IBIT Blog

Office 2010 - Overview

It’s here!

The latest version of the premier office suite of applications has launched. This version takes the innovations introduced with the 2007 version and adds new functionality to help improve your productivity.

Available via volume license immediately, with general availability on June 15th this Office release is the best yet!

So what exactly is new?

Suites

First is a change to the line up of packages.

Microsoft have reduced the amount of packages to make things simpler.

For small businesses who buy Office via retails channels this give you two choices.

Office Home and Business - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook

or

Office Professional - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Pubilsher and Access

You'll notice OneNote is now available in both of these suites. You can get an overview of OneNote here.

Office Web Apps

New to this edition of Office is the ability to use a web based version of Office. If you're away from your desk and need to view or make a quick edit to a document you can do this within a web browser!

Product Improvements

Each product in the suite has gained some great new functionality.

Highlights include,

Word  - Improved image editing tools

Apply effects to improve the look of any image. Thumbnail preview saves time applying and removing effects until the desired one is found.

Background removal allows you to strip out elements of an image keeping only that which is relevant to the document.

You can read more about background removal here

Excel - Sparklines

Sparklines are small charts in a worksheet cell that provide a clear and compact visual representation of your data. You can use them to show trends in a series of values, such as seasonal increases or your monthly expenditures, or to highlight maximum or minimum values.

You can read more about Sparklines here

PowerPoint - Video Editing and Formatting

Allows you to edit videos right in PowerPoint 2010, no additional software required. You can even insert a video link from the Internet into your presentation to create rich, dynamic work but keep your file size manageable. And video controls let you pause, rewind, fast-forward, and stop audio and video content without leaving slide-show mode during your presentation.

PowerPoint - Broadcast Slide Show

Instantly broadcast your slides to a remote audience, who can view your presentation online and on any device that has a Web browser, even if they don’t have PowerPoint 2010.

Outlook - Conversation View

Improves the tracking and managing of related e-mails while saving valuable inbox space, letting you manage large amounts of e-mail with ease. It also hides entire conversations you no longer need and condenses them with just a few clicks.

All applications - Backstage View

Provides a single location for essential information about your document, such as permissions and version information – and increases sharing options for print, online, and e-mail. And printing is faster and easier than ever with the new Live Preview. Now you can see your document and settings automatically before you print, without multiple clicks.

This is just a snapshot of some of the new functionality available!

If you'd like to learn more please contact us today 

Products - OneNote

Microsoft finally decided to make this application available to a wider audience!

OneNote has been around for years but generally found its way into the student package of the Office suite.

This is because OneNote is quite simply, a note taking application so it was felt students would make better use of it.

However it has plenty functionality that is of use in the work place.

Those notes could be for a meeting, while doing research for a customer proposal or just making a list of things to do.

OneNote stores all of it's information with a notebook.

Inside a notebook we can have pages, sections and section groups.

Pages hold the content while sections and section groups are used to help organise that content.

For example.

I could have a notebook called "Work Notes".

Inside that notebook I could have section groups called "Service Delivery" and "Products".

Within the "Products" section group I could have sections called "New Products", "Existing Products".

Inside the "Existing Products" section I could have pages called "Prices", "Sales Notes".

So you may thinking "So what? Can't I do the same thing in Word with documents and folders.

Yes you could. But because OneNote is geared towards note taking it has lots of functionality for making note taking quick and easy.

Some examples include,

Character Recognition.

If you have an image that contains text OneNote tries to make sense of that text so that you can search for it.

Imagine you were at a conference and met Tom Anderson, he could be an important contact that could bring you lots of work. Tom ran out of business cards and didn't want to give away his last one so you could take a picture of it with your mobile phone (store it in OneNote mobile!) and insert into your notes back at the office. OneNote would then index that card and next time you searched your notes OneNote would display his business card!

You can even do the same with audio! Use your phone to do an ad-hoc interview and insert it into your notes. OneNote can then index it for you so it shows up in search results!

Information Capture

OneNote allows you to quickly grab information without having to go to the hassle of cutting and pasting.

If you're in Internet Explorer there is an option called "Send to OneNote". Clicking on this will send the current page to OneNote and place it your current notebook!

What if you don't use Internet Explorer or have another application you want to grab information from?

No problem. OneNote installs the OneNote Printer Driver - you just print your document in the same way you print a hard copy and it'll create an image and place it into your notebook! Again character recognition will index the content.

You can also "dock" OneNote next to your currently open program. OneNote just displays the writing surface allowing you to drag and drop and quickly store notes without having to flick between applications.

 

Quick Editing

OneNote doesn't restrict you to how you enter content. Just click and type (or if you have a touch enabled device you can write!)

