Office 2008 for Mac All-in-One For Dummies

Introduction

Welcome to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac All-in-One For Dummies. We set out to make this book specifically for Mac users who for one reason or another spend a fair amount of time working in Office. Long-time Mac aficionados, recent switchers, and newbies will find valuable tips, advice, and how-to instruction throughout.

Office 2008 has more features than ever before. The only problem is you might not know where to find them! Plenty of workarounds and shortcuts exist, and this book explains everything in the language you converse in each day: plain English.

With this book, you can broaden your own expertise with Office. As you discover new aspects of Office products, you’ll create better documents and you can accomplish more tasks in less time.

We also offer simple, straightforward explanations to help you quickly understand in-depth topics, such as performing mail merge using Word and exporting a PowerPoint presentation as a movie, without feeling overwhelmed. We want Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac All-in-One For Dummies to be an enjoyable experience, and we hope you grow your knowledge in a friendly, helpful way.

About This Book

We start with all the basic information that you’d expect, such as a look at the interface and options. We then go beyond the basics, providing you with new, quicker ways to do what you do all the time and helping you discover valuable tools that you may have been unaware of.

This book is organized as a series of self-contained minibooks, with each one focusing on a particular application or component in Office 2008. You’ll discover that the tricks you use in one application can be used in other Office applications as well. In addition, the valuable Cheat Sheet can be downloaded from the Web site (www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/office2008formacaio) and printed out to be used as a portable reference for shortcuts and common tasks.

We realize that some might have worked in one of the various versions of Microsoft Office for Windows. Throughout this book, we endeavor to highlight Office features that are available only on the Mac. We don’t do that to make Windows users go green with envy; our reasons are infinitely nobler. In fact, we highlight these differences for several reasons:

♦ Mac owners might not be aware that Office 2008 for Mac isn’t identical to the Windows version. Since the earliest versions of Office, Microsoft introduced many new features on the Mac long before the features were brought to the Windows version. As hardware and operating systems have improved, Microsoft has updated the Mac version of Office to incorporate new functionality, speed, file sharing, document delivery, and file formats. Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit (or MacBU) is proud of this fact and strives to continue to bring new features to its Macintosh customers.

♦ Mac users need to be aware that if they use Office for Windows, some features used every day simply aren’t on the Windows platform. The topics in this book with Mac Only indicators have no equivalents in Windows Office.

♦ We provide help for the many people who have recently switched from Windows to Mac OS X. Such users may find comfort in the fact that most of the options in Microsoft Office applications, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, work in the same way on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms. However, the Mac operating system has features not found in Windows. MacBU often incorporates Mac OS X–specific features wherever they make sense in Office for Mac. Many times such features have no equivalent on the Windows version of Microsoft Office.

♦ All the content in this book is very important for users who work on both Windows and Macintosh versions of Office. Nowadays, a lot of businesses use both Macintosh and Windows computers. Maybe you use a Windows computer at work and a Macintosh at home. Or maybe you have a Macintosh that dual boots to Windows. Indeed, we’ve often worked in situations stranger than this! The world is changing so fast — who knows what will happen next? But for now and the near future, this book has you covered!

The success of Office for Mac is due to Microsoft’s continuous process of innovation. As hardware and operating systems improve, Microsoft updates the Mac version of Office to incorporate new functionality, speed, file sharing, document delivery, and file formats. Competition keeps MacBU on its toes. Apple has iWork, Google has Google Apps, and Sun has OpenOffice. With such strong competition from several other products in word processors, Microsoft has continued to innovate and provide a product that Mac users want to use over competing products. That in itself is no average achievement.

How to Use This Book

This book has basic and in-depth information organized by major applications in Microsoft Office. Turn to the Table of Contents or the index to get right to the information on a specific topic. However, that doesn’t mean that we discourage you from reading cover to cover; you just don’t have to!

Throughout this book, you see step-by-step instructions, which are based on Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard. If you’re using 10.4 Tiger (or 10.6 Snow Leopard), some of our steps that involve using Mac OS X Finder may not match your screen. But don’t worry; these changes are small, and you shouldn’t have any problems following any of these steps.

How This Book Is Organized

Each of the six minibooks in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac All-in-One For Dummies stands alone. We start with a general introduction to Office 2008 and then move on to the big applications you’ll use the most. The following sections provide an overview of each minibook.

Book I: Introducing Office 2008

Many tools and features are common to all or more than one of the Office applications. For example, pictures, charts, and diagrams work in exactly the same way across the applications. Rather than repeat these common features for each application, we save you time, pages, and book weight by covering these in depth in the first part of the book.

Book II: Word 2008

In this minibook, we show you how you can use Word’s amazing capabilities to do everything from writing letters to printing envelopes. On the way, you’ll discover how to mail merge hundreds of documents and format your fonts. We also show you how you create newsletters in Word and make notes of your meetings, including audio notes! Have fun.

Book III: Excel 2008

The Excel minibook is chock-a-block full of interesting stuff you can do with this program. We cover all the basics and then show you how to do some advanced stuff with easy step-by-step instructions. We also show you how to go on a journey of cell hopping, and look at data validation, lists, forms, and charts. Truly mesmerizing, numeric stuff!

Book IV: PowerPoint 2008

Okay, this is the minibook that lets you enjoy yourself and work at the same time, and then get paid for it, too! Figure out how you can use PowerPoint basics to create structured presentations and then add the pizzazz with the umpteen new options that Microsoft bestowed upon this latest version of PowerPoint.

Book V: Entourage 2008

So do you e-mail? And do you need a place to store your contacts and organize your calendar? Then you need Entourage, and this minibook covers more ground on this program than you’ll find anywhere else. Determine how you can set up your e-mail accounts; invite others to events you organize; and use the cool, new My Day feature.

