I have been doing some self study recently to prepare to take the Microsoft Office 2010 certification exams. As part of that, I am exploring new features that are offered in this version and I have found some AWESOME things to share with you!

1) Recover Unsaved Documents - I can't imagine there is anyone out there who hasn't done this at least once. You spend a long time typing up a nice brand new document, only to accidentally click NO when you are prompted to save it at the end. In prior versions, you were completely out of luck and had no recourse for any kind of recovery. Enter Office 2010! When you reopen the program, on the File tab under Recent, look in the bottom right corner. You will see a folder icon that says Recover unsaved document/worksheet/etc (different in different Office programs). Click that and it will show you the unsaved files you had for the last four days. Waaa hoo! Microsoft claims in its help file that this can work on previously saved files too. Basically you have to make sure that AutoSave is turned on with the option to Save Last Autosaved Version If I Don't Save Changes checked (find these options in File-Options-Save). In order for that to work, you need to have had the file open long enough for an Autosave to kick in and even then, you'll only get your changes back to the last time it AutoSaved. Still it's worth a shot, so take a moment to select that option right now.

2) Photo Album - PowerPoint 2010 has added a very nifty new feature called Photo Album. You can find it on the Insert tab. It allows you to enter multiple pictures and it will arrange them on the slides for you. Decide you want 2 pictures per page, no problem, PowerPoint reformats them all for you. Change your mind - want 4 pictures per page? Zip, it's done by changing the drop down on the photo album window. Want to have a text box next to each image? You can add them easily from the photo album page. While you are in the photo album window, note that you can - on the fly - rotate images, crop them, change the order, etc. You can also access the photo album (for editing after you have inserted it) by right mouse clicking your slides on the left hand navigation pane. Really cool new feature!

3) Remove Backgrounds in Photographs - Office 2010 has added the ability to remove background images in pictures. You just click the part of the picture you want removed, and voila! Instant white space.

4) Insert Screen Shots - Previously if you wanted to add a screen shot, you would press Alt-Prt Scrn and then paste the screen shot where you wanted it. Office 2010 has automated that step. Click on Insert - Screen Shot and you will get a drop down pane with thumbnails of all the windows you have open. Click the one you want and a screen capture picture is pasted into your document. Bam!

5) Customize the Ribbon - One of the biggest frustrations I had with Office 2007 was the inability to customize the ribbons. Office 2010 has fixed that little problem, thank goodness. Just right mouse click on your ribbon (note it can be context sensitive, so it won't show if you right mouse click on top of your styles for instance), choose Customize The Ribbon and get to customizing (including creating your own tabs on the ribbon)! Easy peasy!

Lot of NICE things have been added in Microsoft Office 2010. If anyone is thinking of upgrading from 2003, do yourself a favor and go straight to 2010!!!

As a speaker, I often find it extremely useful to be able to transfer my PowerPoint presentations with my speaker's notes to Word. This generates a nice neat table which I can edit and is so much easier to work with than PowerPoint's notes view.

This option is available in 2003 (File - Send To - Microsoft Word) and 2007 (Office Button - Publish - Create Handouts in Microsoft Word).

A window pops up that gives you the options of Notes Next To Slides, Blank Lines Next To Slides (similar to the commonly used handouts view), Notes Below Slides (similar to printing notes in PowerPoint), Blank Lines Below Slides, and Outline Only. A little thumbnail image shows you what it will look like.

In addition, you have the option to Paste the slides or Paste Link the slides. Pasting will insert the slides into Word as a PowerPoint Object (which means you can doubleclick on them to edit them in a mini powerpoint window). Paste Link means that if you change the text in PowerPoint, the slides are automatically updated in Word when you next open the file (note the usual cautions of this doesn't apply via email unless you are also mailing the PPT file, etc.). Make your selections and click OK. If you have a very large PowerPoint file, it may take a while to generate the Word document. Be patient.

See the end of this posting for a HUGE tip on how to reduce the size of your final Word document.

Word then opens and creates a table with a column for the slide number, a column with a picture of the slide, a column for notes. Your boss may like having the slide numbers (in which case, using the hint at the end, copy and paste the slides into the same column as the slide numbers all at the same time, then you can delete one column. When it's for myself, I usually delete the slide number column and just number the pages. By doing this, I can then widen out the third column of note text.

Using the Outline Only feature allows you to bring only your PowerPoint text into a Word document. I often use this option to generate take home documents with more details added about what we covered.

You can edit everything in the Word document.

One huge suggestion: If you are "done" with the slides, go through the Word document, cut each slide individually, then click Home Ribbon-Paste-Paste Special and paste it as a picture so that it becomes a picture instead of a PowerPoint object. (I've yet to find a more efficient way to do them all at once - if you know of a way, please let me know!)  If you don't do this, your Word document could be a gazillion megs file (i.e. 30 MB files are not uncommon). When you are done pasting all the slides (this is actually very quick to do), then click on the Format Ribbon after you select a picture, Compress Pictures, Options and select Print/Screen/Email as appropriate for how much you would like to reduce the size of the pictures, then click OK, and OK a second time to apply the compression to all pictures in the document (do not select compress only selected pictures unless you really only want the selected picture to be compressed). These steps will reduce the size of your file dramatically.

Hope you and your boss find this feature helpful. :)

Excel, of course, has gazillions of mathematical formulas. Some you probably use regularly (like sum, count, etc.), but others you may not use quite as much. Some, of course you'll never use unless you are an engineer, mathematician, or scientist. One of the formulas that is fairly useful is payment formulas. This allows you to fill in various blanks and come up with a formula for payments. Say you want to buy a car for instance. If you know how much the interest rate is and the value of the car, you can plug in different term lengths (48 months, 60 months) to compare monthly payment options.

To set up a payment formula, you create cells for each of the formula parts, as needed.

Here are the parts of this formula explained:
 
Rate: This is the annual interest rate, divided by 12. (see note below)

Nper: Number of payments

NOTE: The number of payments should match the payment period of the interest rate. So for instance, I broke the interest rate down into a monthly component (divided by 12), and therefore, I want my number of payments to be the number of months, so I will put in 60 months instead of 5 years. If I were going to make one payment a year for the next five years, I would have the left the rate as an annual rate and put 5 in the number of payments. Make sense how those are linked?

PV: Present Value - This is the amount of money you are borrowing.

FV: Future Value - This is any expected value you might have left at the end of the loan. This would come into play with a lease or a mortgage balloon payment. If it is blank, Excel will assume it is zero.

Type of Payment: (Optional) This field is optional, but it uses a 1 to reflect if the payment is at the beginning of the period or a 0 (or blank) if the payment is at the end of the period. I never use it myself.

Payment: This is where the formula goes and it will show the payment (monthly in my example) that will result from that combination of interest rate, number of payments, and amount borrowed.

A2=rate
B2=number of payments
C2=present value
D2=future value
E2 would be type of payment (I left this out)
 

The formula in cell E2 or F2 would be:
=PMT(A2,B2,C2,D2)

Excel has additional features that greatly expand formulas to allow you to play with the numbers to see how they affect the outcome. Those include Goal Seeker and What If Analyses (Scenarios). I may write some future blog posts on how to use these functions, as they are pretty cool and useful. In the meantime, I encourage you to look them up if you are not familiar with them. You might be surprised at how helpful they are.