Question:

Hi Tony

I have a new laptop at home that has Vista Home Premium. I am really disappointed to find that when I email work Excel spreadsheets to my home computer – spreadsheets with several tabs of worksheets, Vista will only allow me to open one tab at a time in the Vista spreadsheet program This is so annoying as often I need to be flicking from one sheet to the other.

Also, when I email myself a Word doc from work and open it in Vista’s Wordprocesser program, often the formatting goes all over the place, and it does not recognize certain features that were used on the original Word doc.

I feel like I have got extremely basic versions of the the Word and Excel docs I am used to working with and I am amazed that Vista’s packages don’t seem very compatible.

Do I need to get Ultimate to fix these issues? Does everyone have these problems?

Cheers,

Adrianne

Answer: Hi, Adrianne. Vista doesn’t include any version of Office. It sounds like your computer manufacturer gave you some old or sub-par version of Office; it’s a pretty common practice to keep the price of the computer down. You don’t mention the version of Office you have, but I suggest you upgrade to the same version you currently use at work (for example, Office 2003 or Office 2007).

Tony,

Thanks for your help setting up multiple monitors.  I have been experiencing  one problem and wonder if you know the solution: are we able to open different excel windows in both monitors, ie spreadsheet 1 on monitor 1 and spreadsheet 2 on monitor 2?  I have this flexibility in Word.

Thanks for your help.

Alok

Answer:

Yeah, this bugs me, too. If you open two Word documents, you get two windows. If you open two Excel documents, you get ONE window! Why can’t they be consistent within Office? It’s always been this way, even in Office 2007. Office 2007 will even show different taskbar buttons, but they both control a single window.

Anyway, here’s an easy work-around: resize the Excel window so that it covers both your monitors. If you use Ultramon, just right-click the taskbar, and then click Maximize to Desktop.

Then, tile the windows in Excel. In Excel 2007, click View, and then click View Side By Side. In earlier versions of Office, click the Window menu, and then click Tile Vertically (or whatever the command is).

• Microsoft Office Access 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
• Microsoft Office Visio 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2007

Thanks for the tip, Namoskar!

But I spend most of my day writing books and papers in Microsoft Word, and I’m spoiled by, in particular, AutoCorrect. In fact, AutoCorrect has made me a sloppy typist—I frequently capitalize the first two letters of a word because I hold the Shift key down, but Word fixes it automatically for me. Word also has handy features like “Paste Special” to strip the formatting out of text.

So, when I’m blogging, I really miss using Word, and I waste time dealing with typos.

To blog with Word 2007, first register your blog account by following these steps:

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click New.

   

2. Double-click New blog post.
3. In the Register a Blog Account dialog box, click Register Now to register your blog account with Word.
4. On the New Blog Account dialog, click the Blog list, and select your blog provider. Click Next.
5. Enter your Blog Post URL. Word provides a default that probably only requires you to enter your URL.
6. Then, type your User Name and Password, and select the Remember Password checkbox.

   

7. Click the Picture Options button, and change any settings necessary. For WordPress, you need to select My own server, and then configure your FTP URL, with the path to your images folder, and the corresponding HTTP URL. You’ll be asked for your FTP username and password the first time you publish a picture.

   

8. Click OK.
9. Select the dumb Don’t show this message again checkbox, and then click Yes.
10. Click OK.

Word opens your blog entry. Hammer some drivel in about your life or something you saw at Engadget.

You can format pictures by double-clicking them. Word has some cool options that I probably won’t use much. After double-clicking the picture, hover your cursor over the buttons on the ribbon to preview the effect. Check out the special effects on the next couple of screenshots.

To open an entry you made previously, click the Open Existing button.

To configure categories, click the Insert Category button. Then, scroll up to the top of your post (just below the title) and pick a category. Click it multiple times for multiple categories.

When you’re ready, click Publish. You can also click the little down arrow to publish as a draft.

If you configured an FTP server for your images, you’ll be prompted for a username and password the first time you publish.

Now, as I was writing this entry, Word crashed. But, Word also automatically restarted and restored all of my work, so I can’t complain too much. Also, some of my pictures didn’t get uploaded. Obviously, most of them did. Weird.

So, question to you: How do I add the “Read More” Indicator?

You can uninstall most programs by opening Control Panel and then clicking Uninstall a program (under Programs). Oddly, not all programs are listed there.

MyUninstaller is a free tool for removing software that might not be listed. I needed it because I was trying to install Office 2007 and it gave me an awful error message about having needing to uninstall a beta version of Office 2007–but none were installed, and none of the software I needed to remove was showing up in the Uninstall A Program window. MyUninstaller did list some incompatible components (I have no idea how it got installed) and launched the uninstaller for me.
Thanks to Scott Hanselman for pointing me to this tool.