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MS Office

Microsoft Office 365: Work Anywhere, Anytime?

Microsoft is coming out with a new product called “Microsoft Office 365.”

This product is being pushed more for the business market and not towards home users as much as their popular “Microsoft Office Suite.”

Microsoft Office 365 is a subscription based web application that essentially gives you your copy of Microsoft Office anywhere you are and at any time, using Internet Explorer and a web connection.

This software is powered by Microsoft’s already popular “SharePoint” collaboration application.

Office 365 doesn’t give you access to all of the applications available in the traditional Office suite – for instance, Outlook isn’t included in the package – yet.

Microsoft Office 365 includes Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft OneNote, and something Microsoft is calling Microsoft Outlook integration.

Outlook integration links a local copy of Outlook that is installed on your PC to the Office 365 suite in the cloud.

One of the best features in Office 365 is the ability to share files and documents on the go through a web interface that acts like a centralized server for your company.

This connection is 100% secure with encrypted data transfers and is password protected allowing only those who know the password to access to your company’s data and files.

This gives you access to the documents that you were working on in the office while you are on the road. And, anyone else in your organization that needs access to your files can use them anytime, anywhere.

Another advantage of using a web based application like this one is that, since it is a web hosted application, you don’t need to install any software.

You can access your documents from any computer with and Internet connection using just your password. The ability to store and work on your documents anywhere doesn’t come without some caveats.

Although Microsoft guarantees 99.9 percent uptime, most Internet service providers don’t. If your entire organization was deployed on the Office 365 platform and your company’s Internet connection went down, you could very well experience a bout of low productivity until everything came back online.

Office 365 and other cloud services are undoubtedly the wave of the future.

If you’d like to explore some cloud solutions for your organization, please give the office a call at 734- 457-5000.

 

Five Microsoft Office Add-ins Help Improve Productivity

If your company does any type of word processing, data spreadsheets, or even use email then you probably know the benefits of having Microsoft Office.

Did you know that you can enhance your experience by using third party add-ins? An add-in is a mini program which runs in conjunction with a web browser or other application that enhances the functionality of that program.

Here is a list of add-ins for the Microsoft Office Suite. Keep reading to learn about some of the add-ins available to make your everyday tasks easier!

Duplicates Remover for Microsoft Outlook
Duplicates Remover is a powerful and flexible plug-in for Microsoft Outlook intended for the search and deletion of duplicated items in Microsoft Outlook folders.

Duplicates Remover can search in single folders as well as different folders for any duplicates. Duplicated items can then be set to automatically be copied or moved to another folder of your choice, marked with a flag letting you know that item already exists somewhere in another folder, or simply deleted.

Microsoft Mathematics Add-In for Word and OneNote
Microsoft Mathematics Add-in for Word and OneNote makes it easy to plot graphs in 2D and 3D, calculate numerical results, solve equations or inequalities, and simplify algebraic expressions in your Word documents and OneNote notebooks.

Microsoft Mathematics Add-in can add a little extra help when planning your budget for next year, or simply create great visuals using its graphing feature.

SendLater for Microsoft Outlook
SendLater is an easy-to-use and convenient email scheduler with a recurring email option. It allows you to schedule automatic email, follow up and handle your email correspondence in a timely manner even if you are away from your computer.

It also allows you to send a delayed group message as a single email to all recipients or use the “Send personally” feature to conceal any information about other recipients of the same group message.

In this case the recipient will only see his/her name and address in the To, CC or BCC fields, as if the message has been sent to the recipient personally.

Ultimate Add-in for Microsoft Excel
The ultimate Add-in for Microsoft Excel includes a general collection of over 90 different utilities and more than 30 custom written functions to help make life with Excel a little easier. Ultimate Add-in will allow you to customize the menu to bring all of the menu settings in one place to easily show/hide the items you want.

Ultimate Add-in can also optimize your workbooks, rebuilding the whole data spreadsheets and saving the components to a series of files and reloading them into a blank sheet. Serious file space can be saved by using this utility.

Attachments Forget Reminder for Microsoft Outlook
Attachments Forget Reminder is a powerful Microsoft Office Outlook Add-In. It scans each outgoing email and if it finds any of the specified key phrases (e.g., “see attachment” or “in the attached file”).

If no file is attached to the message, the program will give out a notification. It then asks you if you meant to attach a fi le before sending the email, giving you a chance to insert the attachment. The add-in works with Plain Text, RTF, or HTML based email formats.

There is many more add-ins that you can install to improve functionality within the Office suite programs, these are just some of the few I like.

Go ahead and search online for yourself and see if you can find some good add-ins that makes your job simpler!

