How can you tell? In this screen shot, notice that Block Authors is available and not grayed out. In this shot, the first paragraph has been set aside so that nobody else can edit it. You can tell by the icon at the left and the dotted bracket.

Also in this screen shot, the Number of Authors tool is showing in the Status Bar. Here, it shows that there are two people currently editing this file.

While editing a co-authored document, you can click the Number of authors tools to see who else is currently editing the document. Here, I’ve signed on as two different entities from two different computers so you can see what co-authoring looks like.

I’ll have more to say about Word 2010 and co-authoring in the weeks and months to come. For more on co-authoring right now, check out chapter 52 in the Word 2010 Bible.

For some reason, the ability to drag maximized windows without restoring them is tied to this feature. So, if you enable “Prevent…” (which I had done a few weeks ago), then dragging maximized windows no longer works. As with many computer options, these features are bundled into one—so you have to choose. For now, I’ve decided that I need to drag maximized windows more often than I am annoyed by automatic resizing. With three monitors—which together act as one single screen—I hit the left or right edge less often than I might otherwise, since the left and right “monitor” edges are five feet apart, and I tend to focus on the middle monitor for most work.

In Normal view, it shows up as a pane at the bottom of an email message you’ve received.

Minimized, you see less… and Off, you don’t see it at all. Oddly, if it’s turned off, you cannot turn it on from a message window. It can be turned on only from View in the main window.

In the view shown here, you see in in several places—one of them is circled in red. That means that the person is one of my LinkedIn contacts. The in annotation shows up only if you’ve installed the LinkedIn social connector add-in for Outlook—one of two social connector add-ins that are available as of this writing. The other is MySpace, which I don’t use. Connectors for Facebook and other social networking sites are in the pipe, but not available right now.

To get the connector for LinkedIn, first, don’t bother if you’re using the 64-bit version of Office 2010. It’s available only for the 32-bit version of Outlook. It’s okay if you’re running the 64-bit version of Windows 7—I am. You can download the LinkedIn add-in here (http://www.linkedin.com/outlook).

After you install it, you’re not done yet. In Outlook 2010, click the Add-Ins tab, then click the Social Network Account Settings item, then click on LinkedIn. If you haven’t previously set it up, you’ll be prompted for user name and password.

Fill in your name (your LinkedIn email address) and password, and click OK. Then click Connect.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll receive a congratulatory notice, and you’re done. The LinkedIn add-in will [eventually] add a LinkedIn contacts folder, and when you open email from LinkedIn contacts, you will see the indicator.

Caveat. Okay. This might not work, or it might take a while to work. When I added the LinkedIn add-in to my desktop computer, the LinkedIn contact folder and the in logo appeared rather quickly when viewing messages. On my laptop, 60 minutes later, there’s still no visible indicator that it’s working. I’ll revisit later to see if it’s working yet.

Get it here.

The Filter Pack includes:

• Legacy Office Filter (97-2003; .doc, .ppt, .xls)
  
• Metro Office Filter (2007; .docx, .pptx, .xlsx)
  
• Zip Filter
  
• OneNote filter
  
• Visio Filter
  
• Publisher Filter
  
• Open Document Format Filter
  

Sadly, the Recover Text From Any File feature in Word still does not work correctly for *.docx files, even though the filter pack itself lets you search archived folders (*.zip). The Recover… feature does not take advantage of the filter.

Because docx files really are zip file, treating them as if they contained ordinary text does not yield the expected results. If you want to recover text from a docx file, you would do well to add a .zip extension to it, unzip to a folder, and then drill down to the word folder and look at document.xml. For example, consider a file named Doc4.docx. Any salvageable text will be here:

Doc4.docx.zip\word\document.xml

So, if you have activated this setting and suddenly notice that you can no longer insert Symbols, this is probably the reason.

One work-around is to use the keyboard to navigate the Symbol dialog. Use the arrow keys to move around, and use Enter or Alt+I to insert the selected symbol.

When using the Symbol dropdown, click the symbol you want to insert, and then click back in the document to complete the action (if the symbol doesn’t appear immediately when you click on it). I find that I encounter this issue less often than when using the Symbol dialog box.

My own work-around was to abandon the feature. I found that it was more annoying than useful. But, YMMV (your mileage may vary).

Apparently, some of you didn’t know you can also drag from the location bar at the top. First, click in it so that the > Libraries > Documents > format is replaced with the standard file location notation. This also selects the current location (and coincidentally, this is a good way to get a copy of the current location into the clipboard). Move the mouse over the left end of the location, and drag down to the Favorites area, as shown here.

Of course, here, this would be redundant, since the folder I’m dragging already has a shortcut. But, as above, you see the point.

While we’re here, I should tell you that you can also navigate to higher locations by clicking the segments shown in the address bar. Notice that here, Users is highlighted when I hover the mouse pointer over it. If I click on Users, the view now switches directly to that folder, without a need to ride the elevator stopping at My Documents and Herb.

How to put Speak onto your Quick Access Toolbar (QAT).

