Don’t miss that important Microsoft Outlook email!

August 31, 2011
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If you want special alerts for important emails – messages from a particular sender or with certain text in the subject, for example – then you’ll want to know how to set up Rules in Outlook. The Rules feature can examine your incoming mail and alert you to anything that you’ve told it is important, either with a special sound, a flag, or a pop-up box. Click through for the full illustrated tutorial.

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When just the page number won’t do

August 30, 2011
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When you have to have a page number formatted with text (like “C-1 of 3″), then you need a working knowledge of how to insert the various page number fields in Microsoft Word. Here’s a tutorial using a real-life situation: an appellate brief with a specially numbered “Certificate of Interested Parties” section.

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Weekly Roundup: Double-double emails from Gmail

August 29, 2011
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In this week’s Roundup, stop getting double “sent” emails when synchronizing your Gmail account with Outlook with this tip. And if you hate spam, then stop encouraging it by taking these three basic precautions (they really do work). Click through for links to the full articles.

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Reader question: Page number macro misfire

August 26, 2011
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A Legal Office Guru reader has an “insert page number” macro that works just fine … until he logs off. How I solved his dilemma.

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How to do a Table of Authorities, Part 1: Marking citations

August 25, 2011
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If the thought of doing a Table of Authorities in your next brief gives you the willies, you’ll appreciate this series of posts. In Part One, I tell you a little about the Table of Authorities feature and show you how to mark citations in your brief so they can be included (and correctly formatted) in your Table of Authorities.

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How to modify a Table of Contents in Microsoft Word

August 24, 2011
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If your automatically-generated Table of Contents in Microsoft Word isn’t to your liking, you can fix it. From changing fonts to adjusting spacing and indentation, it’s all about modifying the TOC Styles within your document. Click through to view the entire tutorial, complete with screen shots showing each step.

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Why I use web video as a teaching tool

August 23, 2011

Legal Office Guru’s peculiar conceit is its use of web video as a teaching tool. Truth be told, I stumbled on it quite by accident a couple of years ago, and it turns out that what I found to be true about the power of video as a teaching tool is what the founder of Khan Academy, Salman Khan, also found when he started uploading math tutorials to YouTube for his cousins. Check out this cool video of Khan talking about how video is uniquely powerful for teaching new skills. Inspirational stuff.

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Weekly Roundup: Signature lines, Out of Office, shortcut keys

August 22, 2011
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This week’s Roundup of Microsoft Office tips from other blogs: better signature lines, where the heck Outlook’s Out of Office is hiding, and some shortcut key love from South Africa.

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Guest post @ Lawyerist: Using Microsoft Word Styles

August 22, 2011
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How my recent “primer” on Microsoft Word’s Styles feature over on the Lawyerist blog has turned into a series … and how your documents can benefit.

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Guest Post @ Lawyerist – Microsoft Word Text Selection Tricks

July 26, 2011
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There’s more to selecting a block of text – to copy, delete, or format – than just dragging your mouse from one end to another. Click through to read about more text selection tricks that can make document editing easier (including how to copy vertical columns of data in Microsoft Word documents).

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Guest Post @ Lawyerist – Quick Access to Microsoft Word Commands

July 12, 2011
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In this guest post at Lawyerist, I explain how to save your most frequently used commands on the Quick Access Toolbar and/or in a keyboard shortcut key. Click through for a link to the full post.

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Guest Post @ Attorney at Work – Handy Keyboard Tricks

July 5, 2011
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If typing speed is important to you, you want to minimize the amount of time you spend reaching for the mouse to access common commands like font formatting, paragraph justification, etc. Learn a few critical hotkeys (key combinations that give you instant access to commands you’d otherwise have to click through the menu system to use), and your typing speed (and productivity) can increase dramatically.

Microsoft Word’s got tons of hotkeys, but over on the Attorney at Work blog, I’ve listed what I think are some of the most important for increasing your typing and editing speed. Memorize two or three of these at a time, use them enough to make them second-nature, then go back to the list to pick up a couple more.

Click through for a link to the full post.

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Guest Post @ Legal Practice Pro – 3 Formatting Diagnostic Tools

June 30, 2011
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If you’ve ever wondered why *this* paragraph looks a little different from *that* one, or couldn’t figure out how to get some text you’ve inserted into a document to just behave, you need some serious formatting diagnostic tools. Fortunately, in Microsoft Word, there are several available to help with both diagnosing and fixing these head-scratchers.

In my recent guest post on Legal Practice Pro, I show you three indispensable tools for not only figuring out what’s wrong, but leading you to precisely the right menu option to fix the problem. The post includes instructions on setting these up so that whenever you encounter a formatting issue, you can know, at a glance, what’s required to fix it.

Click through for a link to the entire article.

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