Microsoft Office 2007 introduced the revolutionary 'Ribbon' interface to windows.

Though this revamped user interface has been widely praised upon, it has also received some serious criticisms. Especially, the folks like the PC World, accusing the ribbon interface to crowd the work area, making it difficult for laptop users and others, who are still stuck with a low resolution monitor to work with.

Though we love the new Office 2007 interface, we do see that there is a pinch of truth in these accusations. The Ribbon is fat. Now, how do you take the ribbon on a diet?
Read on.

The procedure to make the ribbon slim is stupidly simple. Just double click on any one of the ribbon tabs. The ribbon bar shrinks to show just the tabs and stays in this minimized form until you double click on any tab and maximize it again.

Instead of double clicking, you can also right click the ribbon and select 'Minimize the Ribbon'. This trick works across all products in the Microsoft Office 2007 suite including Outlook 2007.

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OpenOffice.org have just released the first public beta version of OpenOffice.org v3.0 - a popular open source and free Microsoft Office alternative.
Now, what matters most to the common Joe is that OpenOffice 3 can read and write in the Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) out of the box. This version will also be the first one to natively support MAC OSX (in addition to Windows and Linux).
There is a change that will appeal more to Indians. While the rest of the world group numbers in thousands, Indians tend to group number in #,##,##,### format. OO.o 3 now uses this format for numbers if your locale is set to IN. So ten million will be displayed as 1,00,00,000 and not 10,000,000 in India.
Remember that this is a beta release. So don't bother to install on a production machine.

Download OpenOffice 3.0 | Release Notes | Features

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You got a really funny video that you couldn't resist emailing to your friends. But now, that fat video attachment have clogged your Outlook Outbox. You are unable to send the urgent status report to your boss due to this. Moreover, Outlook is teasing you with error messages on trying to stop sending mail or delete the  mail in Outbox. What to do?

Stop biting your nails and read on.

1. In Outlook, select File -> Work Offline.
   
2. Take Outbox and drag the fatso mail to your Drafts folder (or if you have hated this damn mail enough by now, delete it). Once in Drafts folder, you can edit the mail and try to slim it down before attempting to send again.
3. Deselect File -> Work Offline to resume sending and receiving mails.

 

via [Microsoft Outlook Blog]

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Your graphics team have send you a presentation that you need to present to a customer. But instead of the usual .ppt or .pptx file that you are familiar with, this one is a PowerPoint show file (the extension is .pps or .ppsx). When you open it, the sideshow begins automatically in full screen. Now, there is something that you have to modify in this presentation and you have no idea how...
Well, it isn't as difficult as it looks and no you don't have to send another email to the graphics team asking for a ppt file.

Two solutions:

1. Change the extension of the file from pps to ppt. Now it will open in PowerPoint. (Not applicable for Office 2007)
   
2. Open PowerPoint. Select Office Button -> Open and browse to your PowerPoint show file. Make the modifications and then save it as a pptx file.
   

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