Saturday, December 29, 2007

Add-in to merge letters to separate files

I was working on a project for a non-profit organization this weekend, and I ran into an issue that caused some head-scratching. The group needed a large mass mailing, and the process of getting the data into an XL-sheet and running a Mail merge using Word seemed easy enough. It was, except for the fact that Word creates one big document as a result (even though you get that by selecting the somewhat misleading "Edit individual documents").
We needed a separate Word document for each record of the Mass Mailing and Word can not do that.
After searching for some time, I was ready to write a macro myself, but luckily I found Graham Mayor's website with a nice Add-in that solves the problem. The add-in will intercept the command to merge to a new document and provides an additional option to merge to separate document files:Graham's website contains a ton of other Word Tips. I haven't checked them out yet, but it definitely looks worthwhile.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Office 2007 SP1 is out

A few days ago I learned through John C Dvorak's splendid Tech 5 report that Microsoft published SP1 for Office 2007.

I downloaded SP1 from the Microsoft Download site and installed it. It took about 5 minutes.
I'll have a look at the details of the Office 2007 SP1 package and let you know about my experiences with it in the next couple of days.

By the way, check out CrankyGeeks with John as well. I admit, I am a fan!

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Guides to the 2007 Office system user interface on one page

I've talked before about the Interactive Guides on where to find a command in Office 2007, if you know where it was in 2003. The links still work, but meanwhile Microsoft has put them all on one page.

You not only get links to the Interactive Guides for Access, Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook, you can also download them.

Also, on that same page, you'll find links to Mapping Workbooks, which are Excel Workbooks that contain lists of all Office 2003 menu and toolbar commands and their locations in the 2007 Office system.