Microsoft Word Tips and Tricks

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Who’s who? More than anything else, staff want to get in touch with other staff. Most organizations are poor at facilitating such interactions.

Much has been made of knowledge management over the years. We’re all living in the knowledge society and economy and we’re all knowledge workers. But what is the foundation-the corner stone-of knowledge management?

There are two basic types of knowledge. Formal knowledge is found in books, reports and videos (this is what we call content). Informal knowledge resides in the head of the knowledge worker.

In a typical organization, it is often the informal knowledge that is the most valuable. It makes the sale, delivers the service, solves the support call, builds the brand. You just need to get to talk to the right person, quickly.

In the past, most organizations had pretty good solutions for the transfer of informal knowledge. The basic system was called apprenticeship, but there were many other structures put in place to make sure you got to talk to the right person.

Times have changed. The efficient transfer of informal knowledge now has to meet the following challenges:

1. The apprenticeship model has severely declined, if not become
extinct in many organizations.

2. The person you need to talk to is quite possibly not in the
same physical place as you are. (Historically, most of the people you needed were within walking distance.)

3. The person you need to talk to left last week. Who else really knows about this stuff?

4. Skills and knowledge keeps changing. The best person for this job only became the ‘best person’ four months ago. Outside her small team, nobody else knows that she’s so good.

5. Managers and other senior knowledge workers used to have support staff to help them find who they needed. Not anymore.

There is nothing more important for a knowledge organization than to quickly and efficiently connect the right people. It’s the foundation-the corner stone-of knowledge management. It is the foundation for success of the company of today-let alone the company of tomorrow. So, why do so many organizations do such a bloody awful job of it?

Because management is living in the past. It thinks the old networks and structures are sufficient to allow for the efficient flow of informal knowledge. That is simply not the case. And senior managers are often blind to the growing problem because for them it is not a problem.

I heard one CEO comment that he had no problem finding other people. That’s because his search engine was his secretary.

Time and time again, I have seen organizations invest heavily in intranet technologies, while almost totally ignoring the vital processes required to make the intranet a success. Basic staff directories are woefully maintained. Experts have no incentive to enter their details into ‘expert databases’.

To efficiently allow one knowledge worker find another, quality content is now required. In a modern organization, a skill or piece of knowledge that is not formally recorded is very difficult to communicate.

At the most basic level connecting two people means having an email address or telephone number. And if the telephone number is wrong …

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

www.gerrymcgovern.com

Technology does not replace the need for good management.

Without such management, technology can create more problems than it solves.

It’s hard to resist the easy option. Buy this customer relationship management (CRM) software, and you will efficiently and cost-effectively be able to manage your customer relationships. Buy this content management software, and you will be able to efficiently and cost-effectively manage your content.

Software does not manage. People manage. Software is a tool that can help you manage better, but it is not a manager. It is not strategic. Before you can manage customer relationships, you have to have relationships with your customers.

A person recently told me that their CRM software was great for sending lots to email offers and other marketing material to their customers. To them, this was what CRM was all about:
cost-effectively deluging (spamming) their customers with marketing and sales pitches.

It amazes me the amount of organizations out there that still believe that to create a better intranet or public website, all they need to do is choose the right content management software.
These organizations are not thinking about the quality and effectiveness of the content. They’ll employ junior people to put up this content, and then a couple of years later they’ll wonder where it all went wrong.

I’ve yet to meet an organization that has successfully implemented personalization either for their intranet or their public website. This is not because the concept of personalization is wrong. Properly implemented, it is a very sophisticated and powerful way to give customers what they want.

There are many reasons it fails miserably, however. One of them is that organizations feel that all they need to do is install this fancy software, turn it on, and, hey presto, a wonderful website emerges. No need to worry about the quality of the content. No need to worry about how well it is structured and organized. The magic software looks after all that.

I once spoke with a consultant who told me about working with the British military. Years ago, if you were becoming an officer, you were sent on a course about managing your office.
Part of the course involved learning how to manage your filing cabinet.

