It’s Monday – Make Office 2010 Work the Way You Want

Happy Valentine's Day to those who will be celebrating it this year – may this day bring you true love and joy with someone you love. Well for the rest of us – this is just another Monday (more or less), another week to meet those deadlines, attend meetings, and so on.



Do you want Microsoft Office to work the way you want? For example – do you want the ribbon to have another tab that groups together the commands you frequently use? Then this article is for YOU.

Microsoft Office now allows you to create custom tabs in the ribbon, meaning if you want to create a whole new Home tab based on which commands you frequently use – you are free to do so.

To access the options for customizing the ribbon click "File", then "Options", then at the "Options" window click "Customize Ribbon" and you'll see a screen similar to this.



Now, to customize the ribbon here are the essential steps:

1. Click "New Tab", then name your new tab for the ribbon (e.g. My Home Tab)
2. Click "New Group", then click "Rename" to change the name for your group (e.g. Picture)
3. Select the command you wish to add using the list at the left side of the options window
4. Once selected click "Add > >"
5. Repeat 2-3 when necessary; right-click items on the Customize the Ribbon list to access options such as "Move Up/Down", "Remove", etc.

Now that you know how to customize the ribbon here are some reminders:

• You cannot customize built-in tabs in Microsoft Office (e.g. the default, Home, Insert, etc.) but you can hide them and replace them with your custom tabs.
• You cannot add commands directly to a tab; you will have to create a group first.

Here is a sample of what I did with my ribbon:


Congratulations, you have just customized the ribbon! Just don't forget to export your customizations using the import/export button at the bottom of the options window so that in case you need to re-format your PC you can still restore your customizations.

Stay tuned for more Microsoft Office tips and tricks here at myofficenotes.com for now, Happy Monday and Happy Valentine's Day!

Education Thursdays: Calculus, OneNote, and Microsoft Mathematics

A few years ago I have written about using Microsoft OneNote as calculator and how easy it is to solve the following math problem:

(sqrt(2*pi*70)*2+150)^2

But how about if you wanted to solve something like this:

There is no way for you to integrate or differentiate in Microsoft OneNote – well not unless you download and install the Microsoft Mathematics Add-in.

Now how do you exactly do integration in Microsoft OneNote?

1. Make sure you have downloaded and installed the Microsoft Mathematics Add-in from here
2. Start Microsoft OneNote – you will see that there is a new Mathematics tab in the ribbon
3. Go to the Mathematics tab and click Equation (the "Pi" icon) then click Insert New Equation
4. Build your equation using the equation editor
5. Go back to the Mathematics tab and click the Compute command; you should be able to perform a lot of mathematical operations from there including integration and differentiation.

This is really a useful tool for teachers to validate the answer for their exam items, and for you students to check if the answer for your assignment is correct – your teachers still expects your solution to the problem. Don't even think about relying on this one alone to solve your assignment.

Embed a PowerPoint Presentation to a Web Page

Do you know that you can embed a PowerPoint presentation to a webpage using Office Web Apps and Windows Live SkyDrive? Check out the three step guide below

Feature of the Week: Navigation Pane in Microsoft Word 2010

Did you notice that whenever you press "CTRL + F" in Microsoft Word 2010, a pane would appear on the left side of the screen? We call it the navigation pane and in this article, I will discuss some of the neat things that you can do with it.

The navigation pane can be useful tool especially when you are working with long documents. Instead of hitting the page up and page down keys on your keyboard or flipping through pages using the scroll wheel on your mouse to go from one section of your document to another you can use the navigation pane to browse your document either by headings, pages, and search results.

The navigation pane is not just for browsing your documents – you can also use it to manage the structure of your document.

Have you been in a situation wherein you have to rearrange the contents of your document? (E.g. Heading X needs to go after Heading A; Subheading B should be under Heading Y not Heading A) Usually what you will do is to cut/copy the whole section of your document and paste it to where it should really be. This can be messy at times especially if you miss out something in your cut / copy and paste.

Now try this – use the navigation pane to rearrange your headings. Click the leftmost tab of the navigation pane (Browse the headings in your document) and you will see an outline of your document based on your headings. In the example below, we moved "Heading C" between "Heading A" and "Heading B"



If you need to create another heading between "Heading C" and "Heading B", you can right-click "Heading C" and select "New Heading After". If you want to insert a subheading under a certain heading, you can right click the heading and select "New Subheading".

Just like our headings, you can also move subheadings around your document just by click and drag including moving a subheading from one heading to another. Just as what happened in the example below where we moved a subheading so that it appears below "Heading A"



Now rearranging your documents is now as easy as click and drag – no more wasting time copying, pasting, and messing up your document.

Download Office 2010 Beta Today

I have been personally using Office 2010 Beta for my day to day activities – I use this to prepare my workbooks, presentations, and documents in the Office every single day and the experience has been really good so far.

During the next few days, weeks, and months – I will be writing about the new and cool features of this new version of Office. For now I invite you to go and take a test drive of the upcoming Office version.

Download the beta now at: http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx

Real World Office: Changing the Choices in an In-Cell Drop Down

The Challenge
A colleague of mine created a form out of a Microsoft Excel worksheet, there are two in-cell dropdown lists (from Data Validation) – what she wants to happen is that the choices in the second data validation list changes depending on what the user selects on the first data validation list.
For example if a user chooses Fruits in the first in-cell dropdown, then the second in-cell dropdown should contain Apples, Oranges, Grapes, etc.. If the user then chooses Vegetables, then the second should contain Broccoli, Carrots, etc.

The Solution
The first thing that came into our minds is that we probably need a macro to do this (Yikes!).
Since the in-cell drop down lists are created using Data Validation and we know that the validation criteria (the contents of the in-cell drop down, in this case) can be determined by using a formula then you can use the IF function (nested in this case – depending on the number of items in the first cell) to determine which choices to display.

The logic goes something like this:

1. IF user chooses "Fruits" then user can choose between "Apples", "Oranges", and "Grapes"
2. IF user chooses "Vegetables" then the user can choose between "Carrots", "Cabbage", "Broccoli"

Step 1 – Tabulate the choices in a separate sheet in your workbook, should look something like this:


Step 2 – Go back to the second in-cell drop down, go to the Data tab in the ribbon then click data validation. Under the Validation criteria group, make sure that List is selected for the "Allow" field – then in the source field create a formula using the IF function.

The formula should look like this:

=IF([Cell Reference for the First Cell]="[Choice]",[Cell Reference for the Choices], IF([Cell Reference for the First Cell]="[Choice]",[Cell Reference for the Choices]…))

For this example the formula looks something like this:

=IF(C3="Fruits",Sheet2!$B$3:$B$5,IF(C3="Vegetables",Sheet2!$C$3:$C$5,FALSE))

Result
The choices in the second in-cell dropdown list now changes depending on the value of the first cell.
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Hello and Welcome!

It has been a couple of months since I graduated from college – a time where I traded homework with reports, school presentations with presentations over LiveMeeting and another bunch of school stuff for work stuff. The past few months have been fun so far – I am really learning a lot of new things related to my role and every day I am finding more ways on how Microsoft Office can help me do things faster and smarter.



Welcome to My Office Notes, it is where I will write about tips and tricks that are really worth sharing –tricks that you never have thought to be possible with Microsoft Office, questions that my colleagues are asking me every single day, and productivity challenges that I even personally face sometimes.

If you are an avid reader of StudentEmpowered on Microsoft Philippines Community Forums – this is the place where we can continue our conversations about how to be more productive in school, or at work.
I hope you enjoy reading and learning from my new blog!

Cheers!

Chester Coronel