At the right end of the QAT, click the dropdown arrow, and choose More Commands, as shown.

In the Customize Quick Access Toolbar dialog box, set Choose commands from to All commands. In the list, click on Speak, and then click the Add button to add it to the list on the right, as shown. Finally click the OK button.

Now, you should see the Speak button on your QAT, as shown below. To use it, simply select the text you want to hear, and click on the Speak button. While it’s speaking the selected text, you can shut it up by pressing Esc, or by clicking the Speak button again, which becomes while it’s talking.

Assign a Shortcut key to the SpeakStopSpeaking Command

You can, of course, assign a keystroke, if you prefer. After all, if you have limited vision, you might find a keyboard shortcut somewhat more accessible than using the QAT. Here’s the keyboard-only way to do this—or, feel free to use any other method you’re comfortable with:

1. Press Alt+F, t, c, Alt+T. This will open the Customize Keyboard dialog box.
2. Press Alt+C, a, a. This selects All Commands in the Categories box.
3. Press Alt+O, t (this takes you to Commands starting with “t”), PageUp four times (takes you to the SpacePara1 command), Down arrow three times (takes you to the SpeakStopSpeaking command).
4. Press Alt+N (takes you to the Press new shortcut key box.
5. Press the key(s) you want to assign to the SpeakStopSpeaking command.
6. Press Alt+A (assigns the keystroke).
7. Press Esc (dismisses the dialog box).

Your assigned key is a toggle that toggles the speaking of selected text on/off. You can, of course, use the Esc key to interrupt speech.

The hitch

On my laptop, however, there was a hitch. For some reason (cough, registry corruption, cough), on my laptop, I was no longer able to set Microsoft Office Picture Manager—the graphics display and editing program that comes with Office—as the default for opening/viewing pictures. In fact, MOPM didn’t show up as one of the Open With choices at all!

When I clicked Choose default program…, Microsoft Picture Manager didn’t show up in the Recommended Programs list, nor in the Other Programs list, nor did it appear even after clicking Browse… and selecting it in the Office 14 programs folder and clicking Open there. It was there—it’s called OIS.EXE—but it resisted every attempt to add it as a program for opening pictures.

Here’s what I tried

So, I tried a variety of rescue attempt. First, I verified that it had been installed correctly by switching to a different Windows user profile, and verifying correct operation there. Yes. That worked, so the problem must be registry corruption.

Sometimes, you can fix registry corruption by using the /r switch when you start a program—which re-registers some programs (such as Word). I don’t know if /r is supposed to work with OIS.EXE, but it didn’t.

I went into Programs and Features (I use Windows 7), removed Microsoft Office Picture Manager from Office Tools, and restarted Windows 7. Then I reinstalled MOPM, rebooted Windows 7 for luck, and tried again. No luck.

I also tried several other routes, which included going through Windows 7′s Set your default programs and Associate a file type or protocol with a program, both of which are accessed through Control Panel4Programs. None of this worked. Every place I expected to see Microsoft Picture Manager, it was MIA!

Here’s what worked

First, I completely uninstalled Office 2010, and rebooted Windows 7 as instructed by Office Setup. Next, I opened the registry editor (Click Start, and type “regedit” into the Search box, and click on regedit.exe). I searched for and deleted every registry entry that so much as mentioned ois.exe. There were about 9 or 10 entries, as I recall. Then, I rebooted Windows 7… for luck.

Next, I reinstalled Office 2010. MOPM is included by default when you install Office 2010. And, yes, I rebooted again, just for luck. I thought I’d give Setup and Windows every possible chance to fix the problem when I wasn’t watching. After it booted up, I went to my Pictures library, right-clicked on a .jpg file, and presto! Microsoft Picture Manager was back!

To set it as the default, I clicked Choose default program…, enabled Always use the selected program to open this kind of file, and I was back in business.

Word 2007 and Word 2010

There are several ways to accomplish the underlying goal. If you want unformatted text to be the default when you press Ctrl+V, click the Office button and choose Word Options ? Advanced. In the Cut, Copy, and Paste section, set the first four Paste options to Keep Text Only, as shown here. If you ever want a different action, then you’ll need to use Paste Special, which is assigned directly to Alt+Shift+V in Word 2007 and 2010.

Another method is to assign the following macro to the desired keystroke:

Sub PasteUnformatted

Selection.PasteSpecial Link:=False, DataType:=wdPasteText

End Sub

Yet another method requires three keystrokes, starting with Word 2007 and Word 2010′s, Paste Special keystroke: Ctrl+Alt+V. So, using this method requires that you press Ctrl+Alt+V, tap the “u” key, and press Enter.

Word 2010 Only

In Word 2010, there finally is a dedicated built-in command that can be assigned directly to the keyboard, without need for an intervening macro. If you’d like to have a “paste text” keystroke while leaving the default paste keystroke intact, then assign the PasteTextOnly command to the desired keystroke. Shown here, I’ve assigned it to Ctrl+Shift+V, no longer using the macro I’d been using for the previous ten years.