If you looking for having the same look and feel for your document in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook etc, then you should be trying the Office 2007 Theme Builder. Theme Builder tool enables the creation of document themes for Microsoft Office 2007.  Document themes provide a quick and easy way to apply a consistent look across all your Microsoft Office documents.  You can apply the same theme to PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and even Outlook emails.

Once you have installed the utility, you can create themes such that you have the same look across Office documents. you can customize every aspect of the theme like texts links, visited links, fonts etc.

The application requires .Net Framework 3.0 (Download) and  Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies (Download).

Download Theme Builder for Office 2007

Outlook 2010 is the upcoming version of Outlook with some great features which we have covered previously. Another improvement in Outlook 2010 is the way you can search mails and attachments in Outlook. Outlook 2010 has a ribbon tab for with some great search tools which helps you to search mails, attachments in Outlook when compared to previous versions. The search tools tab is enabled as soon as you click on the search box above the mails.

As you can see from the image, the search tools contain lost of options. You can either search the current folder, all sub folders or all Outlook items. In the search refine tools, you can refine your search with from, subject or mails having attachments, mails categorized, flagged, send to etc.

Outlook 2010 provides you with search keyword suggestions as son as you start tying any search term. You can narrow down your search using the keywords.

The  two new features that comes with Outlook 2010 search are the Search Contextual Tab in the Ribbon and the Search Suggestion List. You can customize the search options using the Outlook Search Options which can be opened from the search tools.

Below you can see the screenshot of Search in Outlook 2007 with limited options for searching in emails:

Overall Outlook 2010 is a power house of new features and will definitely change the way emails are being handled.

When using Microsoft Word, we might have created many different tables using various formatting. If you want to save this table template and use it again in another document, then Table Template Manager will help you save the table template with all the formatting. With this handy add-in for Microsoft Word you can use a table that you created as many times as you like in any number of Word documents and all the borders, cells, text will retain their formatting. Once you have installed the add-in, you can add any number of tables you have created to this add-in.

To add a new template, first create the table in word using your own formatting, cells and borders. Once you have created, select the table and then click on the Add Template button in the Addbits.com tab inside word. You will need to enter a name for the template you have created.

This will add the table you have created into the table template manager. Next time when you want to use the same table, click Table Manager button shown in the image above and this will open the table manager settings where you can select and preview the table templates saved.

You can select the table template and click add to have it on your Word document.

With Table Template Manager for Word you can;

• Create your own unique table templates collection in Word quickly and easily.
• Save the table format: borders style, colors, widths, etc.
• Save the text format, patterns, fonts and alignment of cells.
• Save a Word table with all its content or keep the table format only.
• See visually your Word table templates collection with a tree-view.
• Organize and manage your own catalogues of table templates in Microsoft Word.

With the Word Table Template Manager you can take a new table template from one Microsoft Word document and use it in another. This add-in is free for non commercial use in Word. This add-in also supports Office 2010 apart from supporting Office XP, 2003 and 2007.

Download Table Template Manager

Once you have finalized a document, you can always protect it from unnecessary or accidental editing. For this, you can mark the document as final or restrict editing for only selected authors, add an invisible digital signature or even protect sections of document. These steps will make sure that the document whenever opened and viewed will be in read only mode. To protect document and mark it as final, click on the Office button on the top left hand corner and select the info tab of the document.

Once you mark the document as final, you will not be able to modify it and Word shows a warning at the top indicating that the document is final. Apart from this, you can also protect the document with password, digital signature or restrict changes. Click on the protect document button and select the suitable options.

Today while starting Outlook 2010, it was throwing a strange error, soon after the splash screen it showed this error “Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot Open the Outlook Window”. Even after uninstalling and repairing Outlook 2010 using the Office 2010 set up, the same error occurred. Outlook failed to start even the safe mode when this error occurred (Click CTRL to open Outlook in safe mode).

This error is due to the problem with Outlook navigation panel which is failing to start and this could be due to many reasons like improper shutdown of Outlook.

How to fix this issue:

The fix to this problem depends on the issue with Outlook. You can fix this issue using the methods mentioned below.

1. Open Start menu and Click Run (Windows Key + R) and type Outlook.exe /resetnavpane. Now try opening outlook, if the issue was due to navigation panel, resetting it would solve the issue. If the issue is still not solved, try step 2.

