How to Add Images and Color to Your Holiday Letters

Word Tricks Makes Letters Merrier (updated for ‘the Ribbon’)

It is the Holiday time of year. (Is it just me, or did 2013 pass-by rather quickly?) Each year at this time, I post this article which demonstrates a few tricks to make your Season’s Greetings letters more joyous, and your documents more visually interesting. Many of you already know the A-B-C basics of manipulating fonts and formatting, and so this will be review.. and loyal readers may remember this one..

Tip of the day: Add some festivity to your documents with fonts and color. MS Word has a lot of features and options built into it that allows for some very creative elements to be added to your correspondence, and is not at all limited to cold, “professional” documents. I’ll use Word for this demo, but you can do this in most text editors, and e-mail programs. Today I’m going to use a hypothetical holiday greeting letter to show how to add some fun. By default, Word sets the font to Calibri at 11 “points” in height. I have typed in my text, to get things started, and will demonstrate using this letter’s “opener”. As it is a header, I have “centered” the text. As you can see, this font and text does not quite convey the joy and cheer and “best wishes” I am hoping to express. In fact, this may as well say, “Memo from Giganti Corp.” Yawn! So first thing I’m going to do is ‘tweak’ the font style, and make some word bigger (louder), to express a less formal tone.  I “highlighted” Season’s Greetings, and used the Font drop-down arrow and selected a cursive font– Lucida Handwriting (explore Word’s various fonts, and find the one you like best). I set the point size to 36. I repeated the process on the second sentence, but set the type smaller.. only 18. I think you’ll agree, this is much more “friendly” than the default’s look. But this is just not Festive enough! Let’s use some color and improve things some more.  I have again “highlighted” season’s greetings to select this font, and then clicked the Font Color button on the Home tab. I then clicked on the little red box in the color-picker. Now season’s greetings is red. I want to alternate letters in green, so I hold down the Ctrl key and use my mouse to “select” every other letter. I didn’t really like the greens available on the color-picker, so I clicked on “More Colors”…. … and selected a green that contrasted nicely with the red– as the box in the lower right corner shows. This is the result of these steps. Much more jolly! But, something’s missing… Let’s add one more thing– a picture of a candy cane. I went on the Internet and found a Royalty-free graphic (though a piece of Clip Art would do just as nicely) and…  Voila! I could ‘go crazy’, and get carried away with adding things here… but I hope you will be able to see by this little demonstration — using only two of Word’s functions — that you are limited only by your own creativity, and that it’s easy to personalize and ’spice up’ your documents. (I should have matched the greens… but ran out of time.. sorry.)

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Today’s quote: How ’bout some more Longfellow? “The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Copyright 2007-2013 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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Microsoft Office 2010 Technology Guarantee

Buy Office 2007 Today, Get Office 2010 Free

Today I received notice, via Amazon, that for a limited time Microsoft is offering a free upgrade deal. Purchase, install, and activate a qualifying Office 2007 product between March 5, 2010, and September 30, 2010, and you’ll be eligible to download Office 2010 at no additional cost. The Microsoft details page is here.

I noted, also, that Amazon’s price for Home and Student Edition is very competitive, and I was pleased to see that the option to have it on disc was free too. The Amazon page is here.

Some thoughts on Office 2007/2010:
I have been using “the new Office” since the beta of Office 2007, and am currently running the beta of 2010. I find the modest improvements in 2010 quite nice, but since I am not doing a lot of “online collaboration”, nor in a true business environment (no cubicle for me), I am not able to leverage all of its advanced features.

I have no trouble with the “new” Ribbon menu bars, and I love being able to preview, and then apply, formatting ‘dynamically’. But – and this is a pretty big ‘but’ here – longtime users of Office (97 – 2003) do not always find the transition to the new menus so… pleasant. Fortunately, Microsoft provides many aids for easing the transition to the newer way, such as the Office 2010 menu to ribbon reference workbooks. There is a learning curve going from Office 2003/older, yes.

Copyright 2007-2010 © Tech Paul. All Rights Reserved. post to jaanix.

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Open Office 2007 files with older versions*

A while ago I wrote about solving the problem of opening documents that Windows does not recognize, and used as an example two text documents received as email attachments (click here to read Cannot open attachment…help!). While the point of that article was how to identify unrecognized file types, the fact that I mentioned a .docx (a Word 2007 document) received the most attention from readers.

Tip of the day: Open Office 2007 documents with older versions of Office. Some time ago now, Microsoft released a new version of its Office suite, called Office 2007. Besides having a new “look” and new toolbars, this suite of programs uses a whole new format (a way of encoding) for the documents it produces, which Microsoft calls “Open XML” (for more on this, click here); and to signify this, has added an “x” to the file extension.. so the familiar “.doc” of MS Word has become “.docx”.

This change to the coding does improve the flexibility of the document, and “modernizes” the way machines interact with it, and yet allows Microsoft to maintain proprietary control.. thus ensuring that sales of Office continues. The trouble is, owners of MS Word cannot open the new .docx formats, which produces great dissatisfaction from folks who have shelled out the bucks to own the most commonly used word processor in the world. (And largely done so simply to be able to open other people’s documents.) It also smacks of forcing people to spend a couple hundred bucks to upgrade.

