If you are new to Office 2013, you will notice a new control button joining the familiar help, minimize, maximize and close buttons in the upper right of each Office program.  The new button is the Ribbon Display Options button. The functions of Help (F1 is still the help shortcut key), minimize, maximize/resize and close buttons have not changed and are familiar to all Windows users.  Since the ribbon is now the standard interface across all the Office apps, a more obvious, standardized way of controlling the appearance of the ribbon has been introduced.  Clicking the Ribbon Display Options button...

The latest version of Microsoft Office has been released to general consumers this week.  Office 2013 became available on Tuesday, January 29.  Many will have been working with beta copies that have been freely distributed by Microsoft over the last 9 months or so, and some may have been working with copies licensed by businesses, because the product became available to business licensees last fall.  But if you are the average Joe consumer, or are just now hearing about the latest version, it is finally here. This will probably be the final version of Office that will be obtainable on physical media. ...

This post is for all you PowerPoint animators out there.  It’s a little more advanced than than beginning PowerPoint, but if you have never tried it I think you will be pleased with the results.  Here we go. One of the most effective uses of animations in PowerPoint is to create a moving line.  PowerPoint lacks the sophisticated sorts of animations you can create using Flash, but a clever use of the standard Wipe animation, along with an adjustment to some PowerPoint timings, can result in a classy looking moving line animation.  The video below explains how to construct it.   Share...

I attended a webinar on Microsoft’s new Office 365 Home product today and can report on the near-finished feature set. Programs included: Word, Access, Outlook, Publisher, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote. Price: $99.99 per year. Number of installs:  Install on up to five devices.  Installs can be deactivated on one device and activated on another, also.  Just so the total does not exceed 5. Storage:  In addition to whatever storage you already have on SkyDrive, if any, you will receive 20 GB additional with the Office 365 subscription.  The storage is tied to an account, so it is only for one of the...

When you insert a graphics object of any sort into a Word document—pictures, clip art, charts, SmartArt—it is inserted inline with the text on the text layer.  Word treats it as just another character of text.  Big.  Funny looking.  But just another character.  When you drag it to a new location within your text it acts just like a character on that line, within that paragraph.  This is not the behavior that most people are looking for when inserting graphics.  What most folks want is a graphic that the text flows around, book or magazine style, and often then have special needs to display the text in...