Microsoft Office Tutorials

Many people balk at the task of setting up Microsoft Outlook 2010 because it seems such a daunting task. It’s not really, so fear not! This tutorial will take you through the basics of setting up Outlook 2010, and you’ll discover just how easy it is.

After you’ve installed Office 2010, as soon as you start Outlook, you’ll getthe startup window that let’s you know that you’re in the process of setting the application up.

Click Next.

At this screen, you must decide whether you want to tell Outlook about an existing email account that you are currently using. You would normally select “yes” here, and that’s what we’re going to do.

Click Next.

On this screen, things start getting interesting. Here, we add details about our email account. You need to type in the following:

• Your name
• Email address
• Password

Once you’ve typed in those details, click Next.

The next screen tells us that Outlook is configuring the email server settings. This involves trying to establish a connection with the email server and attempting to log on using the email account you specified on the previous screen. It should take only a few minutes.

The next screen, although it highlights an error of sorts, is usually nothing to worry about. It tells us that a network connection was successfully established and that Outlook was able to log on to the email server, but it also tells us that an encrypted connection to the mail server wasn’t available. You don’t even need to know what this means! Just click Next.

This time Outlook tries to log on using an unencrypted connection. Again, don’t worry about what that means, just keep your fingers crossed!

If all goes well, you should get the following screen:

The final window tells us that Outlook was able to connect, log on and send a test email to the account you specified.

In the last lesson, we had a look at how to add transitions to a presentation. We’ve done a whole lot of work on our presentation so far, but we’ve not actually seen how it will appear to our audience when we run it. As you work on your presentation and keep adding slides, you can think of being in “edit mode”. When you play the presentation, it helps to think of the presentation as being in “view mode”. These are just terms that we’ll use here to help you understand what’s going on.

Edit mode looks a bit different to view mode. When the presentation is running, you won’t see the ribbon, or any of the controls that you can see when you are editing the presentation.

The quickest way to run a presentation is to press F5 on the keyboard. Pressing F5 will play the entire presentation, or Slide Show, from the first slide. To move to the next slide, press Enter on your keyboard or left click the mouse button. You can end the presentation at any point by pressing escape on the keyboard. To go back to the previous slide, press the backspace key.

Alternatively, you can play the slide show from the current slide onwards by clicking Slide Show > Start Slide Show > From Current Slide Show.

If you hover over that button, you’ll see a tooltip telling you that the shortcut is shift-F5. This is a good tip for discovering shortcuts for other commands too: simply hover over the button.

In the last lesson we looked at adding new slides to our presentation, and we’ve already seen how we can add text to those slides. In this lesson, we’ll learn how to format the text on our slides.

The text formatting options in PowerPoint 2010 are very similar to those in other Office programs like Word. To format your text, first of all select it and then navigate to the Home tab > Font group. Here, you have all the standard formatting commands like bold, italic, underline, font size, font family, colour etc.

Applying the formatting is a simple case of clicking on the appropriate command button in this group. Let’s look at an example. On the following slide, we want to highlight the key words like subjects and times.

TIP: to select a whole word, double click on it. In the example above, we bolded the text, made it italic and underlined it. The formatting tools we need to accomplish this are all in the font group.

In fact, if you really want to speed up the process of applying these formatting effects, you can use the following shortcuts:

• Bold – ctrl-b
• Italic – ctrl-i
• Underline – ctrl-u

In addition to the basic formatting you can apply using the Font group on the Home tab, you can also apply more advanced formatting using the Format tab within the Drawing Tools tab.

Let’s format the title slide. On the left hand side of the workspace in the Slides pane, click on the Title slide. This should be the very first slide in your presentation. Select the whole of the subtitle, as shown below:

TIP: a quick way to select a whole line of text is to triple click on one word in the sentence. We’re going to add a reflection to the subtitle, just because we can.

With the text selected, click on the Format tab within the Drawing Tools tab > WordArt Styles > Text Effects > Reflection, and select one of the options. We don’t want an exagerrated reflection, so let’s choose Tight Reflection, touching (the first option).

Now, that looks good!

We’re really moving now! Let’s see how we can spice up our presentation by adding some transitions.