Microsoft swears this is not the intent. Of course they want you to upgrade, but to do so because of the improvements and new features. They do, in fact want current MS Office licensees to be able to read the new Open XML ‘standard’, and so they have made available a tool for the older versions of Office.. which is today’s free link.
As more and more people use the new 2007 suite, the more .docx’s you’re going to run across; so if you’re happy and comfortable with your current version, and aren’t ready to relearn the Excel and Word toolbar, relax. Keep reading and download the Microsoft Office compatibility tool.

[Note: If you are the one using Office 2007, and you know you’re going to be sending your document to folks who are using an older version, use “Save As” to save the file as a Office 97-2003 document (no “x”).]

Today’s free link: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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More on opening Office 2007 documents

Yesterday I wrote about solving the problem of opening documents that Windows does not recognize, and used as an example two text documents received as email attachments (click here to read Cannot open attachment…help!). While the point of that article was how to identify unrecognized file types, the fact that I mentioned a .docx (a Word 2007 document) received the most attention from readers.

Tip of the day: Open Office 2007 documents with older versions of Office. Microsoft released a new version of its Office suite, called Office 2007. Besides having a new “look” and new toolbars, this suite of programs uses a whole new format (a way of encoding) for the documents it produces, which Microsoft calls “Open XML” (for more on this, click here); and to signify this, has added an “x” to the file extension.. so the familiar “.doc” of MS Word has become “.docx”.

This change to the binary coding does improve the flexibility of the document, and “modernizes” the way machines interact with it, and yet allows Microsoft to maintain proprietary control.. thus ensuring that sales of Office continues. The trouble is, owners of MS Word cannot open the new .docx formats, which produces great dissatisfaction from folks who have shelled out the bucks to own the most commonly used word processor in the world. (And largely done so simply to be able to open other people’s documents.) It also smacks of forcing people to spend a couple hundred bucks to upgrade.

Microsoft swears this is not the intent. Of course they want you to upgrade, but to do so because of the improvements and new features. They do, in fact want current MS Office licensees to be able to read the new Open XML ‘standard’, and so they have made available a tool for the older versions of Office.. which is today’s free link.
As more and more people use the new 2007 suite, the more .docx’s you’re going to run across; so if you’re happy and comfortable with your current version, and aren’t ready to relearn Excel and Word, relax. Keep reading and download the Microsoft Office compatibility tool.

Today’s free link: Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

Copyright 2007 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved

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Cannot open attachment…help!

A frustrating error occurs when Windows does not recognize the type of file you are trying to open, that reads “Windows cannot open this file:”

It may help you to understand that what causes this is when the file was created with a program that is not installed on your machine. It does not mean the file is not Open-able.

Today’s topic was inspired by a college professor, who received two writing assignments from students as email attachments. [A brief aside: it is simply amazing what is available to us in the form of the e-classroom. If you have a crazy schedule, and there simple isn’t time to further your education, consider taking online courses. A good place to start looking is your local Junior College.] One student sent him a .mdi file and the other sent him a .docx file. When he tried to open them, he received the message shown above, and asked for my help in opening them.

Tip of the day: Use the Internet to identify attachment file types, and find out what it would take to open them. I mentioned in an earlier article, files are identified by a “dot-three-letters” file “extension” (for a more detailed description, click here). This tells your O/S what program created the file so that it can launch the same program to work with it. I will mention again; the place to go when you receive (or come across) a file extension you simply don’t recognize is a website called FILExt.

The professor had assigned a writing assignment, and since he has Microsoft Office and the lesser-known Word Perfect installed on his machine, he was surprised at his inability to open a text document (and doubly surprised when it happened twice). The second file — the .docx — I easily recognized as the new Word format. The new Microsoft Office 2007 suite has modernized, and uses a XML-based format now, and older versions (Office 97 – 2003) of Word will not recognize, or be able to Open, files of this type.
The solution, in this case was to (somehow) upgrade his Office suite to 2007, or ask the student to re-submit the document using Word 2007’s ability to Save As in the older format. I advised him to download and install the free 60-day trial of Office 2007, and to consider purchasing a license for it. (The download is the full suite; it just has a time-limited license.) By doing this, he would also be able to open the second file. [update: for more on Office 2007, and to download the free conversion toolkit, called a “Compatibility Pack” (for owners of older versions of Office), click here.]

I did not immediately recognize the .mdi file extension, and so (since I had it already open) entered “open .mdi” into Google’s search box. It turns out that the student had — instead of simply Save-ing the document — “printed” it to Word 2003’s ‘virtual printer’, Microsoft Document Image Writer. This tool is usually used in conjunction with a scanner, and allows for OCR. You don’t typically run across too many .mdi files…
The professor took my advice, and was able to open both documents using the newly installed Word 2007.

If you refer back to the error message shown above, you will see that by default Windows offer you a choice; allow it to search online for a way to open the file (this rarely works), or select a program — from the programs you have installed — to use to try to force it open (this also rarely works). It will not hurt you, and there is a chance of success, to go ahead and accept the first option.
And then go to FILExt.

Today’s free link: If you use IM and use multiple services… and you frequently use different computers… you should know about Meebo. Meebo allows you to use a web browser to log into and use AIM, Messenger, Yahoo, and GoogleTalk. Quick, simple, and easy… and nothing to install.

Copyright 2007 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.

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