Showing posts with label Microsoft Office. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft Office. Show all posts

KeyRocket: Learn MS Office and Windows Keyboard Shortcuts

KeyRocket: Learn MS Office and Windows Keyboard Shortcuts
Some people are predominantly mouse users and some are predominantly keyboard users, and if you pit one group against the other, the keyboard user will almost always finish a task faster than the mouse user. Why is that? Because keyboard shortcuts save time. Every time you use your keyboard instead of reaching for the mouse, navigating the pointer to the correct button or menu, and clicking, you're saving anywhere from 2-10 seconds. When you work eight hours a day, all these seconds count and you end up saving as much as 30 minutes or more each day, at least, according to Robertson Mcllwain who created KeyRocket.

KeyRocket is a software that helps users learn keyboard shortcuts. As you keep working on Windows and Microsoft Office applications, the software monitors your actions. Whenever it recognizes that a specific series of mouse actions were performed, it alerts the user through a pop-up the equivalent keyboard shortcut that performs the same action. The idea is that, when reminded a sufficient number of times, the user will learn to use the keyboard shortcut instead.


For example, if you select some text and click the “Bold” button in Microsoft Office, KeyRocket will teach you that you can press the key combination Ctrl+B to do the same thing. It is hoped, that over time, you will start using Ctrl+B instead of reaching for the mouse everything you need to make text bold. And when you actually start using the keyboard, KeyRocket will congratulate you on mastering the shortcut.

By default, KeyRocket will only urge you to use shortcuts when you persistently use a particular mouse action, say more than 3 times or 5 times in a session. One time actions are ignored so as not to overwhelm you with keyboard shortcuts you don’t need to remember. If you already know and frequently use a shortcut, KeyRocket will not attempt to suggest it. A shortcut is considered to be mastered after it has been used about ten times. The progress of mastering a shortcut is also tracked in a notification window.

The Statistics Dashboard gives you a unique view of your personal KeyRocket history, displaying Wasted Clicks, Shortcuts Used, Shortcuts Mastered along with your Shortcut Score.


If you just want to learn shortcuts on your own, there is a shortcut browser that is a wonderful resource that reveals all shortcuts for each application. It also explains interesting statistics regarding those shortcuts, such as the likelihood of one being introduced to you through a notification popup and overall popularity.
keyrocket-browser

The Shortcut Browser can be accessed by pressing Win+Shift+K or by clicking on Shortcut Browser in the Options Menu in the System Tray.

The free version of KeyRocket works for Windows and some Microsoft Office components (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook). By upgrading to KeyRocket Premium, you get access to all of Office, plus Visual Studio.
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Calligra: Another Free Alternative to Microsoft Office

Calligra is a suite of programs for word processing and graphic art developed from the now defunct KOffice, the word processing program for KDE. The program is currently in version 2.6 release candidate 3 and aside from Linux, Calligra is also available for Windows and Mac OSX users. Calligra contains applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, databases, vector graphics, digital painting and more. It uses the OpenDocument format as its default file format for most applications and can import other formats, such as Microsoft Office documents.

Calligra was created as a result of unresolved dispute among KOffice developers in 2010. Following arbitration with the community members, several applications were renamed by both communities. Three applications - Kexi, Krita and KPlato, and the user interfaces for mobile devices have been completely moved out of KOffice and are only available within Calligra. A new application called Braindump has been added to Calligra after the split and KWord was replaced by the new word processor Calligra Words.

Calligra has the following components:

Productivity Applications

  • Words - A frame-based word processor that can work in two modes: page oriented or layout oriented. Calligra Words can open and save ODF documents as it’s default file format. Additionally it’s possible to open Microsoft Office Word files (both .doc and .docx). Afterwards you can edit and save the document to ODF.

    calligra_words

  • Sheets - A powerful spreadsheet application.
  • Stage - A full-featured presentation program that supports a rich variety of elements, from graphics to text, from charts to images. Calligra Stage is extensible through a plugin system, so it is easy to add new effects, new content elements or even new ways of managing your presentation.

    stage

  • Kexi – A visual database management front-end, similar to Microsoft Access and with limited compatibility to Access’ file format.

Creativity Applications

  • Karbon - A vector drawing application.

    karbon-gearflowers

  • Krita - A layered pixel image manipulation application
  • Flow - A easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other Calligra applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more.

    flow

Management Application

  • Plan - A project management application that can create Gantt charts.
  • Braindump - A notetaking and mindmapping application to dump and organize the content of your brain (ideas, drawings, images, texts…) to your computer.
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Ginger, a Better Spelling and Grammar Checker for MS Office, Firefox, Chrome and IE

Ginger_LogoEverybody needs a little help in spelling, whether you like to admit it or not. In junior school we had teachers and parents to look over our shoulders and gently correct our spellings and fill in missing prepositions. Today, we have automated spell checkers and we must be thankful that we have them, because without those helpful wriggly green and red lines, the web would be a rather embarrassing place.