Book VI: Entourage’s Project Center

Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone manage your projects and all the paraphernalia associated with those projects? Entourage’s Project Center is even better than that, and this minibook shows you how you can create, implement, and share projects. You also read about how you can integrate these projects with other programs on your Mac including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Bonus Chapters

Don’t forget to check out the book’s Web site at www.dummies.com/go/office2008formacaiofd for two bonus chapters. Bonus Chapter 1 looks ahead to the next version of Office for Mac while Bonus Chapter 2 covers new features in Service Pack 2, such as Document Connection and PowerPoint path animations.

Conventions Used in This Book

For Dummies books are accessible and easy to read, but sometimes you have to type commands and click menu items. To keep these actions as simple as possible, we have some conventions to indicate what needs to be done or what you might see onscreen.

Stuff you type

We use bold to tell you what to type. For example, if we say, "Type 22 and then press the Return key on your keyboard," type the number 22 and then immediately press the Return key. (Remember, you must always press the Return key to process the command or enter text.)

Menu commands

When we give you a specific set of menu commands to use, it appears like this: Choose File⇒Send To⇒Microsoft Word. In this example, click the File menu, choose the Send To item, and then choose the Microsoft Word option in the submenu.

Key combinations

With keyboard commands, press two or more keys in sequence, hold down each key until all the keys in the sequence have been pressed, and then you release all the keys. We use the hyphen sign (–) to chain together these combinations. Press Shift-Ô-3 means to hold down the Shift key, then the Ô key, and then the number 3 key. (Incidentally, if you do that, a picture of your current screen will be saved to your computer’s Desktop.)

Note: On a Mac, the Ô key and the Ú key are the exact same key on your keyboard. Your keyboard may have either of these symbols or both on this key, which is usually located next to the spacebar. We use the newer Ô symbol throughout this book.

Right-click versus Control-click

Applications for the Mac use context-sensitive pop-up menus extensively. To see a context-sensitive menu, hold down the Control key and click something. And yes, for those wondering, right-clicking and Control-clicking do exactly the same thing.

Display messages

Whenever we mention a message or any text that you see onscreen, it appears like this: This message is displayed by an Office application.

Icons Used in This Book

The icons in this book are important visual cues for information you might not want to miss.

Tip.eps This icon indicates special timesaving advice and other items of note.

warning_bomb.eps This icon alerts you to pay close attention because every once in a while we might discuss a topic that could cause problems.

Remember.eps Of course, we expect you to remember everything you read in this book. You’ll have to take part in a written exam that’s held twice a year in 265 cities across the world, and we read every single paper you write. Just kidding! We use this icon to point out important info for you to keep in mind.

technicalstuff.eps We know. Sometimes things can get pretty complicated. We use this icon when we’ve taken extra care to simplify something we think most users might find daunting. Just keep in mind that this information is optional and isn’t critical to your understanding of the topic. We still provide all the necessary how-to coverage for the application features you need to know about.

maconly.eps Microsoft doesn’t keep the Windows and Macintosh versions of Office in lock step with each other. Several excellent features of Office are available only in the Macintosh version. If you’re new to the Mac and are already familiar with the Windows version of Office, look for this icon to help you identify features that may be new to you.

newin2008.eps Like every new release of Office, Office 2008 has introduced several amazing features that make working with the Office programs easier and more intuitive. This icon highlights these new features in Office 2008.

Where to Go from Here

Start reading this book in any minibook, chapter, or even section. You can dive in anywhere to get the info you need. When appropriate, we add cross-references to other parts of the book for more information.

The first place to find information (aside from this wonderful book) is to look in Office Help, which is completely new. Throughout the book, we also mention additional resources for help. Many of the resources are Web pages created and maintained by Microsoft MVPs, Most Valuable Professionals. The MVP program was established by Microsoft to highlight a worldwide network of exceptional technical community leaders, according to the Microsoft MVP Web site at http://mvp.support.microsoft.com.

We’ve received MVP awards for many years, including 2009. We encourage you to participate in online communities and user groups. People who regularly contribute high-quality information to the technical community may eventually become candidates to receive MVP distinction.

When you come across MVP-supplied content on the Web, be assured that it’s reliable. MVPs are volunteers. MVPs don’t receive compensation from Microsoft and are independent from Microsoft Corporation.

Book I

Introducing Office 2008

Contents at a Glance

Chapter 1: Oscillating in the Office 2008 World

Getting Familiar with Office 2008

What’s New Office-Wide for 2008?

Comparing Office 2008 for Mac with Office for Windows

Chapter 2: Project Gallery — The Natural Starting Point

Launching Project Gallery

Opening Blank Documents from Project Gallery

Exploring More Project Gallery Categories

Finding the Fab Four (Wizards, That Is)

Viewing What’s in the Galleries

Finding Your Things in Project Gallery

Prospecting the Project Center Tab

Customizing Project Gallery

Chapter 3: Menus and Toolbars

Cruising Elements Gallery

Summoning Pop-Up Menus

Traversing the Menus and Toolbars

Customizing Entourage and Project Center Toolbars

Chapter 4: Busting Out Your Toolbox

Taking a Look Inside the Toolbox

No Objections to the Object Palette

Scrapbook: The Clipboard Evolves

Getting Serious with Reference Tools

Making Compatibility Checking a Snap

Peeking at Your Projects in the Project Palette

Chapter 5: Graphing, Drawing, and Making Art

Getting the Nitty-Gritty on Graphs and Charts

Making an Organization Chart with SmartArt Graphics

Creating Your Own Shapes

Making an Impression with WordArt

Working in Layers

Chapter 6: Common Tools That Make Your Life Easier

Proofing Your Spelling and Grammar

Understanding Themes and Templates

Saving Everything as a Template

Sharing Files in Other Formats

Getting Mathematical with Equation Editor

Programming and Automation Options

Chapter 7: Getting Help!