You can drag content around so it's organised exactly how you want it and there are a drawing tools that allow you to make quick edits. We've all drawn a big circle around an important meeting note

OneNote also allows us to do quick calculations on the fly.

If you type in a sum, use the equals symbol at the end and press the space bar the answer is filled in for you.

You can also tag information so it's easier to find. There are built-in tags and you can create your own.

These tags can then easily be found using the search functionality.

Clicking on the icon takes you straight to the relevant page

Integration and Sharing

OneNote can also link into your Outlook data. A set of notes can be converted into a task which is entered into Outlook as part of your regular To-Do list.

You can also work with other collagues on notes by sharing them over a network. This allows many people to contribute to a set of notes (great for research projects!)

The latest version of the product can harness the power of the Internet. Notes can be stored in a shared location and accessed from anywhere OneNote is installed. Additionally Office Web Apps also has OneNote capability meaning notes can be quickly read and updated from any PC with an Internet browser!

This is just a very small set of the powerful functionality OneNote provides. Seeing it in action really allows you to understand how much more productive and organised the application can make you.

If you'd like a demonstration of OneNote please get in touch.

InfoPath - An Introduction

This product is one of the hidden gems of the Office suite.

Hidden is used quite literally here though because depending on how you buy Microsoft Office depends on whether you’ll have even heard of the product!

Fortunately you can still buy InfoPath as a standalone product.

So what is InfoPath?

The short answer is Electronic Forms, but there is much more to it than that.

If you’ve ever created a form in Microsoft Access it’s along similar lines. What’s great about InfoPath though is that it isn’t tied into a specific database system. It can talk to SQL Server, Access databases, SharePoint (which is is it’s main strength) and more. You can even make use of InfoPath forms within Outlook to gather information via e-mail!

Also when stacked up against a form in a Word document InfoPath wins a lot of the time!

InfoPath allows you to do form validation to ensure data is entered correctly.

It’s biggest strength is it’s capability to “unlock” data which a Word document just can’t do. (Unless you want to do a lot of coding)

This means an simple example is in order.

Lets say you had a Word document that your staff used to enter their weekly hours worked.

It might look like this.

 

As you can see there is a lot of important information here. 

 

 

 

At the top we have data that lets us know who the time sheet belongs to, and when it’s for. 

 

 

 

Moving down we have the actual data itself. The hours worked.

 

 

Finally we have a brief summary of data so you can see at a glance what’s going on.

 

 

 

 

 

So what’s wrong with this?

Data Validation

You would have to trust whoever fills out the form to put a date in right place and numbers in the hours worked fields. What if someone enters 25 hours for single day? What if “Sales” isn’t even the correct name of the department?

Now you can sort of do this in Word 2007. But it’s not exactly simple. In fact, good luck finding how to insert a form field – The developer tab is hidden by default. Then you have to contend with “legacy form controls” and the new Office 2007 form controls. Not fun at all!

Calculations

Once again you’d need to trust whoever is filling out the form to get their maths right. As with data validation you can get Word to do calculations on tables but it’s not exactly simple or intuitive!

Trapped Data

This is the big one!

We’ve only showed you one form. Let’s imagine you’re Mr Anderson’s line manager. Your boss walks up to your desk at 9am Monday morning and tells you that your department is spending a fortune in overtime. He wants to know exactly how many hours your department logged in overtime for the last three months overall and on a per-person basis…..and he wants it for the management meeting at 11am!

So lets say that each person would have 4 timesheets per month. That’s 12 per person.

If your department had 5 people in it that’s 60 Word documents you need to open, read through, check the maths and note the important figures to bring into your total summary.

That’s going to take some time!

How does InfoPath help?

Here’s the same form designed in InfoPath

At first glance you’ll notice it’s essentially the same form as before

 

But if you look in the first block of data

 

You can see a calendar control button. This means we can choose a date with the mouse as well as typing one in.

It won’t let us put anything other than a date in the field.

 

You’ll also notice all the fields in the first section have a red star next to them.

This because I’ve made them mandatory fields. It’s a little visual notification to remind the user to put some data in.

You also get InfoPath to pop up a little message if no data is entered!

The fields that contain the hours worked data also have some validation rules.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This screenshot shows I’ve tried to enter some text in a numeric field

We get the nice red dotted border AND a tooltip to let me know what’s wrong.

What’s really great about this is that I didn’t even need to set this up. Just by specifying that the field was numeric InfoPath setup the basic validation for me.

 

 

Each control has LOTS of options around data validation to make sure we get exactly the correct data in.

You may also have noticed that the department field is a drop down list.

This means that we can ensure that only valid departments are entered. You’ll see why this can be quite important later on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Also, the data is actually pulled in from a SharePoint list.

 

This means that these lookup lists can easily be managed without having to edit the InfoPath form. We can also set security on the SharePoint list to ensure only specific people can make changes to the department details.

