Business Hacks

The Word 2007 ribbon: You either love it or hate it. There’s apparently no middle ground. But even if you like the way the ribbon exposes Word features that were previously very hard to find, the fact remains that it’s sometimes frustratingly difficult to track down something that you used to know exactly how to find in Word 2003. Well, fret no more. You can now have the best of both worlds.

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Getting feedback is important, which is why we often share Word documents with co-workers. Unfortunately, it’s rarely smooth sailing. Half the time, people edit your document directly without using revision marks, and even if they do, it doesn’t matter anyway, because you end up getting four different copies of the doc, each revised by different people. Making sense of it all and properly incorporating feedback into your original version can be a pain.

All those annoying days of meticulously comparing various versions of your documents are gone. I’ve got the bead on a free online service that makes comparing and reconciling your copies of Word documents as easy as pie.

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Putting the finishing touches on a long Word document? Make sure you include a table of contents. A TOC makes it easy for your readers to skip right to the part that interests them, and it’s easy to do, too — once you figure out Word’s not-exactly-obvious way of doing it.

Check out this exclusive Business Hacks video tutorial. In less than two minutes, I’ll teach you everything you need to know to create and update a table of contents in your own Word documents.

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It’s not as awesome as the war stories your Uncle Ben used to tell, but here goes anyway. “There I was, working late and trying to get out of the office before the sushi place closed. I was ready to shut down my PC, but I had like 25 windows open — Outlook, all sorts of browsers, a couple of Word and Excel windows, some folders… even Windows Media Player. I wanted to close them all in a hurry. My odds looked slim.”

Thankfully, I was able to close all those windows and programs with a single click.

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While in Paris 10 years ago, I had to randomly choose items off the menu because my traveling companions — which included fellow Biz Hacker Rick — sadistically refused to translate anything for me. If I’d only had my iPhone back then, it would not have been a problem.

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As a general rule, mail servers don’t like large file attachments. While some can accommodate files as large as 20MB, others balk if they exceed just 5MB. In these days of mammoth videos, photo libraries, PDFs, and the like, that just doesn’t cut it.

Thankfully, one of our favorite file-sharing services, drop.io, just announced an Outlook plug-in that lets you send attachments as large as 100MB — without ever leaving the program. Take a look:

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Remember the good old days when affordable desktop-publishing apps were plentiful? For the most part they’ve gone the way of the dodo (D’oh!), leaving small businesses few options for designing newsletters, brochures, business cards, and the like.

Indeed, you might think your only recourse is pricey old-guard heavyweights Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress, which sell for $500 and $700, respectively. Thankfully, there’s an extremely budget-friendly alternative: Serif PagePlus X4.

Smashing the you-get-what-you-pay-for rule, PagePlus offers pro-level desktop publishing tools but sells for just $99.99. If you head to Buy.com, you can get PagePlus X4 for just $41.99. And if you don’t mind mail-in rebates [PDF], your final price drops to $16.99.

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You know how Excel remembers exactly where you left your cursor when you re-open a spreadsheet? You know how Word doesn’t? A couple of weeks ago, I was amazed to learn that Word really does bookmark your last cursor position, and simply pressing Shift+F5 takes you there. Unfortunately, it only works on .doc files, not the newer .docx.

Then reader drew.lindsay clued me in to a simple change you can make to Word so it always opens your documents — both .doc and .docx — to the last saved cursor position. Even better: There’s no need to press any shortcut keys. It works automatically, just like Excel.

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If the recent loss of Sidekick users’ cloud-stored data has you worrying about the safety of your cloud-stored Google Docs documents, fear not: You can synchronize your Google Docs data with your PC for offline access (and local backup).

Of course, that solution requires Google Gears, a wonky, unsupported browser tool.

If you’d rather just dump all your Google Docs documents to a Zip file for archiving on your PC, now you can.

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Looking for a way to keep the codes to nuclear weapons or the secret ingredients to Coke safe and secure? You could encrypt the files, but they’d still be visible, and therefore potentially vulnerable. If the files were invisible, though — absolutely invisible from any search of the PC — then your locked files would be safe. After all, you can’t steal what you can’t see.

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