Helping You with New Help

Utilizing Newsgroups and Community Resources

Checking for Updates

Getting Help from Office Web Sites

Making the Most of MVP Sites

Join the Club!

Getting Help for Legal and Medical Professionals

Chapter 1: Oscillating in the Office 2008 World

In This Chapter

Meeting the suite

Exploring individual applications

Discovering new features in Office 2008

Comparing Office for Mac with Windows Office

Dealing with Office automation

Running Office 2004 and Office 2008 together

Like most people, you might already be exposed to Microsoft Office in some way, or perhaps you just got started with this suite of business programs from Microsoft. Either way, be prepared to go on a journey of discovery through this book as we show you how you can work better with Office 2008 for Mac.

You might already know that Microsoft Office can do umpteen things, but maybe you don’t know where to find those umpteen things! That’s where the good news starts for Microsoft Office 2008 users. The new Project Gallery, which we explain in Chapter 2 of this minibook, makes Office far less intimidating by showing you at a glance all the things you can do.

You might have heard about the changes to Office file formats; we show you how easy it is to work with old and new formats. Getting along with users of other Office versions on Mac and Windows is very easy with Office 2008. Although we still can’t say that Office for Mac has every feature available in Office for Windows, you won’t want to live without some of the compelling Mac-only Office features.

Fascinatingly, the latest Mac version of Microsoft Office retains Office 2004’s familiar menus and interface. For example, although the Windows version exposes not-so-conspicuous Office 2007 features to Windows users via the new Ribbon interface, Office for Mac solved the same problem years ago by introducing floating context-sensitive palettes.

Office 2008 has many galleries and introduces the new Elements Gallery, borrowing some of the better aspects of the Windows Office 2007 Ribbon. We cover Elements Gallery in Chapter 3 of this minibook.

Whether you’ve used Office 2004 for Mac or you’re brand new to Office 2008 for Mac, we address all information in an easy-to-grasp manner so that you can understand it. To make sure that we’re all on the same level as far as terminology and concepts go, we start this chapter with an overview of each of the Office applications. Office 2008 has exciting new interface improvements, new file formats, and some completely new features to discover and get acquainted with. You’ll find that Office 2008 brings most of the suite into the future with its emphasis on helping you get organized, manage your documents, create and manage projects, and collaborate by using the very latest Web technologies. This is going to be so much fun!

Getting Familiar with Office 2008

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a central place where you could find all your favorite wizards, templates, and recently used files as well as oversee the projects you’re working on? Wouldn’t you like to see more than just a handful of recently used files? How about if the same place had an incredible search capability that took advantage of Mac OS X’s Spotlight search?

You can stop dreaming because Office 2008 indeed has just such a place — Project Gallery, which is a fantastic way to get started whenever you open an Office application, oversee your projects, or find documents.

Getting started in Project Gallery

maconly.eps Lots of things are important to everyone. Here’s a quick list of some of common goals:

♦ Saving time by creating just the right document the first time you do it.

♦ Making your work have a consistent look and feel so that you feel good.

♦ Having confidence in managing your affairs.

♦ Feeling that you can confidently find the documents you need quickly.

♦ Finding a way to stop working and start making billions.

Office 2008 makes it easy to achieve everything in that list — except maybe the last part about making billions! Project Gallery is a one-stop shop that allows you to open new or existing documents, projects, and documents within a project as well as effectively search for a document even if you can’t remember much about it.

Choose File⇒Project Gallery to open the Project Gallery window. Figure 1-1 shows what Project Gallery looks like.

Figure 1-1: Project Gallery in Microsoft Office 2008.

The Project Gallery interface has four tabs: New, Recent, Project Center, and Settings. We first look at the New tab.

The New tab

Many moons ago you’d choose File⇒New in an Office application to start a new document or a spreadsheet. A simple folder structure would display a plain blank document option that you could click to start working on a new Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or PowerPoint presentation. In addition, you’d see folder tabs containing templates and wizards. This same simple folder concept is on steroids with Project Gallery. Office 2008 enhances this concept by enabling you to see all the Office wizards, templates, recently used files, and projects in a single, integrated, well-designed interface.

Want to start a fresh document from scratch? Click the New tab to display a list of all the templates and wizards available to you (refer to Figure 1-1). You can access your own templates or your organization’s templates right here, too!

technicalstuff.eps As you work through this book, you might wonder why some of the figures in this book don’t look exactly the same as what you see in your copy of Office for Mac. That’s okay. Some interfaces can look different, especially if you have a custom installation of Office that didn’t use the default installation options. Don’t worry. This book still covers all the features you’ll need to know about.

newin2008.eps New in Office 2008, Project Gallery allows you to start a blank document based on a style or a theme. As you’d expect, you can use the new styles and themes provided with Office 2008, or you can use your own saved themes and styles. And if you don’t know much about themes and styles, no problem — we cover how to apply themes and styles in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and even explain how to create your own custom themes and styles throughout this book.

The Recent tab

Looking for a recently used file? Click the Recent tab, as shown in Figure 1-2. A list of recently opened documents appears. You can set the number of recently used files to be displayed to 100 if you want, though that’s probably not the most efficient use of the feature. You can also filter documents by application. Office 2008 includes an amazing new search feature based on Spotlight, the Mac built-in search technology. Many of the Recent tab options, such as the number of recently opened documents, have to be selected in the Settings tab of Project Gallery. More on that shortly.

The Project Center tab

Click the Project Center tab of Project Gallery to instantly access documents associated with projects created with Project Center (see Figure 1-3). Project Center documents can be any kind of document, not just Office documents. Pictures, e-mail, PDFs, movies, MP3s, PowerPoint presentations, you name it! They’re all fair game for Project Center.

In Figure 1-3, you see an empty Project Center tab. Don’t panic if your Project Center looks like this. An empty Project Center tab merely means that you haven’t created any new projects in it!

Figure 1-2: The Recent tab.

Figure 1-3: The Project Center tab.

