Geeky Girl : PowerPoint

Better with Office - Slide Libraries

JessMeats — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:17:00 GMT

I’m going to finish off this series of Better with Office posts, but there’s more that could be said. If I’ve peaked your interest, I’d suggest reading the Fair, Good, Better, Best whitepaper which goes into more technical information about the integration between SharePoint and Office products.

In this final post, I’m going to talk about slide libraries. These are a feature provided by MOSS standard that link in with PowerPoint 2007. When creating a new library in SharePoint, slide libraries are one of the templates that come out of the box.

Once you’ve created your slide library, you can start uploading slides. Unlike in other document libraries, where you upload files through SharePoint’s interface, when you go to upload and click publish slides, you get taken to PowerPoint. You pick a presentation as though you were open a file, but then you get a new window displaying all the slides of that presentation. Each slide has a check box beside it. You can pick specific slides or choose select all and then click the publish button. This will take your chosen slides and put them into the slide library. You can start off this process either from inside the slide library or by going to the main menu and choosing publish from inside PowerPoint.

The thing that’s worth noting is that each slide is displayed, rather than a whole file. If someone watched one of my presentations and thought that a particular slide was really useful, they would be able to download just that slide, rather than a whole PowerPoint deck.

To use slides, you just click in the check boxes beside the slide preview and then click the Copy Slide to Presentation Button.

You have the option to either put this slide in a new presentation or to put it in one that’s already open. By default, the slide will take on the formatting of the presentation deck it’s being copied into so you don’t have to worry about changing background and font colours for every slide, but you can override this option if you so wish. The other option that’s worth noting is the ability to be informed with the slide changes. This can be really useful if you’re using a slide that will be updated. For example, you might be using a slide showing sales figures. If you choose this option, you’ll be told when you open your presentation if there is a new version of the sales figures slide, so you can make sure your presentation is up to date.

Slide libraries are a wonderful feature if you’re in an organisation where PowerPoint presentations are common and where people often want to share and reuse slides created by someone else.

Better with Office - Workspaces

JessMeats — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:37:00 GMT

Continuing this series of blog posts, I’m going to talk about document workspaces. The idea behind these is that sometimes a document needs multiple people working together on it. A document workspace is a site in SharePoint that can be used for collaboration. The standard template for this site includes a document library, discussion board, list of users, task list and a few more features to make it easier to work together. The normal method to create a document workspace would be to go through SharePoint’s menus and select create and then choose the appropriate template. But that’s not the only way.

When you’re using an Office program, for Excel Word or Excel, you can go to the main menu, go down to Publish and then choose Create Document Workspace from the options. This will open up a new area to the right of the document (but you can move it) to enter a name for this workspace and select the URL. All you need for this is to know the address of a SharePoint deployment where you have permission to create sites. You may be prompted to save the document, but that’s all it takes to create the site.

The workspace information will be displayed on the right hand side of the document. This contains five tabs: status, members, tasks, documents and links. These items are synchronised between the document and the SharePoint site. Initially, the status will have one item in it and will display the whether or not the document is synchronised with the version on the workspace. This is because you have a local copy of the document open. This status tab will allow you to make sure that the local copy and the version on the server are the same, even when other people are editing it.

The member tab displays information about the people who have been added as users of the SharePoint site. If you have a Microsoft Unified Communications solution, you will see presence icons so you know whether they are available, busy, offline and so on. Initially, this tab will just list yourself. You can click on the “add new members...” link to, unsurprisingly, add new members. This opens up a little window that you use to type in usernames or email addresses. You then choose what level of permissions to give to those users. Do you want them to be able to edit content or just view it or to have control over the site?

The task list allows you to assign work to the various members of the site. You can create new tasks, set alerts and see what workflow tasks are ongoing. Clicking the “alert me” link will open up the appropriate SharePoint page to enter choices about the type of changes you want to be alerted to. The adding tasks and viewing workflow tasks options both open up new windows within the Office program to complete the actions.

The documents tab shows all the documents that are stored in the SharePoint document library and gives you the ability to organise them, add new documents and set alerts. You can’t create new documents from here, but you can upload existing files to the workspace by clicking on the add option. For the documents in the library, you can view status, open files, delete the file and set alerts.

The final tab is links. This simply allows you to view the links that are stored in the site’s links list and add some new ones from within Office.