Office 2010: Definitely Worth Upgrading Your System

Now that Office 2010 is available, companies should consider whether to invest in the latest version of the software. My answer is: It depends, with a strong leaning toward “yes!”

The “it depends” part considers the current state of your business’ hardware, what version of Office you are currently using, how your firm’s other software applications integrate with an upgrade and most importantly, your technology budget.

Office 2010: The Latest
According to Microsoft, the Office 2010 suite is designed to make work flows more efficient; to effectively use Web applications to make work available anywhere; and to make collaboration with others much easier.

When considering whether to upgrade to Office 2010, Outlook’s integration with Exchange Server 2010 may be a consideration or some firms.

Exchange Server 2010 is designed to reduce deployment costs; simplify high availability and disaster recovery, ease administration and provide greater mobility and flexible access.

Your Hardware and Operating Systems
For some, the decision about whether to upgrade to Office 2010 may depend on where your business is in its hardware life cycle. If you have older machines that might not support the increased hardware requirements of Office 2010, it is probably best to wait for the upgrade to coincide with your hardware refresh.

For businesses that still use Windows XP, upgrading to 2010 may not be an option, since the newest software program will probably not run efficiently on the older operating system.

Your Current Version of Office
Many companies are still using Office 2000 or Office 2003, so their choices may be between forging ahead with Office 2007 or jumping straight to Office 2010.

The learning curve is an issue to consider. Office 2007 and Office 2010 are strikingly different from the 2003 version, while Office 2010 has a more similar look and feel to Office 2007.

This is particularly true when it comes to the “ribbon,” the Office Fluent User Interface that replaced the traditional menu and toolbars in Office 2007.

Firms that are upgrading from Office 2007 to 2010 will have fewer training issues than those that are still using Office 2003 or Office 2000.

Integration Issues
Integration issues should always be a concern for any business considering new technologies.

Integration with your billing, document management, client relationship management, and calendaring software should all be considered. Often, third-party applications will require patches or updates in order to work seamlessly with Office 2010.

Communicate beforehand with your vendors to ensure that all applications will function without a hitch during and after the installation of Office 2010.

Proper planning is key, but so is testing. Testing should include both compatibility and usability.

The staff that will use the software should have an opportunity to examine it – they’ll be the best judge of how much additional training will be required.

Budgetary Issues
Now more than ever, small businesses need to get the biggest bang for their technology buck. It is not the time to roll out a new software program that may be buggy or have integration issues.

For firms with limited IT budgets, the more-proven Office 2007 could be the smarter choice, especially if the new version of Office is purchased with Microsoft Software Assurance, which gives you upgrade rights in the future to Office 2010.

Regardless of the decision your firm makes about upgrading to Office 2010, preparation is the key.

You’ll need to prepare your staff for any changes and plan for a reduction in productivity during the intial roll out.

Planning is extremely important, to ensure that the integration proceeds smoothly and the firm employees can reap all of the benefits they expect – and that they have paid for.

Excel 2007 Has A “Small” Problem Multiplying

We all learned how to multiply with pencil and paper, even great big numbers and decimals. But when it comes to something important like a blueprint or a scientific formula we reach for a calculator – or a spreadsheet.

That’s much more reliable, right? Well, not if the spreadsheet is Excel 2007. Technicians have revealed that Excel 2007 thinks that 850*77.1 is 100,000.

What’s the correct answer? It should be 65,535. Other sites have verified that the error carries over into some (but not all) calculations based on the incorrect result.

If it were just 850*77.1 that gave a wrong answer, we could probably work around that. But there are tons of other problem numbers. Set up a spreadsheet to divide 65,535 by every number from 1 to 65,535 itself, then multiply the number by that result.

So, for example, the spreadsheet divided 65,535 by 26 to get 2,520.577. Then it multiplied 26 by 2,520.577 to get… 100,000?! Over ten thousand of these simple calculations gave the wrong answer.

We won’t know just why the problem comes up until Microsoft speaks out, but there is one thing about 65535 – it’s the very largest 16-bit number.

In hexadecimal (the programmer’s friend) it’s FFFF. But converting the “problem” results to hexadecimal in Excel yields FFFE. That’s  a clue.

Meanwhile, if you have any spreadsheets where some results hit the range around 65535, it might be a good idea to double-check with your trusty calculator… or a pencil.

GOOD NEWS: The Excel team has dissected the problem in detail and is working feverishly to swat this Excel bug.

And finally, two weeks after the scary announcement, Microsoft has fixed the bug. Get the hotfix now, or just wait for it to show up in Automatic Updates.