The Settings tab

The final tab of Project Gallery is the Settings tab, and true to its name, this tab is the place to control various settings for the other three tabs in Project Gallery. Heck, this tab also lets you decide whether you want Project Gallery to open when you launch any Microsoft Office application. Figure 1-4 shows the Settings tab in all its glory.

Figure 1-4: The Settings tab.

Helping Word veterans make the transition

Great software is like a fine wine. Software comes in vintages (or versions), some of which are appreciated by computer users the way wine is appreciated by connoisseurs. When an experienced user uncorks Word 2008, the bouquet has new elements and familiar scents. Here are some of the new improvements:

♦ Themes: Word’s old themes were getting stale. But new themes and the ability to use those themes in Excel and PowerPoint are definite improvements in Word 2008.

♦ Styles: You can use Word styles throughout the Microsoft Office suite.

♦ Elements Gallery: The new Elements Gallery enhances your ability to apply designs, add elements, and apply formatting styles.

♦ Draw: A new drawing engine that encompasses new graphs, organization charts, WordArt, and drawing tools for enhanced appearance. Also adds the new SmartArt graphics to show logical relationships.

♦ AppleScript: The sweetest AppleScript automation ever. AppleScript dictionary updates are included as well as completely new support for Automator Actions so that you can automate common workflows.

♦ Mail Merge Manager: We think the 2008 version of Mail Merge Manager is the best ever, Mac or PC, because you can control everything from a single palette and merging to e-mail works so well.

♦ XML file format: This is a new default file format that’s based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which is based on the file format that was introduced with Office 2007 for Windows. The default file format for Office 2007 (Windows) and Office 2008 (Mac) is identical. The XML format is new compared to Office 2003 (Windows) and Mac (2004).

Did Microsoft achieve its goal of creating a better version of Word in Word 2008? Depending on how you use Word, the answer veers between perhaps and certainly. Word 2008 is certainly an excellent version despite not having VBA.

Exploring all that Microsoft Word has to offer can be satisfying. We help you discover the nice, new nuances of tables, styles, graphs, charts, and sharing on the Web.

Looking for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

Alas, an ingredient is missing from Microsoft Office 2008 that some can’t do without: Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). VBA is a programming language that’s been built into Microsoft Office for both Mac and Windows since the last few versions, and it lets geeks program and integrate Microsoft Office applications in amazing ways, such as in automating everyday tasks. Unfortunately, VBA was left out when Microsoft Office 2008 was being created. As we write this book, Microsoft is busy adding it in so that the next version of Office for Mac will have this complex enhancement restored. For those who must have VBA, Office 2004 will have to do until the next version of Office.

De-mystifying Excel

If Word is like a fine wine, Microsoft Excel is like having a super bright, quiet, know-it all kid around. Excel sits waiting quietly for someone to ask it to do something, but far too often people are afraid to give it a task. That’s because lots of users just find Excel too scary with all its neatly arranged cells and numbers!

Excel 2008 banishes the scary stuff by making huge improvements in the interface.

You don’t have to be an accountant or an engineer to use Excel 2008. Excel 2008 doesn’t act like a brat, either. Book III is all about Excel; there you’ll figure out how to make good use of easy-to-use features, such as the List Wizard, budget and finance tools, and even travel tools.

Even experienced Excel users tend to get comfortable with one or two Excel features and then hesitate to explore additional uses. That’s a shame because Excel can do a lot with just a small amount of effort.

Among the top reasons for people to use Excel is to manage lists. Excel 2008 makes it easy to arrange data into rows and columns. Using mailing lists as data sources for Word mail merge is easy. Excel is great because it’s simple to sort data alphabetically and numerically. You can instantly sort a list of thousands alphabetically or by postal code. Excel doesn’t care if your list is just a few rows, a thousand, or even a million rows; Excel’s just happy to crunch those numbers and to arrange the alphabet for you.

Having an easy tool to use is always a good thing, and Excel 2008 offers a lot of new and improved features, as well as old favorites:

♦ List Manager: In Excel, List Manager helps you create, organize, maintain, and update your lists. With a few mouse clicks, you can use List Manager to help you locate records, count the number of entries, and even do fancy mathematics on data within your lists. If you want to use List Manager straightaway, navigate to Book III.

♦ Themes and styles: Whatever your area of work, organizing data in lists is important, as is how polished your data looks when it’s presented. Both onscreen and when printed, Excel is a champ at presenting data in useful ways. Excel 2008 has support for new office-wide themes and styles (except for font styles) much like Word 2008 and PowerPoint 2008 so that you can easily create great looking reports.

♦ Ledger sheets: Keeping track of business activities is easier now with brand-new Mac-only ledger sheet Excel worksheets. We explore this new feature along with all the other features we discuss here in Book III, Chapter 1.

♦ Graphical reports: Now for some more Excel-lent stuff related to all the data present in your Excel spreadsheets. You don’t have to wonder how to make a good impression with your data. Data analysis is something Excel is famous for. Macs are noted for ease of use and the best graphics around. Put that together in Excel 2008, and you’re making the best year-end reports ever. Even if the economy tanks, at least your data will look great and uplifting. Hopefully, you’ll use Excel to make better forecasts than your competition and smoothly sail your company out of a recession.

♦ Graphs and charts: Beautiful expository graphs can be created in Excel 2008. These can be used in other applications and shared in many ways. Researchers and students find that Excel 2008 can help them prepare lab reports and display tables and graphs in ways that make complex concepts easy to visualize and understand. You can draw fig-ures and flow charts with new Excel 2008 drawing tools. Enhance your reports with pictures and illustrations. You can even include a movie to illustrate a point. Excel 2008 has the ability to import data from many sources, including other computers, the Internet, networks, and co-workers.

♦ Forms: The Excel forms go beyond anything that can be created in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat. Sure, you can make nice looking forms in the other applications, but only Excel can perform logical operations and calculations, enforce business rules, and carry out complex calculations within a form.

