Disappearing Fonts?

If you work collaboratively and find that the beautifully formatted document you created, complete with all its custom Quick Styles and building block content, goes kablooey (that's a technical term) when your coworker opens the file on her computer, here's a sanity-saving tip for you: Embed the fonts.

Here's how to do it:

1. Open the document on your system, and click the Microsoft Office button.

2. Choose Word Options and click Save.

3. In the Preserve Fidelity When Sharing This Document area, click Embed Fonts in This File.

4. Click the down-arrow and choose whether you want to embed fonts for all new documents or the currently open document.

5. Click OK, and save the document.

Now you can share the document's beauty without worrying that your Calibri gets changed to Times Roman. :)

Help Your Readers Help You

I've been up to my eyeballs in SharePoint 3.1 this week (and I'm loving it). I'm designing a new comprehensive site for the pilot of a new program our nonprofit is launching later this month. SharePoint 3.1 is even more flexible than previous versions, and I'm looking forward to really putting the data list capabilities to work and integrating them seamlessly with reporting and analysis in the Office aps. (It's nice to be in a place where I can building solutions that incorporate so many aspects of the technology I write about. Fascinating!)

This is a tiny tip but cool and flexible. If you are adding contact threads to a site and want to know in advance what types of messages you're receiving from your site visitors, customize the mailto line by adding the following info:

mailto:emailaddress@anyplace.com?subject=Customer question

If you have a dozen reasons customers and vendors will be contacting you, identify who wants what by preloading your Subject line helps you prioritize and respond quickly to that barrage of incoming messages.

That's it for now--back to work for me. Kind regards,

Kathy

RSS Feeds in Outlook

For some reason my RSS feeds jumped from one place to another recently and made the feeds on a couple of my blogs null and void. (I think this was due to a folder reorg on my server, but oh well.) I was sleuthing out the problem and trying to get everything working again and realized I hadn't yet added a couple of my blogs to Outlook 2007. It's pretty simple but to save you the trouble of looking for it, here's the process:

1. Add the RSS feeds to Internet Explorer as you usually do, by clicking the RSS icon and clicking Subscribe to This Feed.

2. In Outlook 2007, open the File menu and choose Import and Export.

3. In the Import and Export dialog box, click Import RSS Feeds from the Common Feed List and click Next.

4. The list displays all the RSS feeds that are currently in your Common Feeds list (the RSS feeds shared with Internet Explorer). Click the checkbox(es) of the feed(s) you want to add to Outlook, and click Next.

You can make sure your RSS feeds in Outlook 2007 contine to be sychronized with your Common Feeds List by choosing Tools > Options > Other > Advanced Options. In the General Settings area, make sure the option Sync RSS Feeds to the Common Feed List is checked. (If not, click to select it.) Click OK to save your settings.

Now all your favorite posts will come directly to your Inbox, ready for you to scan at your leisure. Nice. :)

Solving the Gray Column Mystery

I am currently working on preparing a curriculum that brings together the work of university faculty from all across the country. The breadth of thought is fascinating and I'm loving it. But, like anything in life, it's the little things that can hang us up. I just spent about 30 minutes trying to get rid of a mysterious gray column that appeared along the right side of the document whenever I copied one person's work into the master document I'm using for the curriculum draft. I tried adding content a paragraph at a time and all would be going well until...there's that dratted column again! It appeared in Print Preview and Print Layout view.

Through trial and error, I discovered the culprit. Buried deep within the hundred-page document was one tiny little comment, and that created the gray column throughout the entire file.

If you want to do away with balloon comments so that gray column never appears, click the Review tab and click the Balloons arrow. Choose Show All Revisions Inline. Now you can display the comment by hovering the mouse pointer over it; or you can display comments and changes in the Reviewing Pane, which you can display at the bottom of along the right side of your document.

There. Now I can get back to being productive again.

Have a good weekend!

Adding the Path to Your Filenames

If you work with content development team like I do, chances are that you are continually sharing versions of files and improving on each other's work. Content management at its best enables you to all work with a single document without duplicating or accidentally replacing or losing earlier changes. One simple way to manage versions is to ensure that everyone is drawing their file from the same place. (Yes, there are more sophisticated ways of doing this, including using Office Live Workspaces or SharePoint to check files in and out, but when you work in an office that is slowly deploying and warming to high-end features, sometimes simple is best.)

Here's a simple little technique that has saved us a lot of hassle. Add the file path to the filename in the footer of your document. That way you can ensure that people are using the same file and any stray versions can be weeded out. Here are the steps:

1. Open the document you want to use.

2. Click the Insert tab and click Footer.

3. Click Edit Footer.

4. Click in the footer at the bottom of the page. In the Insert group on the Design tab of the Header & Footer Tools, click Quick Parts, and then click Field.

5. In the Field Names list, click FileName. Click the Add Path to Filename checkbox in the right side of the dialog box. Click OK.

There. Now you're one step closer to that smooth content development process you've been dreaming about. :)

Single Labels in Word 2007

Here's a super simple tip, just in case you're getting ready to do one-off labels in Word 2007. When I opened the label template yesterday, Word 2007 shows me a blank screen. Oh great, I thought. How do I tell where one label area stops and another starts?

Suddenly a little whisper of intuition said, "Turn on paragraph marks."

So I clicked the Show/Hide tool in the Paragraph group on the Home tab, and clicked inside the little label marker (after the open bracket and before the end-of-paragraph mark) and typed the data for the label. All things should be so easy!

Fresh Out of Properties

As the managing editor for a professional journal, I work with lots of versions of manuscripts in all sorts of states. Early submissions, revisions, reviewer copies, and so forth. I need to be able to easily discern which versions are which. Although our numbering system is reliable and effective, I always want to double-check versions before they go out to reviewers. Today I went to do that second look and had to go on an adventure hunt to find Properties. Just in case you're wondering where they went too, here you go:

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button.

2. Click Prepare. (Why Properties are under "Prepare," I have no idea--not very intuitive, imo)

3. Click Properties (at the top of the submenu).

The Properties header appears so that you can find things like author, title, location, and so forth. But if, like me, you want to check the creation date. You have one more step. Click Document Properties at the top of the Properties header area and choose Advanced Properties. This pops open the old-fashioned Properties dialog box so that you can get the rest of the story.