In Outlook 2010 you can add digital signatures and also standard signatures. This tutorial will focus on adding standard signatures. Outlook allows you to add standard signatures either manually or automatically. If you’re going to be adding the same signature to every email, then it makes sense to set up your signature so that it gets added automatically. This will save you time, cut down on typing errors and it will be one less thing to have to think about!

There is much flexibility too, as you can specify different signatures for new emails, replies and forwards. Also, your signature can include text and even images.

To create a signature click the File tab > Options > Mail > Signatures (it should be the third button down).

When the Signatures and Stationery window opens, make sure the Email Signature tab is active and then click New.

In the New Signature window, type in the name of your new signature. Click OK. In the lower half of the window, you’ll see an editor that you can use to construct your signature. Position the cursor in the large text box and start typing the text you want to be added to every email you send.

If you want to add an image, click on the Insert Image button to the right of the toolbar. You can then navigate to the location of your image and insert it. You can also insert a hyperlink in your signature. To do this, select the portion of text you want to become the link and then click on the Hyperlink button (next to the Insert Image button).

Type in the URL and click OK. What most people do is navigate to the URL they want to use as the link, highlight the URL in their browser’s address bar, copy it and then paste it here.

Many of the formatting options that are available when typing out the email message itself are available here for use in the signature.

When you’ve finished creating your signature, click OK. The new signature will appear in the list. You can create new signatures by repeating this process, and you can also edit existing signatures by selecting them and changing their details in the editor.

Assigning Signatures To Replies And Forwards

When creating your signature, you may have seen two drop down lists for:

• New messages
• Replies/forwards

If you have only one signature, don’t worry about these settings. However, you can create multiple signatures and then use these drop down lists to specify which signature should be used for new messages and which one should be used for replies and forwards.

In Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, the easiest way to add text is to use the content placeholders that appear by default on the slides you add to your presentation. For example, if you add a Title and Content slide there are two placeholders for text: the title placeholder and the content placeholder. To add text in either of these places, simply click in the box and start typing.

Text Boxes In PowerPoint

If you need to add text to a slide outside of the normal text placeholders, you can add a text box. To do this, click Insert > Text > Text Box.

Now that we have the Text Box tool active, we can click once anywhere on the slide and start typing. The text appears where you clicked. The width of the text will grow as you keep typing (it won’t wrap automatically). Instead of clicking once when the Text Box tool is active, you can drag out a box. This time when you type, the text will only be as wide as the text box you just drew.

Resizing And Rotating A Text Box

Text Boxes in PowerPoint display convenient handles that you can use to resize and rotate them. To resize a text box, click and drag on any of the handles that appear at corners and halfway along each edge.

To rotate a text box, clcik on the green rotate handle at the top of the box and drag left or right. Dragging left rotates the text box in an anti clockwise direction, whereas dragging right rotates the text box in a clockwise direction.

You can also move your text box around the slide. If you hover over any of the text box edges, you should see the cursor change to a crosshair. When you see the crosshair, you can start dragging to reposition the text box.

Formatting A Text Box

If you are familiar with formatting text in other programs like Word 2010, then you’ll find formatting a text box in PowerPoint a breeze. In addition to being able to apply standard text formatting that using the Font group on the Home tab, you can also apply text box specific formatting using the Format tab Format tab in the Drawing Tools tab.

If you liked this tutorials, maybe you’d like the one where we teach you how to format a text box in more detail.

In addition to being able to see two views of the same document at the same time, you can also display two different Microsoft Word documents side by side. If you need to compare two documents, then viewing them side by side can be a helpful thing to do.

To view two documents side by side, open two documents in Word and then click View > Window > View Side By Side.This option is only available when you have more than one document open.

Word will then resize both windows so that they fit side by side, occupying an equal amount of space. You can navigate between the two windows as you would under normal circumstances: by using alt-tab or or by simply clicking the title bar of the window to make it active.

View Side By Side: Synchronous Scrolling

When you display two documents side by side like this, the synchronous scrolling button becomes available.

This button acts like an on/off switch, so synchronous scrolling is either active or inactive. As soon as you display two documents side by side, synchronous scrolling is switched on by default and this means that both documents will scroll together, regardless of which window you are scrolling in.