♦ Database features: Excel has always had extraordinary, though often ignored, database features, and sometimes their very existences are underplayed for reasons not known to us. If you need fewer than a few hundred thousand or so records in a table, Excel may be all you need. We go into depth in all things Excel in Book III to show you how to take advantage of Excel 2008’s surprisingly complete database capabilities.

♦ Document sharing: The documents you create in Excel often need to be shared. Excel 2008 has a couple tricks up its sleeve in the sharing department, too, such as the ability to do live sharing of a workbook on a network. You can save an Excel workbook as a Web page that even has working sheet tabs. Sometimes you need to share only part of a workbook. We show you simple ways to save a graph or any other part of a workbook as a picture. You can send an Excel workbook directly from Office via e-mail, Microsoft Messenger, or one of the brand new Microsoft file-sharing services.

Whether you need a simple database or a state-of-the-art spreadsheet program, Excel is competent for the task. This book is the one place you’re likely to find everything you need to take advantage of these tools that Excel provides.

Slide shows with PowerPoint

Of all the Office 2008 applications, PowerPoint is probably the most fun to use. PowerPoint 2008 comes with lots of interesting templates, and thousands more are available. And you can also create some of your own. All you have to do is open a template; mix in your words, pictures, movies, and graphs; and you’re well on your way. Because PowerPoint takes care of the look and feel, you can productively use the time saved to create a compelling message and story for your presentation. If you have a multimedia message to present, PowerPoint 2008 helps you deliver that, too.

Remember.eps When you need to put something together in a hurry, built-in content and design templates are at your fingertips. You can build new presentations based on old ones very quickly. But don’t forget that no PowerPoint template will ever take care of the hard part for you: You still have to refine your presentation message all by yourself.

What’s great about PowerPoint is that most people can make truly professional presentations with very little effort thanks to many new and improved features:

♦ Presenter tools: Improvements in this area give presenters current time information to help them stay on track.

♦ Toolbox: The new Toolbox combines the Formatting Palette, Scrapbook, Reference Tools, ClipArt, and more into a single palette that saves screen real estate. Having everything in one place also lets presenters and presentation creators be more efficient while creating better looking presentations.

♦ Elements Gallery: Formatting your presentations has never been easier. With the new Elements Gallery, you can apply slide themes, slide layouts, transitions, new table styles, charts, new SmartArt graphics, and WordArt. You can even add your own elements to this Gallery.

♦ Multiple masters and layouts: New in PowerPoint 2008, you now have the power of design control. You can use and create multiple slide masters as well as control over multiple slide layouts.

♦ iPhoto integration: PowerPoint has new ways to interact with your iPhoto albums. You can send slide shows directly to iPhoto, and with our help, you can bring iPhoto albums into PowerPoint.

♦ Working with Web 2.0: We guide you through the process of getting YouTube videos into PowerPoint and offer pointers on how to get your PowerPoint presentations into YouTube.

♦ Special effects: The special effects you can apply to pictures are all new in PowerPoint 2008.

♦ Drawings, shapes, SmartArt, WordArt, charts, and graphs: The inner workings of PowerPoint that make all these things were completely re-done for 2008. You’ll notice niceties, such as the new reflection feature, because of this improvement.

♦ Document themes and styles: There’s a whole new way to work with document themes and styles, and special places to save them.

♦ New gradient fill formatting: Now you can add multiple colors to gradient fills to add interest to filled shapes.

Flip to Chapter 3 of this minibook to read about the common core of Office features before moving on to Book IV, which is devoted to features exclusive to PowerPoint.

Also, PowerPoint offers a speaker confidence by being a tool to organize your thoughts and to express them electronically in a beautiful and/or business-like way. You can easily rehearse your presentation with PowerPoint using the Rehearse Timings feature.

Beyond business presentations, PowerPoint slide shows are also a great way to share photographs with family and friends. You can add your own personal touch by narrating the slide show. You can e-mail smaller presentations right from within PowerPoint. Larger slide shows can be saved on inexpensive CDs and sent via regular mail, or uploaded to file-sharing sites.

If you’re a teacher or a student, you probably have found PowerPoint to be an indispensable tool. No longer do students have to put up with ancient chalk technology that’s hard to see. Projectors have become inexpensive enough that most schools can afford to install them and display PowerPoint presentations on them.

Today, PowerPoint can help even more. You can easily share your PowerPoint presentations with individuals, specific groups, or the entire world. With Web 2.0 technologies, such as iChat, Microsoft Messenger, YouTube, Yahoo!, Microsoft Office Live, Facebook, and MySpace, presentations can be distributed to audiences inexpensively.

You may not have thought of some of the ways to use PowerPoint. If you’re looking for a tool that creates flash cards for your computer, use PowerPoint. Not only that; PowerPoint can make flash cards for cellphones and iPods. We explain the basics of how you can do this in the PowerPoint chapters that you find in Book IV.

Making your day with Entourage

The first time you encountered the PIM acronym, you might have said, What’s a PIM? PIM is one of the few acronyms that sounds good when pronounced. PIM stands for Personal Information Manager, which is a great description of Microsoft Entourage.

Entourage is probably the best application to manage, store, archive, and search e-mail on the Mac. Organizing mail into categories is an efficient way to save time because using categories helps you set priorities.

Tip.eps For those switching to Office 2008 from a Windows Office version, think of Microsoft Entourage as Microsoft Outlook. Integration with Microsoft Exchange is included in all bundled packages of Microsoft Office 2008 except the Home and Student edition, just like the Windows product lineup.

If you’ve been using Apple applications, think of Entourage as a super-charged combination of Apple Mail, Address Book, and iCal. And throw in a project management system and clipping organizer. And of course, better integration with Microsoft Office applications.

