Get creative with Office

Every so often we get to develop a client’s project that really pushes Office and uses some of the more complex features in the software. These projects are not really pushing the boundaries, but use features that most people are not using, or don’t know how.
A recent project for a brand analysis client started out [...]

Macros for Word tables

The Office suite has a fully-fledged programming language built into it. Visual Basic for Applications [VBA] is a sub set of the very powerful Visual Basic used to develop full applications on the Windows platform. In Office, VBA can extend almost any feature or function within Word and, to a lesser degree, in PowerPoint and [...]

Things to consider

A Microsoft Office template in Word, PowerPoint or Excel should only use the facilities offered by the Office suite. With a general issue of training for most people, it is hardly surprising that the uninitiated produce poor templates themselves. We receive a request for help from one designer or another every month, where they have [...]

Master your slides

PowerPoint has been the least updated software in the whole Office package for most of its life. The basic building blocks beneath the menus have barely changed since Office 95, but the latest PowerPoint 2007 finally sees some very powerful features and abilities. Not all are entirely compatible with previous versions.
Master slides have always been [...]

PowerPoint animation

Most presentations only use basic builds and transitions. This is largely because people are not taught how to use it, or have no formal design background, and simple builds and transitions is all they are confident in using. Animation in PowerPoint can’t produce the latest Disney offering, but does have the ability to control just [...]