When synchronous scrolling is turned off, you can scroll the document in each window independently.

If you have resized any of the windows, you can reset them to their original sizes, occupying half the screen size each, by clicking the Reset Window Position button.

Displaying Side By Side If You Have More Than Two Documents Open

If you happen to have more than two documents open in Word, clicking the View Side By Side button triggers the display of the Compare Side By Side window. You must use this window to choose which document you want to display next to the current one.

If you’re looking to land the job of your dreams, your application letter is crucial. In today’s business climate, competition for jobs is fierce, so take care to get this initial correspondence right.

Application Letters Via Email

You can actually send emails with application letters attached, and if you do, you must ensure that your email includes the following:

• a header for your addressee at the top of your cover e-mail that includes the recipient’s name, title, and address.
• a salutation and appropriate closing.
• provide your contact details in your email signature. Typically, you will want to refer to this information in the event that the recipient wants to contact you.

Many feel that attaching both cover letter and application letter to your email is better than using the email itself as the covering letter, but the choice is yours. If you do decide to attach the cover letter separately, you might include a statement such as

Attached are my cover letter and resume for your consideration for the position of …

Candidates who want to stand out from the crowd often send electronic copies of their letters by email and also send more formal hard copies on high quality stock paper by regular mail.

Obviously, application letters vary from candidate to candidate as each will have a different employemnt history and work experiences.

Sample Of Application Letter

Essential ingredients of an application letter are:

• where you read about the job opening.
• how you fit the special requirements of the job.
• your availability for an interview.

I’m running Microsoft Outlook 2010 and I’ve experienced the same problem that many other users have. There is an alarming number of people reporting the display of an error message that says The Sent Items Folder Is Unavailable when they send an email. If you search in Google for “The Sent Items Folder Is Unavailable“, you’ll find a variety of solutions, some that work for some people and others that don’t. Those solutions didn’t work for me, so I’ll detail here what did to solve the problem!

After you have installed Outlook 2010, it seems that you need to set up the destination for “Sent Items”. That is, you need to tell Outlook where to save your sent items. To do this, do click the File tab > Account Settings, and click the Account Settings button that appears below.

When the email accounts window opens, double click on the account you want to change.

Here, you should click on More Settings.

In the Internet Email Settings window that opens, click on the Sent Items tab, and right at the bottom make sure that Save sent items in the Sent Items folder on this computer option is selected.

Now when you send an email, you won’t get that stupid message about the Sent Items folder.

How you remove a password from a Word document will depend on how the password was assigned in the first place. The following password window requires you to enter the password to open the document:

… and the following window requires you to enter a password in order to modify the document:

Both of these passwords are set – and removed – in the same place. Once you have opened the document, click the File tab > Save as > Tools > General Options.

In the General Options window that opens, simply blank out the passwords that you want to remove and then click OK.

Additionally, if opening the document is password protected, you will see the following informational message in backstage view when you click the File tab.

There is also another way to remove the password required to open the document: if you click on the Protect Document button seen in the image above and then click Encrypt with Password, you will see the password window below.

Again, blank out the password and click OK to remove it.

Of course, the above only works if you are able to open the document in the first place, and that requires knowing the password.

Password Recovery Software

If you don’t know the password that was assigned to a document, then you won’t be able to use any of the above methods. Instead, you will have to use password recovery software. There is a variety of different software solutions for removing password from Office documents, and some of the more popular ones are:

• Advanced Office Password Recovery (ElcomSoft)
• MS Office Password cracking Software (Rixler Software)
• Office Password Recovery Magic
• Password Recovery Tools

We don’t know whether any of the above solutions are any good, but we intend to review each of them.

Having to write a reference letter can be a daunting prospect if you’ve never written one before. Take the pain out of the process by availing yourself of someone else’s efforst! The following is a sample reference letter for a fomer employee who is seeking employment elsewhere. The post is of a technical nature (programming) but you can easily substitute the technical references and names with the details that pertain to your requirements.

Anatomy Of A Sample Reference Letter

The template for a reference letter can be broken down into the following 3 parts, which correspond to the paragraphs in the letter:

1. statement of previous employment.
2. assessment of the employee’s past performance
3. recommendation of candidate
4. permission for future contact