Even users of open source find Entourage hard to resist. Imagine having Thunderbird, Sunbird, a contact manager, a project manager, an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) client, a security certificate manager, and more all rolled into one. That’s the power of Entourage 2008. Among the new and improved features are the following:

♦ Rules: PowerPoint isn’t the only application that lets you have fun. Believe it or not, you can easily do amazing things with the Rules feature of Entourage. By creating and bending your own mail rules within Entourage, you automate your inbox entirely. Rules are both powerful and playful, and can move and/or copy messages to folders on your hard drive.

♦ Project tagging: It’s fun (well, sometimes) and easy to manage e-mail, tasks, Calendar events, your to-do list, and even your documents. In Entourage, you can tag all these things with categories and/or assign them to projects. When you create projects in Entourage, they’re accessible throughout the Microsoft Office 2008 suite. In Word, Excel, and PowerPoint a Projects tab in the new Toolbox lets you have instant access to your projects. Your project documents are available on the Project Center tab of Project Gallery. We devote Book VI to the Entourage Project Center application and dive into the niceties of this powerful set of tools.

♦ Junk mail filter: Entourage can help control junk mail from becoming a crisis through a built-in junk mail filter that’s kept up-to-date automatically when Office updates are installed.

♦ Address Book: Keeping track of your contacts has become an essential activity for everyone. Everything you’d expect in a Contact Manager or an Address Book is in Entourage. Just wait ’til you see the many ways you can print your Address Book.

♦ LDAP compatibility: Large organizations, businesses, and universities often have institution-wide address books that use an LDAP standard. If your institution uses LDAP, you can use Entourage to look up people in the institution’s LDAP directory and to add contacts from LDAP into your Entourage contacts. Entourage can auto-complete e-mail addresses from the institution’s directory without you having to add people to your contact list.

♦ Calendar: A great Calendar is built right into Entourage. You can create and manage your Calendar by making Calendar events. Planning meetings or other activities is a cinch; reminders can be set. Your entire daily schedule can appear in the new Entourage My Day feature, which gives you access to your Calendar even when Entourage 2008 is closed. Entourage users who also use Microsoft Exchange can see each other’s free/busy information — even with Outlook users on the same server. Because Entourage uses industry standard Calendar events, you can share them with other Entourage users and with other standards-compliant Calendar programs. For example, open-source Sunbird Calendar users can share Entourage Calendar events.

♦ Task Manager: You probably have many tasks to do. Whether you have to write a report or complete an assignment, you can add your task to the Entourage Task Manager. The new My Day feature reminds you of your tasks as the day progresses and lets you manage your tasks on the fly during the work day.

♦ Notes: Maybe you just need to make a quick note about something lest you forget. Use the Entourage Notes feature. Notes is better than regular Stickies or tying a thread on your finger because Entourage Notes can be linked to just about anything and can be tagged in categories and projects. Get more familiar with linking in Entourage in Book V.

♦ Project management: Organizing your activities into discrete projects is a great way to keep track of your busy office or home lifestyle. Project Center is a major application within Microsoft Entourage that integrates with all the Office 2008 applications. Project Center supports organizing and linking and sharing of document files from all applications on your Mac. We cover the Entourage Project Center in complete detail in all of Book VI.

♦ Customizable toolbars: At last! Entourage 2008 allows you to customize the toolbars of every single window in Entourage.

Mingling instantly with Messenger

Communicating and collaborating with peers, co-workers, classmates, your boss, your parents, and your kids is all the rage. Whether you use a computer, an iPhone, or another mobile device, instant messaging is a priority. Microsoft Messenger allows for live communication and collaboration. For those who abhor instant messengers because they let others interrupt your work, Microsoft Messenger has plenty of features to keep unwanted elements away!

In addition to its instant messaging functions, Messenger also provides text and document sharing. The latest update of Messenger on the Mac integrates with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, a unified communications server package, to provide new live video and audio chat in addition to text messages. Quite possibly by the time you read this, live video and audio will be available without having to use Microsoft Office Communication Server.

Lighting the future with Silverlight

The Internet may be getting older, but new technologies for it are emerging. Silverlight is one such technology that gives Web browsers new capabilities.

All the apps working together

Imagine a large, happy family in an ideal world where each person’s personality and skills meshed together so that the whole family benefits. Now imagine that each member of this family communicates and interacts with other families in friendly ways. Office 2008 is very much like an ideal family. Each application within Office 2008 is designed to work together with the other Office applications, the Internet, and the Mac OS X applications as well as to interface with Office 2007 for Windows.

Word can be coupled with Excel to generate professional quality, personalized custom brochures, letters, and e-mail sent to a small group of friends or to hundreds of thousands of people.

The Excel graphs can be displayed in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The results of Excel formulas can be displayed in Word or PowerPoint or even on the Web. Mac and PC users can work on the same Excel document at the same time.

You often hear seamless used to describe applications that work together as well as Office 2008 applications. The same powerful drawing tools are available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The documents you create from any application can be organized and shared with Project Center in Entourage.

Some interesting specialty features are built into Office 2008. Maybe even some you wouldn’t expect, such as a special, large capacity Clipboard — the Scrapbook. Within Office, you’re not limited to just one thing on the Clipboard at a time. In Office 2008, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage all share the same Scrapbook, which is a common multiple-item clipboard that can be used to share content between one application and another.

Many people are familiar with Adobe Flash and its associated player. If you’ve ever watched a cartoon on your Mac, played a game online, or watched a Google or YouTube video, you’ve most likely used the Flash Player. And if you’re like most people, you might wish that the presentation quality was better. In comes Silverlight, which provides a much richer visual and interactive experience than Flash, and is competing head-to-head with Adobe’s new Adobe AIR product.

Even though it’s a small Web browser plug-in, Silverlight allows you to play an enormous amount of rich PC content on a Mac.

