In my last post I introduced you to the editing features of Microsoft's Picture Manager software that comes with Office 2007.

Today we will look at how we can use the programme to organise our pictures and send them to other people.

File management

You can easily do some file management while using this programme. To delete images simply click on the image in the central window, and choose the delete button up in the top toolbar represented by a large cross symbol. You will be asked if you are sure you want to delete the file. Click Yes. The image will now be deleted. To move an image from one folder to another, make sure that you have both folders listed in the shortcut panel on the left. Find the image you want to move, click and drag it over the destination folder on the left and when that folder is highlighted, release the mouse button. A copy of the file is now placed in the destination folder. Check it is there before you go back and delete the original. Another way of moving a file is to right-click over the original, choose cut, move to the destination folder and click on paste. The image will be cut from the original folder and pasted into the destination folder.

Inserting images into emails and documents

Usually in a programme like MS Word, or any of the other office programmes, you can choose Insert-Picture, and file manage to your image in Windows. Another way of inserting images is to have the document open and insert it from Picture Manager. Select the image you want to insert, go to File and choose Send To - Microsoft Office (see right). You should see the open document listed so click on the Send button and it will insert the image where the cursor is placed in the document. Alternatively, when sending to a blank Office document, choose which programme you want to insert the image in, and click on Send (note that if you click on the Options link you will be able to change the size).

You can email your image by going to File-Send To and choosing Email. You will be given the Email Task Pane on the right of the screen. Complete the options and click on Create Message. The selected image should then be inserted into an empty email ready for you to address and send.

If you find these features greyed out it means you didn't select an image to send!

I hope you find that a useful summary of software that you may not have used before. 

I came across the MS Picture Manager recently and was reminded what a useful tool it can be, especially if you don't have access to an image editing programme. The next two posts will take you through some of the handy features.

First we will look at exploring the windows. Below you will see a screen shot of the main window:

The panel on the left hand side is the shortcuts panel. To hide it, click on the Shortcut's button just above it. Click again to get it back. By default you will see the image files saved in your My Pictures folder in My Documents. Your ICT department may have changed the default settings, but this is the standard before any customisation.

If you have a folder of images saved elsewhere you can click on 'Add Picture Shortcut...' , find the folder containing the images and then click on Add. You should see the folder listed in the Picture Shortcuts panel and the contents of the folder displayed in the middle window.

You can change how large the images appear in the central window by using the slider at the bottom right (note this does not change the actual size of the image). You can also change how the images are viewed by clicking on one of the three buttons in the top left corner of the central pane.

Editing an image

Use the shortcut panel to find the folder that contains the image you want to edit, and click on it to show its contents. When you see the desired image double-click on it and it should fill the middle window. You can hide the shortcuts panel if you wish by clicking on the Shortcuts button at the top left.

On the right hand side of the screen you see the task pane. Here I have clicked on the Properties task pane from the drop down arrow at the top of the pane (see left) and you can see the size of the file, where it resides and even what model of camera took the photo!

If you choose the Edit Pictures pane from the drop down, you will see a list of editing tools to change the colour, contrast, cropping, and a few other options that are very useful. Experiment with each one in turn. Move the sliders to see the effects on the image in your main window. When you want to try the next edit option click on Back to Edit Pictures at the bottom of the pane.

Resizing and cropping

Note the difference between cropping and resizing an image. Cropping will slice off the edge of the image that you identify. Move your mouse over the handles around the edge and drag inwards. The shaded area will be cut from the image. To retain all of the image but make it smaller you need to resize. The easiest way to choose the resize option and to insert a percentage less than 100 in the fourth option down. Otherwise, if you know the dimensions you want in pixels you can enter the numbers in the box for custom width x height. The Predefined width and height option offers some standard dimensions which might be useful.

When you have finished making all your changes, click on Save to ensure that the changes are made to the original image.

In the next post I will cover file management and sending images by email, from MS Picture Manager.

In my last post I outlined how to create a list which you can use to mailmerge letters. In this post I go over creating a letter in Word 2007, using mailmerge to insert multiple addresses.  

Open Word and choose the Mailings ribbon.

Click on the button that says Start Mail Merge and select Letters. You are given an empty document.

Click on Select Recipients, and then choose Existing List. Find your Excel spreadsheet and click on Open.

Compose your letter, inserting the merge fields from the list under the button Insert Merge Field. To preview how the fields appear, click on Preview Results. This will preview just one of the records in the letter.

When you have completed your letter you can click on Finish and Merge. I always choose the first option Edit Individual Documents so that I can view and edit before I print. You can also save the letters as evidence that the letters were done, should you need proof in future.

That should save you a bit of time in future.

I was working on a project with an administrator recently which involved mailing out to a long list of contacts. This was the second time that the organisation had mailed this list, but the administrator was typing in the address from scratch again!

My advice would be, if you are going to type the list anyway, you may as well type it up into a sheet of labels in Word, and then you can print it out as often as you like later. This would be my suggestion for someone with limited word processing skills.

For those with more skills, or more willing to learn them, I would suggest typing the list into a spreadsheet, with each line of the address in a new column. Here's an example of the layout:

You can then use this spreadsheet of data to create labels, letters and contact lists. When you need to update the data you only need to update the one Excel file, rather than a number of lists and letters.

