We received a question from a Productivity Hub blog reader who wants to use OneNote as a thumbnail library. While it is possible to resize your images in OneNote , it's not the quickest way to create consistent thumbnail-sized images. Microsoft Word,...

If you're the sort of person who likes to stick notes all over the edges of your monitor, you can save a tree and put the notes right on your screen using Outlook. The Notes feature is available in both Office 2007 and Office 2010. You can find them tucked...

There are plenty of scenarios where you'd want to know the week number within a year. Say you are developing a schedule with a time budget, and you need to know how many hours you can commit per week over the course of a project or fiscal year. Or maybe...

If you author or publish Office documents for customers to download and read, you may not be reaching all of your audience - specifically, those customers who have disabilities and use a reader tool to speak your document. The Office 2010 Accessibility...

If you're not handy with advanced graphics programs but know your way around PowerPoint, there's an easy way to create a background image for your desktop, Twitter page, Web site, or just about any place you might want to decorate with an artistic statement...

If you're like me, you like to color your Excel cells depending on any number of factors: priority (red, yellow, and green), whether a value is up or down (green and red), or just to highlight it to draw your attention to it the next time you open the...

Here's a classic tip you might have missed: With multi-tasking, the lifestyle of choice in cube farms everywhere, most of us keep a virtual pile of programs and documents and shortcuts on our Windows desktops. We know where everything is—sort of. It’s...

If you have an Excel spreadsheet that you want to re-use without all of the data (say, to share with colleagues or use as a generic input form), you'll want to keep all of the formulas and text fields intact but clear the input values. The quickest way...

If you're a power user of PowerPoint, you've no doubt run into some of these scenarios: Collaborating on a slide presentation with one or more colleagues Creating a master deck to generate smaller presentation decks customized for specific audiences Moving...

If you want to quickly archive a group of messages in Outlook to a text file, there's an easy way to do this. Simply select the messages you want (use Shift-Select to collect a range of consecutive messages or Ctrl-Select if you want to hand pick them...

The Productivity Hub 2010 SharePoint Server site collection is available for download and offers a number of new and improved features including a quiz, Get It Done section with training for e-mail management and collaboration, and Coach self-help training...

Have you ever sent a message and asked people to "small r" you (aka "reply just to sender") only to unleash a barrage of public responses to a large work group of recipients? There's a way to prevent this tucked away in every message...

If you use Microsoft Excel to log times, there's a simple technique you can use to quickly calculate the difference between two times. For instance, you might log the start and end times for meetings, or keep track of the entry and exit times for visitors...

Still getting the hang of Office 2010? The Office team has prepared a set of helpful migration guides that call out new features and important changes to help you dive right in and maximize your productivity. Each offers a visual introduction to the...

If you use header rows in your documents, you probably want to see them even when you're down to row 2042. Likewise, if you have critical information in your first column, you still want it in sight no matter how many columns you add. There's a pair...

If you're working on a team PowerPoint presentation, you could just use the built-in comments feature. But coupling PowerPoint with OneNote adds the ability to quickly notate and even draw on slides with your collaborators! The quickest way to do this...

Here's a classic tip you might have missed: Today, let's briefly stand back and stare at Windows 7. Looks like you'll be able to: More quickly and easily access frequently-used items Juggle more tasks (oh, great) with fewer hassles Spend more time doing...

If you work in long documents, you're going to love the new Navigation Pane in Word 2010. This replaces the Document Map in earlier versions of Word and makes it a snap to reorganize, delete, or even just select a section to cut and paste into a mail...

Our friends at the Microsoft Office Blog have developed a novel use for OneNote: Flashcards. As longtime readers know, I simply love OneNote. It's a versatile tool for recording everything from notes to screenshots and even audio . You can even use it...

If you've ever typed a name into an Outlook message and seen the contact you want appear within the first few letters, you've enjoyed the benefits of autocomplete. We've already discussed how to remove outdated e-mail suggestions from Outlook autocomplete...

If you've upgraded to OneNote 2010 but some of your collaborators or potential readers have not, you'll need to convert your shared documents to be compatible with OneNote 2007. This is actually pretty easy to do, though the feature is a little buried...