on a ton of different Microsoft Office related topics. Here’s the link:

Microsoft Office Reporter.

I came across this functionality the other day when I was trying to convert some data I had in a Microsoft Word document into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The problem was that although the data was in columns in the Word document, it wasn’t actually in a table. This means that when I tried to copy a row into Excel, instead of it going into three columns the entire row went into the first column. It was a major problem for me because there was a significant amount of data, and I didn’t have time to try to hand copy it row by row into Excel. Fortunately for me, this is when I found out about the Text to Columns feature in Excel.

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The title of this post is an age old adage that is as true today as it was when it was first coined, and you can find no better example of this than in today’s workplace. Probably the perfect example of this is the way that Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint have become so deeply integrated in our day to day activities. However, I’d like to focus on an area where I think the use of pictures is vastly underrated: The use of process flow diagrams in non-technical formal documentation.

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The word Backend is usually used to refer to the part of a system that the end users or clients don’t see. Take buying airline tickets online as an example. In this instance, the person buying tickets online only sees the web page. What they don’t see is the database behind the web pages and the services that get kicked off when they click “Buy”. This is what we refer to as the backend of the system.

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