When it comes to Web 2.0, Silverlight ensures that Macs aren’t second-class citizens when it comes to taking advantage of new Web content, such as watching movies online at Netflix, zooming almost infinitely in and out of a map. In the near future, you most likely will be able to run some Microsoft Office applications online in Silverlight on your Mac.

What’s New Office-Wide for 2008?

If you’re upgrading from an older version of Office for Mac, you immediately see new elements in the user interface, such as the new Elements Gallery, when you open any Office application. Yet often, you don’t see the things that get changed the most because these changes affect what goes on behind the scenes, as with the revamped graphics engine that draws boxes that still look like boxes, but now they have some new formatting options.

Elation from Elements Gallery

Perhaps the most visible change from earlier versions of Microsoft Office is the new Elements Gallery in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

To display this handy new feature, click any of the buttons on the new Elements bar, which is located just under the Standard toolbar. Figure 1-5 shows how Elements Gallery looks in Microsoft Word 2008.

Figure 1-5: Elements Gallery in Word.

To display Elements Gallery, which in Figure 1-5 shows the SmartArt Graphics elements, follow these steps:

1. Click the Word icon in the Dock.

A new blank document opens, or you’re taken to Project Gallery, where you open a new blank Word document.

2. In Word’s View menu, choose any of the following views:

• Print Layout View

• Web Layout View

• Publishing Layout View

Elements Gallery is not available in other views in Word.

3. Click any of the buttons, such as the SmartArt Graphics button on the Elements bar, or click the Gallery button on Word’s Standard toolbar.

Elements Gallery reveals itself in the document window.

4. Click the Relationship button in Elements Gallery.

If your screen is wider than the one shown in Figure 1-5, you may see more SmartArt graphics elements from which to choose.

To hide Elements Gallery, click the SmartArt Graphics button on the Elements bar a second time, or click the Gallery button on Word’s Standard toolbar.

Tip.eps All buttons on the Elements bar are toggle buttons that alternate between showing and hiding Elements Gallery.

Another way to show and hide Elements Gallery is to click the Gallery button on the Standard toolbar.

Getting smart with SmartArt Graphics

You could always easily make attractive graphics in Microsoft Office. But with the new SmartArt Graphics, professional pizzazz is only a few clicks away.

One of the behind-the-scenes aspects of Office 2008 is that the way shapes and graphics are drawn has been completely overhauled. One of the Mac Microsoft MVPs has dubbed them with a cute nickname, squeezy graphics.

Whatever you call them, they give Office added capabilities, including true 3D perspectives and a realistic reflection effect for pictures and shapes.

Discovering new Office-wide themes

Word used to have its own themes, and PowerPoint had different themes. There was no coordination.

The new Office document themes (color combinations and other formatting aspects) are now Office-wide. Themes made in PowerPoint can be shared with Word and Excel. Themes are portable between Mac and Windows platforms and are saved in files with .thmx extensions.

You can save and manage themes in entirely new ways with Formatting Palette, Elements Gallery, and Project Gallery. We get you up to speed on themes in Chapter 6 of this minibook.

Comparing Office 2008 for Mac with Office for Windows

The team who developed the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) wanted to be able to incorporate features of Mac OS X in its version of Microsoft Office. They succeeded in creating a very Mac-like product. Consequently, Office for Mac has many features not found in Windows Office and vice versa. This is also the reason why version numbers often alternate between Mac and Windows Office — each version has unique features.

Picking the products

Microsoft sells Office in various bundles at various prices. Home and student users can save a lot of money by purchasing special packages. Businesses and educational institutions can save money by purchasing under a volume license agreement. Details about these packages can be found on Microsoft’s Web site, Mactopia, for Mac products:

www.microsoft.com/mac

Both Mac and PC platforms

All bundles for both Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows include these applications:

♦ Microsoft Word

♦ Microsoft Excel

♦ Microsoft PowerPoint

We break it down a little further though. Here we list which applications are unique to Mac or PC versions of Office. If similar functionality is offered by Office for Mac, we tell you which Office for Mac feature to explore as a possible substitute for the missing Windows application.

Just on Windows

Office Home and Student 2007 for Microsoft Windows comes with an additional program called OneNote 2007, which is not available for Mac.

Word 2008 on the Mac has Notebook View, which offers similar functionality to OneNote without having to install an additional application. OneNote files aren’t compatible.

Office Professional 2007 for Microsoft Windows comes with four additional applications that aren’t included Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac:

♦ Microsoft Access 2007: In Office for Mac, use Microsoft Query with Excel 2008 for relational database capabilities. Data from Access databases can be queried by Mac’s Microsoft Query application.

♦ Accounting Express 2009: Yes, that 2009 suffix was not a typo. Current shipments of Office 2007 now include Accounting Express 2009 because Microsoft changes the software to keep the bundle up to date. No equivalent is found in Office for Mac.

♦ Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager (BCM): Microsoft Entourage 2008 is the most similar application in Office for Mac. Entourage includes most features of Outlook including Microsoft Exchange Server support. The following explains two differences:

• Project Center: Outlook doesn’t include Project Center, which is Mac only, and is included in Entourage.

• Outlook BCM: The Outlook BCM feature is Windows only. Entourage doesn’t support BCM.

♦ Publisher 2007: In Office for Mac, use the Microsoft Word Publishing Layout View for similar functionality without installing a separate application.

Just on Macintosh

maconly.eps The following list describes features found only in Office for Mac:

♦ Project Gallery: This application lets you prioritize, organize, share, and search for and launch documents.

♦ Project Center: Project Center in Office 2008 for Mac is project management software targeted toward businesses and home and student users. Project Center is what most people are looking for when they seek software that helps them manage their everyday projects.

Project Center in Office 2008 for Mac isn’t the same as a similar sounding but entirely different Microsoft product for Windows called Microsoft Project, which is marketed to professional project managers.