InfoPath also has rules and events we can work with. We could actually set this up so all the staff names appeared in another drop down and that once a department has been chosen only the staff in that department are shown (or vice versa. You choose your name and your department is automatically filled out)

 

 

This totally solves the Data Validation problem mentioned above.

So what about calculation?

Easy!

Same form as above with the same data entered

However this time the summary data is updated automatically.

We’ve set the summary fields to do a simple bit of addition and then made them read-only so they just work on there own without any user input needed!

 

Sorted!

Data Validation and Calculation all dealt with quickly and easily.

 

 

 

 

It would understandable if you were still a little sceptical at this point though. As previosuly mentioned lots of similar functionality is already available all across the Office suite. That brings us onto the final point made above.

Trapped Data

The real magic happens when this is published to a SharePoint site.

When the form is published we can specify that the summary fields are to be pushed through to the SharePoint form library.

 

This is called “property promotion”.

 

 

 

Here is the time sheet Tom Anderson just filled out on the SharePoint site.

You can now see how many hours Mr Anderson worked that week without even opening the file!

Multiply this across the whole team and you can see at a glance what everyone was up to!

Let’s throw a bit of SharePoint magic in.

We’ve grouped by Department and then by Week Commencing Date.

 

 

 

Can you see why it was important to get the department entry consistent?

We can now get a real overview of the hours entered by each person.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And one finishing touch.

We’ve changed the view so SharePoint sums the totals fields.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This can look a little confusing when your grouping as it gives you overall totals as well as a total at each group level. You’d be better setting up a filtered view to do this.

Something like this.

We've removed a level of grouping and filtered to only show the Sales team.

You can now see really easily over the last two weeks the Sales team have posted 18 hours of overtime.

Just to show off….you could then dump this out to Excel for further analysis.

 

This waschart was created with about five clicks of the mouse. Getting that report together for the boss would be nice and simple.

Finally one other cool thing about using SharePoint and InfoPath for a solution like this.

The files themselves are stored in XML format.

This means if you needed integration with another system (your accounts package for example) this makes the whole thing a lot easier.

We’ll stop there….this was supposed to be a quick introduction!

If you’ve made it to the bottom of this post thanks for the reading!

This was just one example of how you can use InfoPath in a real world scenario.

There is lots more you can do, especially when you put it together with SharePoint.

For example, imagine having an expenses form tied into a workflow so that management approval is required when a certain monetary threshold is met?

Hopefully this all makes sense and you can see why we're such fans of InfoPath.

If you'd like to discuss how InfoPath or SharePoint could work for your business, please get in touch

 

Blackberry - Finally Small Business Friendly

Just about every modern business uses email as one of their primary means of communication. Modern smartphones have helped with this by making email accessible while on the go.

This technology is also available to small businesses and those who have invested in Microsoft Small Business Server have been able to use multiple device types to accomplish this.

Windows Mobile, iPhone, Nokia business phones and even Google Android phones have the ability to integrate with the Exchange mail server out of the box without the need for any extra hardware or software.

Blackberry handsets on the other hand have been a different matter.

Many mobile phone retailers don’t usually point out that traditionally to get a Blackberry to work with an Exchange Server you need extra software, licenses and a whole extra server which is expensive just for a couple of phones.

This usually means a series of complicated workarounds or having to use an inferior replacement service that doesn’t quite do the same thing.

Until now.

The company that develop Blackberry, Research in Motion recently announced the release of Blackberry Enterprise Server Express

This is a cut down version of the full enterprise product (many of the features wouldn't be applicable to small businesses) but crucially it is able to run on an existing server that is already running the Exchange mail server.

The product is free and doesn't require any additional licensing.

Once installed email, calendars and contact sync are all available on the Blackberry device while out and about.

Any changes made on the device are visible in the mailbox when back in the office without any manual intervention.

We've already had a successful deployment of this with one of clients.

They currently have a broad mixture of devices and the Blackberry users have been frustrated at having a poorer experience than users with different devices so were keen to get the software installed as soon as it was available.

SInce it was new software we ran it in-house on a test server to ensure it all worked as expected before rolling it out to their live server.

If you'd be intererested in taking advantage of this new software release please get in touch.

 

 

Website Launch

Welcome to the new IBIT Solutions website!

This is the fourth revision of the site and brings in a more modern look along with a content mangament system.

This will allow us to update the site much more easily. We're hoping some of the content we're adding will make the site a useful resource instead of just contact information

All of the security alerts we sent out to our clients will be archived here and our about to be released newsletter which will be full of useful tips and advice will also be stored here for future reference

So please bear with us while we kick the tyres and make sure all the content is polished!

 

If you'd like to talk about how our Internet services can help you get in touch