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.