Then computers came along and the course was scrapped. Think about it. A computer has at least 100 “filing cabinets”. You need training in managing content far more if you have a computer. But you don’t get it because of this irrational exuberance about what technology can do.

Modern organizations are not professionally managing their content. Senior management often abdicate responsibility. They think that the Web is a technology challenge that they can hand over to IT.

Content management will become one of the key management skills of the 21st century. That’s because we live in a content-driven world.

Technology can support strategy. It can support managers as they do their jobs. But technology is not a strategy, and it is certainly not management.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

  Content management solutions: Gerry McGovern
  http://www.gerrymcgovern.com

It has rarely made sense for a business to advertise its weaknesses. Until the Web, that is.

There is a book on Amazon called “Introducing Operations Management”. It has received a one-star average from readers.

One review begins: “I am a senior in college and I have used and read many, many textbooks but this is the worst one ever!”

Amazon sells books. The more books it sells the more money it makes. It doesn’t seem to make sense that Amazon should allow customers to come to its website and tell other potential customers not to buy certain books.

Progressive is a successful American auto insurance company. On its homepage it provides the latest auto rates for itself and its competitors. Progressive is often cheaper but I saw numerous occasions where it was the more expensive option. That doesn’t make sense, does it?

Hostelworld.com lets customers review the hostels they stay at.
Dumil hostel in London gets this review: “Manager was very nice and understood he was running the worst hostel ever.” Why does Hostel World allow this? Surely it is bad for business?

The truth is hard to come by, and it is particularly hard to come by when you want to buy something. We realize that most organizations that are selling to us are either exaggerating, omitting the truth, or outright lying.

That’s why hearing from other customers is so reassuring.
They’re on our side. Of course, we know that not every customer review is truthful, but once there’s enough of them, we can get a sense of the average-the collective intelligence.

“Dumil hostel is one of the best hostels in London for its price and area. We try to make sure that all our customers get more privacy and enjoy a pleasant stay,” the marketing material says.

However, one reviewer writes that, “This place was horrible!!! It was so dirty and I have never felt so unsafe in a place before.”

The Web customer is savvier, educated, less gullible, more sceptical. The Web is illustrating that there is a place for honest business.

Much marketing and advertising is about association. We see cool, happy and beautiful people using a particular product. The association is that if we buy this product we too will become cool, happy and beautiful.

The Web is different. Not totally different, but different all the same. The Web is where people go to be informed. We’re on the Web because we don’t believe the hype, because we want to get some more facts. We’re driven by logic not by impulse.

We trust the reviews of other customers because they’re like us, and we know that organizations lie to us. When we arrive at a website like progressive.com, we are surprised and impressed by its honesty.

Honesty is selling on the Web. Honest websites are not better because they are morally superior but because they are more believable and trustworthy. The customer has matured. The customer is better educated, better informed.

These are interesting times. Society is moving to another level of sophistication, and marketing must learn to follow.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

More at www.gerrymcgovern.com

 <Would appreciate any other advice you have regarding taming/controlling
auto updates on styles - as this is when the file size explodes….If this happens, it usually means something has crept into the Normal.dot template file. This is Word’s master template where all settings are saved.

1. What I do is locate this file and delete it (or rename it for example to Normalbackup.dot)

2. Reopen Word. It will automatically recreate a new Normal.dot file but this one should be cleaner and cause less issues.

3. Open the file that tends to explode.

4. Also open a blank file.

5. Then, using your mouse select all the content - except the very last sentence. you can type this in by hand later.

6. Copy and paste into the new blank file. Save.

Ther reason you dont select the very last sentence is because all of the Word files settings are stored in the very last paragraph marker - if you copy this, you copy the bugs.

You can tell Word to undo a mistake you’ve made and to change it back to what you wrote a few minutes ago.

If you’ve made a mistake when writing, for example deleted a few paragraphs by accident, the first reaction may be to panic. How do I get it back? Do I have to write it all again?