So you get access to all these SharePoint collaboration features from inside Office. You can create a site, add users, add documents, work together, share tasks and more, without ever opening up SharePoint. This means that people who are already familiar with Office get to work in an environment they know, but still get the benefits of the rich features SharePoint can offer.

Better with Office - Metadata

JessMeats — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:59:00 GMT

What is metadata? The simple definition is that it’s data about data. In the case of SharePoint, it’s information about files and documents stored within SharePoint. There are some bits of metadata that are included as standard, such as who created a document, who last edited it, where in SharePoint it is and so on. You can add your own metadata as appropriate. If you want to have documents labelled as whether they’re confidential or not, or attach a next review date to official documentation, you can do so.

If you’re running MOSS 2007 standard or enterprise, you can set policies and rules across the whole of the SharePoint deployment. One example of this I’ve seen was a situation where the company wanted to label some documents as being key documents. So every document in SharePoint had this piece of metadata associated with it, which was a yes/no option stating whether or not that particular document was key. Those that were key were then displayed to the users through a portal page. What’s more common would be to create document types and to associate certain pieces of metadata to those types.

Metadata can also be applied at a document library level. This is true for WSS 3.0 and both levels of MOSS 2007. In a document library you’ve created, you can add a column by clicking on Settings -> Create Column. Then you will be given options to set about the data that should go into this column. These options are things like whether it’s a line of text or a number or a choice from a list. You also get the option of setting a default value, calculating the value from other values or setting the column as required. Once you’ve clicked OK, you’ve associated a new piece of metadata to this library. All documents created here or added to the library will now have this bit of information stored about them.

But what’s this got to do with Office?

Well, when you open up a file from this library in an Office 2007 program, you will see a Document Properties section in which to enter this information. This gives the user space to enter metadata, shows metadata already associated and shows which fields are required. This means users can enter information that’s used by SharePoint, without ever needing to go to SharePoint.

If you’ve set some metadata fields as required and the user tries to save the document without them, they will see an error message. This informs them what has happened, takes them to the Document Properties panel and highlights the problems. If data has been entered that’s incorrect (for example, text in a number field) this will shown by a red dashed line around the field. A red asterisk will show required fields that have been missed. The error message explains this formatting to the user so they will be able to see what has gone wrong.

Users can save documents straight to SharePoint document libraries from within Office. This all means that users can be making use of the document management features of SharePoint without actually opening up a SharePoint page to put information in. This makes the process of document management incredibly smooth and efficient, while allowing users to work in an environment they’re familiar with. It can cut down training costs immensely if employees are already used to Microsoft Office.

Better with Office - introduction

JessMeats — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:58:00 GMT

SharePoint is part of the Microsoft product stack. This doesn’t mean that it’s just another item on a Microsoft price list. What it means is that it’s designed to work with the other products Microsoft produces. In other posts, I’ve talked about using InfoPath and SharePoint together, but that’s not where it ends. There’s a lot of integration between SharePoint and Outlook, particularly synchronising lists, forums and document libraries so that you can view things offline, see changes or submit new items via email. There are case studies that show SharePoint working alongside Project or the Dynamics products to deliver valuable solutions. There’s a SQL reporting add-in. There’s a connector to BizTalk Server. The integration with Office Communication Server leads to great Unified Communication solutions.

SharePoint has been designed and tested alongside these various products and gives a great integration story.

What I’m going to focus on though is how SharePoint works with Office 2007. SharePoint can be used as a document management solution for all kinds of files, regardless of the program they’re created in. SharePoint’s document management capabilities can be applied to any files, whether they’re InfoPath forms, PDF files, OpenOffice documents, videos or whatever your company happens to deal in. But when you’re using Microsoft Office 2007, those capabilities come out of SharePoint and are presented to your users through the Office client.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to go into some of the features of SharePoint which can be presented to end users through the various Office programs. I’m going to talk about metadata, versioning, workflows, document workspaces, data connection libraries and slide libraries.

It's not piracy - it's the Ultimate Steal

JessMeats — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:54:00 GMT

If you're a UK higher education student or staff member, you can get Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for the ridiculously cheap price of £38.95 - if you buy before 30th June 2009.

Just go to The Ultimate Steal, register with your academic email address and buy online.