How-To Geek

Although it’s unlikely that you’ll ever hit the maximum Access database size of 2GB, it’s still good to know that you can set your database to automatically compact or shrink the file size. This is especially true for databases where you are adding and removing a lot of data each time.

One of the biggest new changes in Office 2007 is the new mini toolbar that pops up when you highlight text and either right-click or move your mouse up.

If you have a lot of Word documents and are not sure which one contains the information you need, Microsoft Word 2007 allows you to preview a document within Word without having to open each document.

AutoRecover is a Microsoft Office feature that will keep you from losing work in the event of a system crash or power outage by automatically saving your document at certain time intervals.

The Ribbon feature in Microsoft Office 2007 is full of features that make it easier to navigate through options, but it takes up a lot of space. If you think the Ribbon is too big, you can put it into a pseudo “auto-hide” mode and still retain all the functionality, but with a much smaller footprint.

Adding your contact information as a Signature to your emails is very useful in a corporate environment, but also for personal emails as well.  You can add a signature the same way as you would in 2003, but you can also use The Ribbon as a new way to add your signature.

How many times have you had a Microsoft Office application crash or lock up your system? The worst culprits seem to be Outlook and Access for me.

In the corporate environment, Excel is king. So when you have an Access database report that you would really prefer to analyze in Excel spreadsheet form, there’s an easy way to convert it.

Microsoft Access is used within many businesses to store and access information. You can also create a simple report easily using the Report Wizard.

Everybody loves Gmail, but some people use a desktop client, especially in corporate environments where Outlook is king. Adding your Gmail account to Outlook 2007 couldn’t be easier.

You can use Mail Merge in Word 2003 to create mailing labels for a database full of customers. 

The Microsoft Office 2007 color scheme certainly fits in Windows Vista, but fortunately for those of us unhappy with so much light blue, the color scheme can be changed.

When you know you are going to be out of the office for a few days, you can set up the Out of Office Assistant to reply automatically, letting people know that you are enjoying your vacation while they are stuck at work. You can also add rules to forward messages based on different criteria.

How many times have you migrated to a new computer and lost all the little settings in Word or Excel that you had finally tweaked perfectly?

If Outlook 2007′s new Instant Search just isn’t… instant… there’s a patch from Microsoft that might fix this problem for you.

If you would like better communication with your co-workers here is a quick tip on sharing your calendar in Outlook. This will only work if you are using an Exchange Server e-mail account, typically something you’d be using in a corporate environment.

If you get hundreds of emails every day your inbox can fill up quickly. Outlook 2003 has an easy way to clean up your inbox quickly without having to go through each email individually to decide what needs to be kept.

Everybody sends out emails to the same group of people on a regular basis, but most people don’t realize that you can create your own private list of email addresses in Outlook by using the Distribution List feature.

Here is a quick and easy way to add all holidays to your Outlook 2003 Calendar. This tip also works for countries other than the United States.

This method can be applied to any special circumstance for bringing in a CSV file into Excel including other delimited files. With the ability of specifying the data type for each column during the data importing process you are in much better control on your final result.

If you have an email you send out every day that contains the same information, or a form that requires users to dictate answers to the same questions – you can create a template in Outlook to help save you time.

Outlook 2003 has an automatic completion for any email address that you try to type into the To or CC fields. This feature does not pull from the contacts or address book, because you may have tried to email somebody that wasn’t in your contact list, and it will still add that to the auto complete list.

If you are using Outlook 2003 with a Microsoft Exchange server for your email, typically in a corporate environment, you may be interested to know that you can encrypt all network communications between the Outlook client and the server, to protect against potential hackers sniffing out your email traffic.

Outlook doesn’t give you an option to export the Exchange Global Address list to any format. You don’t even have the option to sort while searching, which drives me crazy.. If I want to see who works in the Houston office, I don’t want to have to go through the entire list.

When you have automated backup jobs running on your database server, sometimes you forget that they are even running. Then you forget to check to see if they are running successfully, and don’t realize until your database crashes and you can’t restore it since you don’t have a current backup.