Edit Google Docs in Office

Officially, Google Docs files are compatible with Microsoft Word. Yeah, there are some limitations but if you want online access to a document or want to collaborate on a document with others, Google Docs is a great tool.

Because of this compatibility you’ve always been able to edit a Google Doc in Office. The problem was, you had to log in to Google Docs, download the file, open it in Word (or Excel), edit it, save it, and upload it back to Google Docs. That’s hardly an efficient use of your time.

But what if you could access your Google Docs transparently via Office? Now you can when you download and install OffiSync! Once installed in either Office 2007 or 2010 (I’ve not tested it in Office 2003 yet) you’ll get an additional ribbon which allows you to directly access your Google Docs files.

Ok, technically it does the downloading and uploading for you, so you’re technically not live editing as you can with others when logged into Google Docs directly, but if you just need to edit a doc, and you’re more comfortable in Office, this is the tool for you.

Embedding YouTube Videos into PowerPoint 2007

These instructions were originally posted on Clay’s Blog. I’ve modified them a little and added screenshots.

1. First turn on the Developer Tab on the Ribbon by clicking on the Microsoft logo at the top left of the window and selecting PowerPoint Options all the way at the bottom of the menu. Next put a check next to the unchecked item to show the Developer Tab
    
   
2. Go to YouTube and select a video to embed
3. Copy the URL
   
   
4. Open Notepad and paste the URL
   
   
5. In the URL delete "watch?" and change the = sign to a ⁄
6. Copy the new URL
   
   
7. Back in PowerPoint, on the Developer menu choose "More Controls"
   
   
8. Select Shockwave Flash Object
   
   
9. Click and drag on the PowerPoint slide to draw a box in which the video will appear
   
   
10. Right Click the box and select properties
    
    
11. Paste the URL into the Movie Property field
    
    
12. Adjust the options for Looping or AutoPlay if desired
13. Close the Properties window
14. You can now adjust the size of the video by dragging the corners as needed

Your YouTube video will now play directly in your presentation provided you are connected to the Internet.

SlideShare Ribbon for PowerPoint 2007

Anyone who reads this blog knows I'm a SlideShare user. Well, as of this morning, SlideShare just got 100x better as it is now fully integrateable with PowerPoint 2007. Just install the SlideShare Ribbon for PowerPoint (don't forget to install the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 first as instructed) and then you'll have a new SlideShare ribbon right in PowerPoint.

As you can see from the buttons much of what they do is self-explanatory. Simply put you can upload to, search, and download from SlideShare directly in PowerPoint. Here's a screenshot of what the search/preview/download interface looks like.

What I also found surprisingly impressive is the program's ability to give you detailed statistics about your account with just a click of the Presentation Stats button.

There's more I could say but instead I'll leave you with the intro video that the folks at SlideShare put together.

SlideShare Ribbon Demo from slideshare on Vimeo.

Open Office 2007 Documents in OpenOffice

I don't use OpenOffice much but it comes installed on the Cloudbook so I think I'm going to start. (Though I also plan on using Google Docs a lot more too.) Anyway, since most of my current files are in Office 2007 format I was concerned about moving between the two programs. Well, a solution is now available: the Open XML Translator.

Expand OpenOffice.org's document opening, saving, and conversion powers to Office 2007 documents with the Open XML Translator, a free plug-in intended for Ubuntu systems.

lifehacker also says that "conversion from Microsoft Office-authored files remains hit-and-miss, but it's a nice step forward for the free and open-source office suite." I'll have to give it a test when I get my Cloudbook.

(Oh, and I'm officially declaring this my blog post for Thing #7: Blog about anything dealing with technology.)

Another Blogging via Word 2007 test

Since someone just asked me "how clean is the code Office 2007 puts out" for blogging I figured I'd do another test. This post contains much more complicated formatting and an image pulled in from MS ClipArt.

• One
• Two
• Three

Here's some right-aligned text.

And some centered text in another font.

Outlook 2007 Performance Update

Some have noticed that Outlook 2007 runs a little slower than the 2003 version did. Those of us that have massive amounts of e-mail and calendar data just chalked it up to the amount of data we're making it crunch. However, it seems that 2007 is actually running slower than 2003 as stated by a recent, yet unpromoted, Outlook 2007 update released this past April 13th.

"This update fixes a problem in which a calendar item that is marked as private is opened if it is found by using the Search Desktop feature. The update also fixes performance issues that occur when you work with items in a large .pst file or .ost file."

Believe it or not, the difference post update is noticeable.

Slow Performance From Outlook 2007?

I'm not experiencing slowdowns but it does make me wonder about usuing Outlook 2007 as a feed agregator.

"Adding RSS feeds can quickly swell the in-boxes of many users to more than 2GB of data, according to O'Kelly. He said that causes Outlook 2007, especially when it's running on PCs that don't have large amounts of memory, to write to the hard drive much more often than it typically does -- resulting in performance slowdowns. Hopefully, Microsoft will be able to better tune that part of the software before the next major release, O'Kelly said."

Save as PDF or XPS directly from Office 2007

I'm assuming this is a result of the PDF format going open source but you can now install an add-on for Office 2007 to give you the ability to directly save your documents in the PDF or XPS file formats.