The Top Ten Reasons CMIT Loves PowerPoint 2007

Now that we've reviewed top ways Word 2007 and Excel 2007 can help you create professional-looking content, PowerPoint 2007 also has many benefits and new features. PowerPoint enables users to quickly create high-impact, dynamic presentations while integrating security-enhanced workflow and ways to easily share this information.

Here are the top 10 ways PowerPoint 2007 can help you increase productivity and improve collaboration.

Get better results faster with the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface.

The redesigned look and feel of the Office Fluent user interface makes creating, presenting, and sharing presentations an easier and more intuitive experience. Rich features and capabilities are presented in a streamlined, uncluttered workspace that minimizes distraction and enables people to achieve the results they want more quickly and easily.

Create powerful, dynamic SmartArt diagrams.

Easily create high-impact and dynamic workflow, relationship, or hierarchy diagrams from within Office PowerPoint 2007. You can even convert a bulleted list into a SmartArt diagram, or modify and update existing diagrams. It's easy for users to take advantage of rich formatting options with new contextual diagramming menus.

Easily reuse content with Office PowerPoint 2007 Slide Libraries.

Wish there was a better way to reuse content from one presentation to another? With PowerPoint Slide Libraries, you can store presentations as individual slides on a site supported by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and easily repurpose the content later within Office PowerPoint 2007. Not only does this cut down the time you spend creating presentations, but any slides you insert can remain synchronized with the server version, so your content is always up to date.

Communicate with users across platforms and devices.

Help ensure broad communication with your PowerPoint presentations by converting your files to XPS and PDF files for sharing with users on any platform.

Use custom layouts to assemble presentations more quickly.

In Office PowerPoint 2007, you can define and save your own custom slide layouts so you no longer have to waste valuable time cutting and pasting your layouts onto new slides or deleting content on a slide with your desired layout. With PowerPoint Slide Libraries, it is easy to share these custom slides with others so that your presentations have a consistent and professional look and feel.

Accelerate your review processes using Office PowerPoint 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.

With built-in workflow capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can initiate, manage, and track review and approval processes from within Office PowerPoint 2007, enabling people to accelerate presentation review cycles across the organization without requiring them to learn new tools.

Uniformly format your presentations with Document Themes.

Document Themes enable you to change the look and feel of your entire presentation with just one click. Changing the theme of your presentation not only changes the background color, but also the colors, styles, and fonts of the diagrams, tables, charts, shapes and text within your presentation has a professional and consistent look and feel.

Dramatically modify shapes, text, and graphics with new SmartArt graphics tools and effects.

You can manipulate and work with your text, tables, charts, and other presentations elements in richer ways than ever before. Office PowerPoint 2007 makes these tools readily available through the streamlined user interface and contextual menus, so that in just a few clicks, your work can have greater impact.

Add more security to your PowerPoint presentations.

You can now add a digital signature to your PowerPoint presentations to help ensure their contents are not changed after they leave your hands, or you can mark a presentation as "final" to prevent inadvertent changes. Using content controls, you can create and deploy structured PowerPoint templates that guide users into entering the correct information, while helping protect and preserve the information in the presentation that shouldn't be changed.

Reduce your document sizes and improve file recovery at the same time.

The new, compressed Microsoft Office PowerPoint XML Format offers a dramatic reduction in file size while also offering an improvement in data recovery for damaged files. This new format provides a tremendous savings to storage and bandwidth requirements and reduces the burden on IT costs.

Ten Reasons To Love Excel 2007

Now that we've reviewed top ways Word 2007 can help you create professional-looking content, Excel 2007 also has many benefits and new features. Excel is widely used to analyze information and can be a powerful tool for making business decisions.

Here are the top 10 ways Excel 2007 can help you create spreadsheets and analyze, share, and manage information more effectively.

Office Excel 2007 features the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface to help you find powerful tools when you need them.

Find the tools you want wen you need them using the results-oriented Office Fluent user interface in Office Excel 2007. Based on the job you need to accomplish, whether it's creating a table or writing a formula, Office Excel 2007 presents the appropriate commands when you need them.

Import, organize, and explore massive data sets within significantly expanded spreadsheets.

Work with massive amounts of data in Office Excel 2007, which supports spreadsheets that can be up to 1 million rows by 16,000 columns. In addition to the bigger grid, Office Excel 2007 supports multicore processor platforms for faster calculation of formula-intense spreadsheets.


Use the completely redesigned charting engine in Office Excel 2007 to communicate your analysis in professional-looking charts.

Build professional-looking charts faster with fewer clicks using charting tools in the Office Fluent user interface. Apply rich visual enhancements to your charts such as 3-D effects, soft shadowing, and transparency. Create and interact with charts the same way, regardless of the application you are using, because the charting engine in Office Excel 2007 is consistent in Microsoft Office Word 2007 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007.

Enjoy improved and powerful support for working tables.

Create, format, expand, filter, and refer to tables within formulas because Office Excel 2007 has greatly improved support for tables. When you're viewing data contained in a large table, Office Excel 2007 keeps table headings in view while you scroll.

Create and work with interactive PivotTable views with ease.

PivotTable views enable you to quickly reorient your data to help you answer multiple questions. Find the answers you need faster and create and use PivotTable views more easily by dragging fields where you want them to be displayed.

"See" important trends and find exceptions in your data.

Apply conditional formatting to your information to your information more easily to discover patterns and highlight trends in your data. New schemes include color gradients, heat maps, data bars, and performance indicator icons.

