I’ve been really enjoying the Office 2007 beta, well, most of it. I’ve got a weird quirk with Excel right now that gives me some kind of vbs error every time I open it. And Powerpoint is just too unbelievably slow. So slow in fact that I refuse to use it. But Word and Outlook are definitely great to use. I’m a big fan of the pretty gooey look too. I’m sorry, I just can’t help it.

Anyway, one of the first things I noticed was that I couldn’t find stuff, like commands. I’m so used to using the old menu bars, especially in Word and Excel, that I couldn’t figure out what part of the ribbon I was supposed to be looking at. It took me days to figure out that if I wanted to run a macro, I need to allow the Developer part of the ribbon to be shown (like writing a macro really requires you to be a developer!).

And this is how I figured it out: I did some scouting around and found a great set of pages. Here are three links that can help you figure out exactly where a command is in the new programs. They’re interactive pages that let you navigate in the old menu bars and then tell you where the command is now. So, in my case, I used the one for Word, and navigated to find out how to play a macro. Here’s a shot of the result I got:

And here are the links. I hope they help you as much as they helped me!

• Interactive: Word 2003 to Word 2007 command reference guide
• Interactive: Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 command reference guide
• Interactive: PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 command reference guide

I used to consider myself pretty much a PowerPoint guru, but I admit that I haven’t kept up with the times. I was in a presentation yesterday, where the presenter was able to see her notes on the laptop, while only the slide was presented on the screen. Immediately, I was hooked - I wanted that functionality!

A painful bit of Googling today finally brought me the answer. I thought I was looking for “PowerPoint Presentation Viewer”, but no - that’s just a way to view presentations if you don’t have PowerPoint. Instead, what I really wanted was “PowerPoint Presentation View”. Ahhh, the difference two little letters can make!

I finally discovered a very well-documented answer at the Working Smart blog, which shows (with pictures) exactly how to set up this system - and the functionality is built into PowerPoint (well, at least newer versions of it).

Here’s the short form - for more info see the above-mentioned blog:

1. Need to have two monitors (or computer and projector) set up first.
2. To set up PP: SlideShow/Set Up Show. Under Multiple Monitors, select “Display slide show on Monitor 2″ and check “Show Presenter View”.

Voila!