Setting up a list in Excel

A spreadsheet has rows across the page, and columns down the page. By creating a list in Excel you are actually creating what is called a database, even though it is in a spreadsheet package. Each address in the row is called a record. Make sure that each separate line of address is in a separate column (this is called a field in database language). It is particularly important to put the postcode or area in a separate column because you can then order your list into geographical areas or postcode areas. While you may not need to have this function right now, you might find in the future that this would be very useful.

Give your list relevant column headings, avoiding spaces. This will ensure that you can mailmerge the list later on. Make the column headings bold so they stand out.

In my next post I will use an Excel list to mailmerge to a letter.

Most of us stick to the default settings when we use software programmes, but if you want to try a new look, experiment with these three options:

If you want a bit more document space, and less of the screen taken up by toolbars, right click over the top of the toolbar and choose 'Minimize the ribbon'.  Now you will see much more of your document. To open up one of the ribbons just click on its name across the top.  To return to the previous view, right click in the same area and choose 'Minimize the ribbon' again to deselect it.

While you were right-clicking on the toolbars you may have noticed 'Customize Quick Access Toolbar'.  Select this and you will be able to add commonly used buttons to the mini toolbar at the top left hand croner of the screen next to the Office Home button. Once in the customise area simply select the button you want in the left hand life and click on 'Add' to move it to the list on the right.

You may wish to see the whole page on the screen to make reading easier.  When you open a document in Word 2007 for the first time you may have been asked if want to open all documents in this format, and you probably chose no at the time.

To have a look at this view click on the second button in of the five view options in the bottom right hand corner:

Once in screen reading view you can click on the 'View Options' button in the top right hand corner to get a range of choices. Note that you can edit text in this view. Click on Close to return to the previous view.

Enjoy taking the time to explore these features.

Not everyone likes the new Office 2007 look and its features.  I think Excel particularly has improved and has some great tools that have come out from behind the menus.  I covered some conditional formatting last week, in today's posts I want to touch on the tool next to it, 'format as table'.

This tool is so simple to use that I'm almost embarrassed posting about it, but I think it is more a case of pointing out that it is there. Look at the home ribbon, and in the styles section you will see the button 'Format as Table'.

If you open a spreadsheet and click inside the data, when you select a style for your table it will be applied to the data table that you clicked in.  In fact you can hover over the styles on offer to see them previewed in the data.  When you find the style that suits your needs just click to select it from the list and your table is formatted.

Note that if you click outside the data table Excel will not be able to find the cells to format.  Also if you have empty rows or columns in the table the formatting may not be uniform.  It is not good practice to have empty rows and columns in a spreadsheet and this is one of many good reasons why.

You can also choose to remove the formatting from some parts of the table.  To the left of the styles you can see a selection of Table Style Options.  A tick in the box means the format will be applied, removing the tick means the formatting won't be applied to those cells.

Have a play around with this tool and see how you like it.

I was asked recently, how do you stop PowerPoint from automatically captilising the first letter of a line of bullet points?  Well this is a good question, and the answer is applicable to the other Office packages too.  Automatic formatting like this can be a real pain, but it is easy to work around most of the time.

When you press the enter/return key at the end of the line and get a capital on the following line you will see a little blue line underneath the first letter.  This tells you that there is a message relating to the letter underlined.  Click on the blue line and you will get something similar to this:

In this case it is telling you that it has automatically capitalising the letter.  You can see that if you select the first option you can undo the automatic capitalisation.  Selecting the second option will turn off automatic capitalisation for the whole presentation (it will not undo any capitalisation already in place).  If you want to turn it back on again, go back to one of the letters with a line underneath, click on the line and you will see a tick next to 'Stop Auto-capitalizing....'.  Select the line and auto-capitalising will be turned on again.  The third choice in the list will take you to the auto fomatting options dialogue box where you can change the settings for automatic formatting.

As I said earlier, this works in the other Office programmes too.

I used MS Publisher for years without realising that you could turn off the automatic hyphenation in text boxes.  It was only when I was actually asked how to do it once that I made the effort to find out.  And this is what I discovered....

The default setting in Publisher is to hyphenate all new text boxes.  You can turn off the hyphenations of individual text boxes by going to Tools-Language and selecting Hyphenation.

In the dialogue box take the tick out of the box next to 'Automatically hyphenate this story' and the text in the box will be reset without hyphens.

To change the default settings in Publisher, go to Tools-Options and choose the Edit tab.  In the second section of the dialogue box is an option to turn off/on the automatic hyphenation.  If  you remove the tick from the box your stories will no longer be hyphenated unless you use the method above to manually reset hyphenation.

A tool available in all Office packages that I feel is rather under used is the alignment feature for images and objects.  If you have several objects in a document/presention you can line them up so they are evenly spaced or align to the top or bottom of the objects.  Here's how you do it.

Select all the of objects you want to align.  To do this click on one object, hold you finger down on the shift key on the keyboard, and click on the remaining objects.  They should all be selected.  If you are having trouble achieving this, select each object, right click and turn text wrapping on.  You should then be able to select them all.

In Office 2007, when you select the pictures you get the picture formatting ribbon.  You will see the align button on the right.

In Publisher if you go to the Arrange tool at the top and choose align, you will get a very similar dialogue box (left).

Then you have to simply select the desired option.  As you can see you can align all of the selected objects across the top or bottom, or down the page to the left or right.  If you have more than two objects you can also distribute them equidistant from each other across or down the page.

So, a very useful tool to improve the look of your documents and presentations.