♦ My Day: The new My Day Entourage feature keeps you on top of things while it stays on top of all the application windows on your screen. Calendar events and tasks pop on and off as your day progresses.

Microsoft Office 2008 Home and Student edition for Mac comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage. Like the Home and Student edition of Office 2007 for Windows, Entourage (the Mac e-mail program) doesn’t have support for Microsoft Exchange Server.

Comparing Office 2008 for Mac package bundles

Table 1-1 compares what comes in the box with each of the three available Office 2008 for Mac package bundles:

Understanding file format compatibility

Newer file formats for Windows and Macintosh versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are identical. You can freely pass these files between Macs and PCs.

Microsoft Access MDB files (.mdb) can be queried with Microsoft Query in Office 2008 for Mac, but Query is read-only. Tables and records can’t be modified by Office for Mac. Reading Access files requires a third party driver called an ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) driver, which isn’t supplied with Office 2008.

Microsoft SQL Server databases can be queried with Microsoft Query in Office 2008. The same limitations regarding Microsoft Access apply.

The following applications aren’t supported, and their files can’t be opened in Office 2008:

♦ Microsoft OneNote

♦ Microsoft Project

♦ Microsoft Publisher

♦ Microsoft Visio

Navigating the interface

Although Microsoft Office applications for Macintosh and Windows started from similar code bases many years ago, the two platforms have diverged in their approach to the Desktop and in how application windows behave.

Launching applications

You can launch Office 2008 applications in any one of several ways. The first two are the ones you’re likely to use most often:

♦ Double-click the document icon of any document previously made by any Office 2008 application.

♦ Click an application icon on the Mac OS X Dock.

♦ If the application has been launched recently, click the Apple Menu, choose Recent Items, and then select a recently used file or application from the Recent Items submenu.

♦ Open the Applications Folder and then open the Microsoft Office 2008 folder. You can double-click an application’s icon to open the application.

♦ Right-click or Control-click any document and choose Open With from the pop-up menu to specify which application to use to open a file.

♦ Drag a document’s icon to the appropriate Dock icon.

Tip.eps For those used to Microsoft Windows, there’s no taskbar in Mac OS X. Instead, Mac OS X provides a Dock that you can easily customize. If you hold down the Option key while you open an application, other applications that are running will be hidden. This is more like the way Windows works, so you might be more comfortable opening applications and documents this way.

Figure 1-6 shows the Office 2008 Dock icons. Of course, Dock icons can be arranged in any order by dragging them, so yours may not be in the same order that ours are. You won’t see Microsoft Messenger or Expression Media unless you install them separately. Expression Media is included only with certain product bundles, as we mention earlier in this chapter.

Figure 1-6: Office 2008 Dock icons.

Opening Spaces

Apple has a new Mac OS X feature for people who like to keep things in neat compartments on their screens. In Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard, this feature is Spaces. You can put one document in each space if you like.

460412-ma009.tif To turn on Spaces, follow these steps, as shown in Figure 1-7:

1. Click the Apple Menu in the menu bar.

2. Click System Preferences and then double-click Exposé and Spaces.

3. Click the Spaces tab and then select the Enable Spaces check box.

You see that you have a number of customization possibilities.

Figure 1-7: Turning on Spaces in System Preferences.

Switching from one document to another

Several different methods can be used to switch from one document to another while using Microsoft 2008 for Mac. Here are some common ways to switch from one open document to another:

♦ Click the Window menu. Select an open document from the bottom of the menu. Tried and true.

♦ Click any visible window. You may see other windows behind the active window. If you can see even a little piece of window, click it to make it the active window.

♦ Press F8 (or FN-F8 on some laptops) to switch to Spaces (if you turned on Spaces in the preceding section).

♦ Click and hold an application icon in the Dock, and then select a document from the top portion of the pop-up menu. Each application’s icon in the Dock is also a document switcher. Figure 1-8 shows what you’d see if you had five Word documents open. In this figure, we want to switch to the document Book 1 Chapter 1, which we selected in the pop-up menu.

Figure 1-8: Use the Dock icons to switch among documents.

Switching from one application to another

Here are the two easy ways to switch between applications:

♦ Press Ô-Tab on the keyboard.

♦ Click any application icon in the Dock.

Coping with Office automation incompatibility

Office 2008 for Mac doesn’t have support for a very popular programming language — Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Previous versions of Office for Mac did have VBA support. This means that

♦ VBA scripts, macros, and add-ins no longer run at all in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint 2008.

♦ Office 2008 doesn’t ship with the popular Solver add-in for Excel. You can download a new, free AppleScript version of Solver from Solver’s creators at the Frontline Systems Web site:

www.solver.com/mac

♦ RealBasic, another popular programming language, is no longer supported.

Office 2008 does include extensive support for Apple’s system-wide scripting language, AppleScript. Although you can use AppleScript as a substitute for VBA, unlike VBA, AppleScript isn’t cross-platform. Unfortunately, Windows versions of Office don’t support AppleScript.

The incompatibility will go away when VBA returns to Office for Mac in the next major release of it, but no plans are in the works to include VBA as an update to Office 2008. Office 2004, the previous version before Office 2008, does support VBA on the Mac.

Tip.eps If you need to be able to run VBA on the Mac, you’re limited to Office 2004 (or earlier). Other options include

♦ Running a Windows version of Office in the Apple Boot Camp or in a Windows virtual machine with Parallels or VMWare Fusion.

♦ Running Office 2007 for Windows directly in Mac OS X with the NTFS product for Mac OS X from Paragon software.

Co-existing with Office 2004 and earlier

Office 2008 by default creates new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in the new XML-based file format. The new XML formats have the same file extensions as the old ones plus the letter x appended to the file extension, such as .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx. When you’re using Office 2008, you can save files in the new XML format documents or in the old format. Choose File⇒Save As in any of the Office 2008 applications to find an option to save in the old format in the Format list box. Then your documents can be opened in any version of Office