MicroAssist Newsletter | November 2011

5 Ways Excel 2010 Works Harder for You

1. A New and Improved Ribbon

Those familiar with Office 2007 already know about the Ribbon. Microsoft has made some serious improvements to the Ribbon for 2010, including the ability to add your own tabs or groups to the Ribbon. You can even rename and change the order of the built-in tabs and groups!

2. Backstage View

Replacing the Office button on the Ribbon is the File tab, where you'll find the Backstage view. This view brings together many common functions that exist between applications, particularly enhanced printing and sharing options. Changes to the printing options are amazing - clicking print opens a plethora of printing options. No need to go through a "Print Wizard" or searching through tabs in "Advanced Printing Features" - all your print opitions are laid out in Backstage view with a great built-in print preview.

3. Make Fast, Effective Comparisons from Lists of Data

New features such as sparklines and slicers and improvements to Pivot Tables and other existing features can help you discover patterns or trends in your data.

Use sparklines - tiny charts that fit in a single cell - to visually summarize trends alongside data. Because sparklines show trends in a small amount of space, they are especially useful for dashboards and other places where you need to show a snapshot of your data in an easy-to-understand visual format.

Slicers a visual controls that let you quickly filter data in a PivotTable in an interactive, intuitive way. If you insert a slicer, you can use buttons to quickly segment and filter the data to display just what you need. In addition, when you apply more than one filter to your PivotTable, you no longer have to open a list to see which filters are applied to the data. Instead, it is shown there on the screen in the slicer. You can make slicers match your workbook formatting and easily reuse them in other PivotTables, PivotCharts, and cube functions.

4. Improved Support for Equations

You can now use the new equation editing tools in Excel 2010 to insert common mathematical equations into your worksheets, or to build up your own equations by using a library of math symbols. You can also insert new equations inside of text boxes and other shapes.

5. Collaborate on Workbooks in New Ways

Use Excel Web App, part of Office Web Apps to enable different people to edit a workbook at the same time from different locations. All you need is a free Windows Live account to simultaneously author workbooks with others. Users in companies and agencies running Microsoft SharePoint 2010 technology can also use this functionality within their firewall. Say goodbye to the "file in use" dialog box!

Bonus: Accessibility checker

The new Accessibility Checker tool in Excel 2010 enables you to find and fix issues that can make it difficult for people with special needs to read and interact with your workbook. The Checker will present errors and warnings in a task pane, making it easy to identify important issues to fix. In addition to the Accessibility Checker, you can add alternative text to more objects in your worksheet, including Excel tables and PivotTables. This information is useful to people with visual impairments who may be unable to easily or fully see the object.

5 Ways Outlook 2010 Lets you Work Smarter

For most people, Outlook is the first program fired up in the morning, and the last to be shut down at night. We all spend oodles of time sorthing through messages and setting appointments - Mcirosoft has added some great features to make Outlook 2010 work a lot smarter.

1. See More of Your Messages

An improved conversation view is now available when you work with your messages. This view improves tracking and managing related messages, regardless of the folder that contains the messages. You can see the complete course of the conversation, including your responses, find the most recent responses, and more easily determine the message most important to you. You can also easily categorize or ignore a complete conversation.

2. Process and File your Messages Faster with Quick Steps

Use Quick Steps to turn commands and procedures that you use most often into one click. You can customize the default Quick Steps, and create your own buttons that combine your frequent actions. The Quick Steps gallery includes buttons for one-click file and flag, sending messages to your team, and other popular commands.

3. Get the Calendar Big Picture

When you receive a meeting request, Quick View helps you better understand how a meeting request affects your calendar. When creating or responding to a meeting request, a calendar snapshot appears in the meeting request. You can instantly review any conflicts or adjacent items on your calendar without ever leaving the meeting request.

Introduced in Outlook 2007, Meeting Suggestions now appears when you create a meeting request. Schedules for attendees are analyzed and the best time is suggested based on everyone's availability.

4. Stay on Top of Your Tasks

The To-Do Bar has been improved based on customer requests. In Outlook 2010 there is better access to all-day appointments and events. Additional improvements include visual indicators for conflicts and unanswered meeting requests, day separators, and convenient drag and drop resizing to see more of what you want when you want it.

5. Stay Connected

The new Outlook Social Connector connects you to the social and business networks you use, including Microsoft SharePoint, Windows Live, LinkedIn, Facebook, and many more other popular third-party sites.

Get faster access to your contacts including instant messaging and presence indicators with Quick Contacts without leaving the mail view. With the new Find a Contact box on the ribbon, you can start to type the name of the person you are looking for and get instant results - including multiple ways to connect to the person including instant messaging, phone, mail, and meeting scheduling.

Accessibility Survey - Are You Accessible?

Knowbility, a nonprofit advocate, trainer, and consultant since 1999 for technology access for people with disabilities, and MicroAssist, a leading software training center since 1988 are seeking input on questions of IT accessibility. Our industry has seen legal mandates for accessibility expanding every year; technical standards from the W3C are in place and updated as technology evolves; and yet, access to technology remains unequal. We have had many inquiries about why the state of accessibility remains so dismal. We welcome your input and if we have left something out, please send an email to knowbility@knowbility.com.

Take the survey on SurveyMonkey - and enter your email address after the survey to be entered into a drawing for a pair of airline tickets anywhere Southwest Airlines flies!

Planning and Managing an E-Learning Project

The success of your E-Learning initiative begins and ends with project management. E-Learning projects are more complex to manage than traditional learning projects because they involve technology and training. There's more risk, more time constraints, more budget pressures, and more failures in communication.

Our E-Learning Project Management Workshop will show you an adaptive and agile methodology for E-Learning projects that will help you prevent common pitfalls in an E-Learning project. Topics covered include

Project charter and definition
Creating communication and agreement between all stakeholders and resources
Creating a high accountability blueprint
Risk management: how to know when trouble is imminent

The MicroAssist E-Learning Group has over ten years of real world experience working with clients to create effective E-Learning projects. This level of unparalleled real-world experience is invaluable and we are excited to begin sharing this knowledge with our clients.