Numerous spell checking technology has been around for a while. Every word processing program, such as MS Office or OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, has one. Browsers have built in spell checkers too. Ginger is one such spelling and grammar checking technology that is attracting the attention of investors, and in turn, blogs such as this. Ginger is an intelligent spell checker that differentiates itself from the competition by recognizing words in context, that makes little sense to typical spell checkers. Ginger detects misused words and provide the most appropriate corrections for spelling and grammar mistakes according to the intended meaning of the sentence. In other words, Ginger can not only correct spellings but can also tell when a correctly spelled word is misused in a sentence and replace it with the right word.

ginger-software

For instance, you might mistakenly type “their” instead of “there”, or type “were” when you meant “where”. This kind of errors are more common than the first and are notoriously difficult to detect, because standard spell checkers only check for misspelled words and if the word is correctly spelled, they deem the sentence correct even if the sentence doesn't make sense.

Ginger, however, examines the entire sentence in which a misspelled word appears and analyzes the context. Ginger is thus able to correct the text in keeping with the writer’s intention, even in cases of extreme spelling mistakes. Because Ginger is able to recognize the context of the sentence, it’s able to narrow down the list of alternative words to the correct one. For example, if you write, "I rannd out of time", a standard spell checker displays a list of words such as "rand", "rend", and "rind" as possible corrections. Ginger, on the other hand, automatically knows the correct word should be “ran” and offers just a single suggestion with confidence.

Ginger is not perfect; in my test, it did miss out on some obvious grammatical errors and in some cases, threw in false positives, but it is an improvement over Microsoft’s Words native spell checker, and a definite must have when you are using a web browser.

Aside from misspelled words, contextually misused words, and grammar, Ginger recognizes and merges split words. For example, Ginger will identify the error in the sentence "I went in side" and will correct it to "I went inside". Plenty more improvements are scheduled to appear in upcoming version of Ginger, including enhanced vocabulary, insertion of missing words and verb tense correction. More details of Ginger’s capabilities can be found here and here.

Ginger is free and works on Microsoft Office Word, Outlook and PowerPoint. It also works on Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. The software requires an active Internet connection to work.

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Microsoft Office 2013 Preview: Offline Installer

Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled the latest edition of Microsoft Office – Office 2013, also known as Office 15. The version out is the Technical Preview which comes completely free of charge and is intended to get people familiar with the new version until the final version goes on sale.

The initial announcement directed users who wished to download and test Office 2013 to an online installer. But now you can grab the offline installer from Microsoft Technet.

Office2013

Unlike the web-based installer, there are certain limitations to the offline installer:

  • You cannot install and run multiple versions of office simultaneously. That means if you have Office 2010 or Office 2007 installed, you’ll have to remove it before installing Office 2013. Update: Apparently, this is not true. Office 2013 can be run alongside your current Office installation.
  • It also does not support the fast streaming feature.
  • It comes with a Product Key that you will need to active your Office installation with.

To download the offline installer and get your product key:

  1. Head over to TechNet Evaluation Center, scroll down the page and click on the link that says “Download the .msi package now”.
  2. Sign in with your Live ID, fill up the form, and click on Continue.
  3. On the next page you will get your product key for Office 2013.
  4. On the same page, you will get the download links for Office 2013, 32-bit or 64-bit version.

It is recommended that you download the 32-bit version because it is more compatible with existing add-ons.

The direct download links are given below. However, you still need to register on TechNet to get the product key. Both downloads are above 600MB in size. The downloads support pause and resume so you don’t have to worry about the your Internet connection breaking in the middle of the download.

Download Office 2013, 32-bit
Download Office 2013, 64-bit

[via SumTips]

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Microsoft Word 2013 Will Support PDF Viewing and Editing

Microsoft’s upcoming word processing suite Office 2013 is about to get a big upgrade. According to Liveside, Microsoft Word 2013 will be able to open PDF files and even edit them.

Until now, editing PDF documents wasn’t easy or cheap. Free PDF editors are few and far between and their PDF editing abilities are limited. The only true PDF editor in existence today is Adobe Acrobat. It’s still unclear up to what extent Microsoft Word 2013 will allow PDF editing though.

Word-2013-Reading-Mode

Word 2013 reportedly provides a “stunning new reading experience for both traditional Word documents and PDFs that reflows text in a columnar view automatically”. Interesting, the default layout on a traditional landscape PC screen uses a left-to-right scrolling mode, not top-to-bottom as has always been the case with such document-based applications.

Word 2013 will also support bookmarking pages that will allow users to return back to where they left when they closed the document last.

Word-2013-Bookmark

It must be noted that Office 2010 already supports saving documents in the PDF format, but this is the first time the Office application will be able to open and view PDF documents. Office 2013 may sound the death knell for Adobe Reader and many PDF reading utilities such as Foxit Reader. An unexpected outcome of the built-in PDF editing feature will be that the PDF documents will no longer be considered non-tamperable.

The first public beta of Office 2013 is expected to be released sometime next week.

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