How do I add music symbols to my Word document?

Ask Owen blogs on How do I add music symbols to my Word document?.

Musical sharps, flats, and naturals not in the font you’re using? This post covers the Unicode method to insert those symbols anyway. Nice trick for writing about music!

Free Printables dress up your letters, cards, more

Free Printables has colorful and useful templates for business cards, stationery, time sheets, and many more.

More MRU (Most Recently Used) magic

Office Watch has a post on More MRU magic.

The Most Recently Used list in Microsoft Office can be handy, but it can also have a lot of stuff you don’t need or want again.  This post tells you where to find the lists and remove the unwanted items.

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website is a Digital Inspiration post with practical instructions on how to handle RSS feeds, videos, audio, photos and slideshows, web albums, events from Google Calendar, very large photos, charts and graphs, animated gifs and screencasts, chat functions, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheet data, PDF files, Flash (SWF or FLV files), LinkedIn profile, Google Maps, another webpage, Windows Media or QuickTime movies, other fonts, and FriendFeed lifestreams.

Whew!

Word 2007: headers & footers

Tutorials are available for the various tasks needed in doing papers using Microsoft Word 2007.  Microsoft has some step-by-step instructions with screenshots.

• Adding headers and footers
• Remove a header or footer
• Insert different headers/footers on pages
• Change header/footer position
• Add document author to footer

Keep Office 2007 Documents Readily Available

Mysticgeek has a post on how toKeep Your Office 2007 Documents Readily Available the Easy Way .

“How many times have you been looking or a Word of Excel document and what should be an quick retrieval takes several minutes? Sure, you can always search, but for frequently used documents that’s not the best solution.

Today we will look at an easy way to keep your most important documents readily available within Office 2007. This trick works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint just the same… there’s a push pin icon next to each item in the recent documents list.”

10 annoying Word features and how to turn them off

Looking for a way to make Microsoft Word behave as you want it to?

A post in TechRepublic covers 10 annoying Word features and how to turn them off.

Make the Office 2007 ribbon go away, please!

Make the Office 2007 ribbon go away

Office Watch has instructions on making more room for your document in Office 2007 by removing the ribbon at the top, but still usable.

Then it automagically disappears again when you’re done using some function.

Word 2007 help for student papers

The Microsoft Office Word Team has advice on their blog about using Word 2007 for doing papers, especially stuff like footnotes and bibliographies.

Microsoft Office student discount

While this site normally doesn’t promote commercial software (companies have budgets of their own for that!), the Microsoft Office Suite is the campus standard software and many students would like to get it at a discount.

Try the student discount for the ultimate package here.

DocSyncer for Google docs

Somebody had to come up with a way to synchronize the documents you edit in Microsoft Office so they are available in Google Docs.

Try the free service at DocSyncer to migrate files to Google.

Zotero is not a sword-swinging hero

Zotero is actually a Firefox add-on designed to “help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources”.

It has features like:

Automatic capture of citation information from web pages

Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages

Flexible notetaking with autosave

Fast, as-you-type search through your materials

Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags

Integration with Word (use the Word extension) and OpenOffice (use the OpenOffice extention)

Integration with WordPress and other blogging software

From the Institute of Museum and Library Services: “Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).”

Here’s looking at you, Office

Microsoft Office viewers are available if you don’t have Microsoft Office programs. Click here for the download page for viewers for all MS Office products, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Outlook, Access, and Visio.

Remember: you can see the files with these viewers, but you cannot edit them in any way.

You can also use OpenOffice (freeware compatible with MS Office Suite before 2007) to view Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Access files (before 2007) as well as edit and save them to MS Office formats such as 97-2003 formats.

Remember: you must not use 2007 formats (ending in “x” such as “.docx“) if you want to use other programs such as OpenOffice, WordPerfect, etc. to view or edit them reliably.

Document & PowerPoint templates to download

[updated 2009.8.11]

Why reinvent the wheel? If somebody else has already created a template for the kind of document or PowerPoint you’re working on, why not use that if it suits your needs? Many of these are free.

Here are some sources, recommended by MakeUseOf.com :

DocStop : “Extremely useful community-powered service for sharing all kinds of business document templates. If you need a professional document, Docstoc is the first place to check out. Whether it’s a legal document, a business form or whatever is out there. Docstoc was launched just recently but already counts over 65.000 user-submitted documents, covering legal, business, financial, technology, and education areas.”

Gazhoo – “Unlike Docstoc, Gazhoo is a marketplace for legal, financial and business documents, case studies and research papers. Mainly it’s a place to buy and sell professional documents. However, with the exception of few scarce document types (i.e. market research papers) most of the listed documents are free. So, it’s a pretty good resource as well.”

Scribd – “Scribd has the biggest document collection, but it’s not focused on professional documents alone. It’s more like a virtual document library, where anyone can freely upload and share any kind of text documents (jokes, facts, stories, legal, presentations, etc.). Although, there is a good deal of useless stuff, it still has lots of legal forms and document templates.”

BusinessForms “has an inventory of over 500 FREE business forms and FREE business templates available in Excel and Word formats.  All of the free business forms and free business templates are organized into categories according to the type of business form or business template.  The free business forms and free business templates can be previewed and downloaded individually.  Don’t spend hours trying to create and organize your own business forms and business templates when you can download these free business forms and free business templates. You can customize these free business forms and free business templates to fit your specific needs.”

Office 2007 tutorials

Access Librarian Joni Stine recommends the Office 2007 tutorials at Microsoft Online.

Microsoft Word 2003 to 2007 cheat sheet

USC Marshall has a cheat sheet for Word 2003 commands in 2007.