2.  Run the Inbox Repair tool in Outlook- Inbox repair tool (Scanpst.exe) is included in the Office CD and is a tool to repair issues with Inbox personal folder (.pst) files. You can check the Microsoft KB article 272227 for more details on this.

It is most likely that you can solve this issue using Step 1.

Thanks to Microsoft answers for the tip.

We have previously discussed a feature in PowerPoint 2010 by which you can add a video from online site. Another cool feature added to PowerPoint 2010 is the ability to trim any video added to PowerPoint. You can only trim video added to PowerPoint from the local PC folder. With the trim option, you can either specify the start time and end time or use the slider to select the time. To trim the video, select the video in PowerPoint and right click on the video. You will be able to see an option “Trim Video”.

Another way to select trim is to use the ribbon. Selecting the video in PowerPoint will highlight the video tool tab in the ribbon. Inside the edit tab, you can see the option Trim Video.

When you select this option, it opens a new window from trimming video. Here you can either specify the start time or end time or use the slider to select the time.

This is very useful feature added to PowerPoint 2010 by which you can do some basic editing on your videos.

Office 2010 Technical preview was released with lots of new features in all the applications. PowerPoint also comes with new features and tools to manage your presentations better. You can add a video from any online video sharing sites like YouTube. Videos can be embedded into PowerPoint presentation so that you do not have to download videos and these videos can be played with the PC connected to Internet.

To embed a video from online site like YouTube, click on the insert tab in PowerPoint and on the right hand corner you will be able to see Video option. Click on the video option and select “Video from Online Video Site”

This will open up the window to add the embed code of the video. Copy and paste the video embed code from the website.

Click Insert button and the video will be added to your presentation. One important thing to note that, if you embedding video from online video site, you will need Internet connection to play them while showing the presentation.

The Microsoft Office Developer Center (ODC) contains a lots of great how-to articles, videos, code samples to create office solutions and these are not quickly accessible in Word 2007 and 2010. The new Office Developer resource ribbon will give access to these resources right inside the Word. It adds a new tab in the Word ribbon to get access to developer center articles. Once installed, you can see the tab “Office Developer Resource” available in Word.

This Ribbon tab provides quick access to developer sites on MSDN for Office and SharePoint, as well as a rich set or organized links to Get Started, MSDN Library, Learn, Community, Forums and Support resources that matter to Office/SharePoint developers. Apart from this, it also gives access to community sites like Facebook, Twitter, Codeplex etc directly inside the Word.

Download Developer Resources Add-in [Via]

Word 2010 comes with lots of new features like Outlook 2010. We have discussed how you can take a screenshot in Word 2010 without any third party tools. Word 2010 has another great feature called Background Removal Tool which can help you remove the background of any image inside word without any photo editing tools. You can remove background from any image in Word 2010 just with few clicks. To start using this tool, first add the image to the Word using the Insert-> Picture option or drag and drop the image to Word.

Select the image in Word 2010 and you can see the picture tools menu getting activated. Select the Picture tools tab and in the ribbon, you can see Background Removal tool.

When you select this tool, you get some additional options where you can either select some areas to be removed or areas to be included after the tool is applied on to image.

You can select areas which need to be included or removed using the Background removal tool options. Once you done with the selects, close the tool and you see the image without the background.

This tool is really useful for quick image editing and removing backgrounds from images.

One of the major changes to Office 2010 was the improvement in Outlook. Outlook 2010 includes many new features and also the inclusion of ribbon feature which was not available in Outlook 2007. We have already discussion the features available in Outlook 2010. The ribbon might not be a desirable feature for many users as it takes up lot of space on top of the screen. If you do not want to use the ribbon feature in Outlook 2010, you can always minimize it.

You can minimize the ribbon in different ways, using the option available or using the shortcut key. To minimize the ribbon, click on the arrow key near the close button of Outlook (just below). This will minimize the ribbon and only tabs will be active. When you click on any tab, the ribbon will be active for the time you are using it and it will be automatically minimized.

Apart from this you can also quickly minimize using the shortcut key CTRL + F1.

Outlook with minimized ribbon (only tabs are active)

If you want more space out of Outlook 2010, then minimizing the ribbon would be a good idea, otherwise it has lots of features worth trying out. So what is your call- with or without ribbon?