Tabs for Microsoft Office

If you use tabbed browsing while working online to shift quickly between webpages, it can be frustrating to work in Microsoft Office products and have to open one document at a time, and use the taskbar or Alt+Tab to move between documents.


ExtendOffice (http://www.extendoffice.com/download/office-tab.html) is a free add-in for Microsoft Office that adds tab functions to Word, PowerPoint and Excel (the paid version also adds them to Publisher, Access and Visio).  This allows you to move quickly between documents, particularly useful if you are comparing documents or copy-and-pasting sections of content from one document to the other.  The screenshot at the upper right shows the tabs of two presentations pulled up in PowerPoint 2010, so the two presentations can be accessed more quickly, simply by clicking the tab.

The tabs are very customizable, and different settings can be used for different Microsoft programs (tab options for Word are shown at left).  It is compatible with Office 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013.

Editing Video in PowerPoint

Microsoft Office 2010 has some new video editing tools available that allow you to add fades, automatically go full screen, and make trims and cuts directly in PowerPoint. This lets you avoid the step of having to first edit your video in an outside editor, such as Movie Maker or Adobe Premiere.

To begin, you insert the video the same as you always have: go to the Insert tab, choose Video, then Video from File.

Select your video. You now will have a "contextual" Video Tools tab appear above the other tabs (see image below), and below it two other tabs, Format and Playback. Choose Playback.


To trim video, choose the Trim Video icon. A dialogue box will appear (see image at left). Drag the left marker to set your Start point, and drag the right marker to choose your End point.

To add fades to the beginning and end of your video, use the Fade In and Fade Out boxes just to the right of the Trim Video icon to set the duration of the fades (see image below).

Finally, to allow your video to automatically play Full Screen, check the Play Full Screen checkbox.

Converting docx, pptx and xlsx Files

As most of you probably know, when Microsoft released Office 2007, the file formats of the documents it created changed: .doc (Word documents) became .docx, .ppt (PowerPoint documents) became .pptx, and .xls (Excel documents) became .xlsx. What this meant is that people with earlier versions of Microsoft Office were unable to open the new file formats.

There are many file format converters out there, but Microsoft probably created the easiest, most seamless one, with the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack, available for free download at: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=3.

I like this converter (and use it on my personal laptop) because it converts the document all by itself. All you need to do is open the document in whatever version of MS Office you have, and the converter automatically recognizes the format as incompatible and converts and displays the document in a read-only version. You don't have to do a thing. The converted document can then be saved in an older file format (e.g. - .doc)

Some caveats: the compatability pack only converts Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents. And formatting choices that are not available in the older version of Office will be discarded. Overall, though, it is the easiest and cheapest way to convert Microsoft Office 07 and 2010 documents.

Office 2010 Beta

Late yesterday Windows unveiled the beta version of Office 2010. It's free, and it's available here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx. The beta version will expire in October 2010.

Overall, it doesn't look too much different than Office 07. The ribbon is still there (though the Office button has been replaced with a File tab). There are some enhanced image editing features, such as color saturation and artistic effects. You can edit videos embedded in PowerPoint directly from the program.

The big difference is that you can save documents to the Web and share them with others on Microsoft's "Skydrive." Clearly, this is an attempt to compete with Google Docs and other Web 2.0 cloud computing options available out there. It allows you to save your documents to the web directly from the File tab, and you can invite others to view or collaborate with you on documents, as well as access them from any computer.

Yes, you can already do all of that on Google Docs. And yes, this free version expires in October, after which you have to buy it. But it's worth a look, if only to see how Microsoft will compete in the Web 2.0 arena in the future.

More information is available at the the Microsoft Office 2010 FAQ page.