One really nice feature which was added in Office 2007 is the ability to make certain files in your recently opened document list ’sticky’ so that they always appear in the list. This is really easy to do:

1. In the respective application (Word, Excel, etc.), click on the Office icon in the upper left.
2. In the ‘Recent Documents’ listing, note the push pin next to each item.
3. Click the push pin for each item you want to make stick on the list. When you select the item to be sticky, the icon will change to indicate this.
4. Now whenever you open the Recent Documents list, the sticky files will always be there. The order will shuffle according to other documents you may have opened, but the sticky files will not be removed.
5. To unstick a file, simply click the push pin again.

This feature is great for making sure you have easy access to the files you use most often and can help you avoid cluttering up your desktop with shortcuts. Office 2007 users definitely should take advantage of this.

As work I make fairly extensive use of the excellent Microsoft Visio to create database ER diagrams and network topology markups, however a need came up recently where I had to provide someone who did not have Visio an editable copy of a file. Of course, the simple solution is to just go get a copy of Visio, but for those of you looking for a more ‘economical’ solution, check out Dia.

Dia does not advertise itself to be a replacement for Visio, rather a more ‘home user’ friendly variant:

Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams.

Even better, Dia can open files exported from Visio.

Again, I would not say Dia is a replacement for Visio, however if you just need to create some simple diagrams Dia is a great option to consider as it is definitely going to be easier to work with than a standard graphics editor.

I made an interesting discovery today when I was exporting some Word Documents to PDF. I had previously been using the PDF printer installed on my machine (CutePDF), but this time I used the Microsoft Save add-in to save the document as a PDF.

I found the Microsoft add-in worked much better. Not only was the file saved to PDF faster, but the file size was smaller and my links within the Word Document carried over to the PDF. By ‘links within’ I am referring not only to external URL links, but my table of contents. As you know, in Word when you generate a table of contents, you can click on the item and jump to the applicable section in the Word Document. By using the MS add-in, this exact functionality existed in the output PDF.

Unfortunately, the free Microsoft add-in is only available for Office 2007, but 2007 users should definitely take advantage.

At home I use Google Docs for everything, but at work Microsoft Office is king. One resource I just recently found out about is Microsoft Office Online.

Here you can find downloads for any Office version categorized by product (Excel, Word, Access, etc.) as well as access lots of free stuff such as:

• Clip art
• Fonts
• Templates
• Detailed how-to write ups

The site is very well put together and truly is a great resource for Office users. One thing the need to give up, however is their Office OFFline Web comic…