Over the past several weeks, I’ve been posting about all the great features of Office 2010 and how it can make your life easier and give your creativity wings. It can give clear vision to your ideas with SmartArt, tame your crazy inbox, and keep all your projects organized. But today I want to discuss moving…and not the boxed and bubble wrap nightmare we all know and hate…I’m talking about moving from an older Office suite like Office 2003 to Office 2010.
I know I
sometimes get apprehensive changing up my hair style or trying a new
“look”, so it would come as no surprise
if some of you felt hesitant to embrace the new and switch from Microsoft Office
2003 to Office 2010. Over the years, you’ve probably grown comfortable with
your system and developed patterns and processes that work for you. Understandably,
upgrading now might seem like a bit of a risk.
However, feathered bangs and acid washed jeans just
aren’t as cool as they once were. It’s
time take the leap. Short term pain brings long term gain and all that.
One of the biggest
changes to both Office 2007 and Office 2010 is the “ribbon” menu. So let’s learn
how to clear that hurdle with grace and ease. First of all, what is the ribbon?
This is what it looks like:
But if I
click on, say, an image in my document, Picture Tools will automatically appear
and be highlighted so that I can see that there are picture specific features
that I can use:
If I click
on the highlighted Picture Tools, I see a different view, visually showing me
how I can change the format of my image:
The ribbon enables you to boost your
productivity reducing the number of steps to complete a command like “print”
and “save.” You no longer have to search
through the drop down menus for basic operations; it is all right there for
you. For anyone who’s
never used Office, the ribbon will enable them to pick it up quicker and faster
than the old style menu. But for those of us more set in our ways…well, it can
be a hurdle.
That’s why team at Microsoft made interactive guides for you, to help make the switch simple. These interactive guides show you where your favorite menu and toolbar commands are located in Office 2010. Just click the command or button that you want to find and the guide will show you its location in the 2010 version of the program.
Here’s what the Word 2010 Interactive Guide looks like:
When I select Insert, then Page Number in the Word 2003 style menu, the following comes up, showing me where the same command is in Word 2010:
If you want to be a little more old school (no judgment!) try these great menu-to-ribbon reference workbooks.
Until next week….
Ruth Morton
Microsoft Geek and Mother of Twins