One way to do this is to use the Undo feature in Word. This lets you go back in time, step by step, until you find the first version of the text you wrote.

Here’s how it works:

1. In the Word document, press Ctrl and Z. This performs one Undo. It undoes the last edit you made to the document.

2. Press Ctrl and Z. This performs another Undo. It undoes the second last edit you made.

Continue to press Ctrl and Z to undo as many edits as you want. 

When you’ve found the text that you were after, save the document, preferably with some naming convention that makes sense to you, for example, June Report Draft 2.

Rather than keeping one version of a document, especially one you’ll re-write many times, save it with a different version number as you work on it. This avoids losing all your work if the document crashes, which can happen if you repeatedly format a document and make changes to its layout.

At the end of the project, delete the initial drafts, then create a Gold Copy of the final draft and save it in the Archives.

Here’s a great trick to make Word easier to use.

You can customize Word so that is shows all the different toolbars on your screen. This saves you time looking for those special fuctions you’re always after. Of course, you can also turn off the ones you dont want later.

Here’s how to view all the toolbars.

1. Press ALT.  Then let go of the ALT key.

2. Press SHIFT+F10.

This displays a list which shows you all toolbars available in MS Word. 

Choose the ones you want. If you use Word frequently, experiment with the toolbars that best suit your needs

Add-in Express 2007 for VSTO is the first toolkit on the development components market that provides visual designers for application-level customization and enhancement of the Microsoft Office 2007 and 2003 on Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005.

Using the designers Office developers customize the Ribbon UI for their Office 2007 plug-ins, add elements to Ribbon tabs, the Quick Access Toolbar and Office Menu and validate the resulting Ribbon XML in no time. The traditional Office 2003 GUI is supported by the Add-in Express designers as well.

Add-in Express provides special components for creating custom task panes, application-level keyboard shortcuts, custom .NET controls, advanced regions, extended Outlook customization, etc. It completely supports application-level add-ins for Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio and InfoPath, and works for Visual Basic .NET and C#.

http://www.add-in-express.com/add-in-vsto/

David Berlind at ZDNet introduces Microsoft’s beta version of its unified communications suite adding that “The pair of solutions is known as Office Communicator 2007 (the client side) and Office Communicator Server 2007 (the server side). In favor of Office Communicator Server, Microsoft is dropping the old product name Live Communications Server (2005) or LCS.”

There is also an an image gallery with 15 screen shots showing Office Communicator in action. http://zdnet.com.com/1606-2_2-6170363.html

SparkMaker lets you visualize numerical data in dashboards and spreadsheets, reports and presentations. Sparklines compress large amounts of data into intense, word-sized diagrams (e.g. miniaturized bar or line graphs). They are created within a single spreadsheet cell or even directly inside a text paragraph.

The new Bissantz SparkMaker 3.0 empowers Microsoft® Office users to create their sparklines automatically and to present condensed graphical information which is traditionally lost among multiple report pages or slides.

The sparkline concept has been invented by Edward Tufte, the renowned expert for innovative information design. He states that at the heart of the concept are “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”:

A sparkline depicts data in miniaturized graphs, such as bars, lines, whiskers and pie charts.

A typical application is to depict the history of a value by means of a sparkline which is placed right in front of the current value within a report (e.g. the last months or years of product sales). Readers then have context information (e.g. about a trend or cyclical ups-and-downs in sales) to interpret the current data.

Probably the most remarkable innovation are functions for Excel that generate cell-adherent sparklines automatically and update them dynamically. In Excel XP and 2003 functions like “=Sparkline(cellrange)” generate a sparkline directly in a cell of a worksheet. The word-sized graphs automatically update whenever the underlying data has changed.

Bissantz SparkMaker 3.0 is free with unlimited functionality for private and academic users while all other users may test it during a 30-day trial period before a valid license has to be obtained. For more details and a downloadable version of SparkMaker 3.0 please visit: http://www.bissantz.com/sparklines/sparkmaker.asp