Use Office Excel 2007 and Excel Services to help share spreadsheets more securely with others.

Excel Services, a feature of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, dynamically renders a spreadsheet as HTML so others can access the information using a Web browser. Because of the high degree of fidelity with the Office Excel 2007 client, Excel Services users can navigate, sort, filter, input parameters, and interact with the information, all within their Web browser.

Help ensure you and your organization work with the most current business information.

Prevent the spread of multiple or outdated copies of a spreadsheet throughout your organization by using Office Excel 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. Control which users can view and modify spreadsheets on the server using permission-based access.

Reduce the size of spreadsheets and improve damaged file recovery at the same time.

The new, compressed Microsoft Office Excel XML Format offers a dramatic reduction in file size, while its architecture offers an improvement in data recovery for damaged files. This new format provides a tremendous savings to storage and bandwidth requirements, and reduces the burden on IT personnel.

Extend your business intelligence investments because Office Excel 2007 provides full support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services.

Take advantage of the flexibility and the new cube functions in Office Excel 2007 to build a custom report from an OLAP database. You can also connect to external sources of data more easily using the Data Connection Library.

The Top Ten Reasons to Love Word 2007

When Word 2007 was first introduced last fall, there was a collective groan as people worried they would have to learn to use their word processor all over again. But to our surprise, even though there was a learning curve, Word 2007 provided editing and reviewing tools for creating polished documents more easily than ever before.

Here are the top 10 ways Office Word 2007 can help you create professional-looking content faster.

Spend more time writing and less time formatting

The Office Fluent user interface presents the right tools when you need them, making it easy to format your documents quickly. Now you can find the right features in Office Word 2007 to make your documents communicate more effectively. Using Quick Styles and Document Themes, you can quickly change the appearance of text, tables, and graphics throughout the entire document to match your preferred style or color scheme. The new Ribbon, a component of the Office user interface, groups tools by task, and the commands you use most frequently are close at hand.

1. Tabs are designed to be task-oriented
2. Groups within each tab break a task into subtasks
3. Command buttons in each group carry out a command or display a menu of commands

Communicate more effectively with SmartArt diagrams and new charting tools

New SmartArt diagrams and a new charting engine help you create great-looking content with
3-D shapes, transparency, drop shadows, and other effects.

Quickly assemble documents using Building Blocks

Building Blocks in Office Word 2007 can be used to assemble documents from frequently used or predefined content such as disclaimer text, pull quotes, sidebars, cover pages, and other types of content. This will help ensure you don't spend needless time recreating content or copying and pasting between documents; it also helps ensure consistency across all of the documents created within your organization.

Save as PDF or XPS directly from Office Word 2007

Office Word 2007 offers you a choice for sharing documents with other people. You can convert your Word documents to Portable Document Format (PDF) or XML Paper Specification (XPS) format without the addition of third-party tools to help ensure broad communication with users on any platform.

Publish and maintain blogs directly from Office Word 2007

You can now publish blogs directly from Office Word 2007. You can configure Office Word 2007 to link directly to your blog site, and use the rich Word experience to create blogs with images, tables, and advanced text formatting features.

Master your document review processes using Office Word 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

With built-in workflow services in Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can initiate and track document review and approval processes from within Office Word 2007 to help accelerate review cycles across your organization without forcing people to learn new tools.

Connect your documents to business information

Create dynamic Smart Documents that update themselves by connecting to your back-end systems using new document controls and data bindings. By using the new XML integration capability, organizations can deploy intelligent templates to assist people in creating highly structured documents.

Remove tracked changes, comments, and hidden text from your documents

Detect and remove unwanted comments, hidden text, or personally identifiable information using the Document Inspector to help ensure that sensitive information doesn't escape when your documents are published.

Use the tri-pane review panel to compare and combine documents

Office Word 2007 makes it easy to find out what changes were made to a document. A new tri-pane review panel helps you see both versions of a document with deleted, inserted, and moved text clearly marked.

Reduce your file sizes and improve corrupt file recovery

The new Ecma Office Open XML Formats offer a dramatic reduction in file sizes as well as improvements in recovery for damaged files. These new formats provide a tremendous savings to storage and bandwidth requirements, and reduce the burden on IT personnel.

Hate spam?

Click Here.

Do you receive lots of junk email messages from people you don't know? It's no surprise if you do. As more people use email, marketers are increasingly using email messages to pitch their products and services. Some consumers find unsolicited commercial email - also known as "spam" - annoying and time consuming; others have lost money to bogus offers that arrived in their email inbox.

Use a unique email address: Pick an address that is hard for spammers to guess and easy for you to remember. Also, if chatting online, use a unique screen name that is not associated with your email address.

Use multiple email addresses: Consider creating separate addresses or accounts that can be used for online purchases, chat rooms and other public postings. You can also use a free forwarding address.

"Mask" your email address: If you post your email address online, consider masking your address. There are several ways to correctly mask your address and thwart spammers.

Check the privacy policy when you submit your address to a Web site: Always be familiar with a Web site's privacy policy before submitting any information.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is: Fraudsters, scammers, and crooks take advantage of people via unwanted email.

Learn more about "pop up spam": Recently, a new form of spam has developed via the Microsoft Windows operating system feature Messenger Service. It is a stream of "pop up" messages that stop you from using your home computer until you close them.

Use tools to help prevent spam: Consider tools or programs that can filter or tag spam before it fills your email inbox. (www.ftc.gov)