Helping legal professionals get the most from Microsoft Office

0 Guest Post @ Lawyerist: Get Reveal Codes in Microsoft Word with CrossEyes

Hands-down, the number one complaint I get from former WordPerfect users is, “But Word doesn’t have Reveal Codes!” And, to a point, that’s true.

But as my ongoing (really, never-ending) research in the wonderful world of Microsoft Office plug-ins (a.k.a. add-ins or extensions) has shown me, it’s often a case of “seek and ye shall find.” Because there are a lot of enterprising programmers out there adding heretofore unavailable features to Microsoft Office.

Specifically, for Reveal Codes, there’s CrossEyes. And if you want to get a gander at what this plug-in can do, click here to read my review on Lawyerist.

0 Guest Post @ Lawyerist: Searching Microsoft Outlook with Lookeen

If you’ve ever been frustrated when attempting to search for an email you just know you received (or all the calendar items or tasks that have a particular party’s name in them, etc.), you may appreciate my latest guest post at Lawyerist. It’s a review of Lookeen (version 8), a popular search plug-in for Microsoft Outlook that not only searches Outlook .pst files (a.k.a. where all your Outlook data is stored), but can also be configured to search selected folders on your computer.

Click here to see the full review.

0 Guest Post @ Lawyerist: Review of Smart Schedules for Outlook

Have you ever had an event on your calendar — an upcoming trial or a recent case assignment — that you needed to create a bunch of preceding (in the case of the trial) or following (for the case assignment) Tasks and/or Appointments in Outlook? If you could automate the creation and management of those related Tasks and Appointments (ever had a trial continued and had to move a bunch of related deadlines forward by X days?), how much time would that save you?

In my latest guest post on Lawyerist, I review a product called Smart Schedules for Outlook that does just that. You tell Smart Schedules what the triggering date or event is and, based on a template (either Smart Schedules’ delivered templates or one of your own), all the related Tasks and Appointments (or, as they call them, “events”) will be created for you. You can even edit individual Tasks or Appointments without disturbing the “project” (what Smart Schedules calls the set of inter-related events) and assign certain ones to other members of your team.

Click here for the full illustrated review.

0 Guest Post @ Lawyerist: Microsoft Office on iPad

If you’ve got an iPad and are frustrated by Microsoft’s failure to (thus far) create an Office app for iOS, I’ve reviewed several possible alternatives on my guest post on Lawyerist, “Microsoft Office on iPad.” Some are, frankly, better than others; some are free while others require a subscription.

Find out how you can edit your Microsoft Office files on your iPad by clicking here.

0 Software Review @ Lawyerist: Email Notes for Outlook

Have you ever wanted to add a note to an email without having to print it out and write on it? If so, you’re in luck: over at Lawyerist, I reviewed a new Microsoft Outlook plug-in called Email Notes. It’s like putting an electronic sticky note on an item in your inbox.

This piece of software is part of a new trend of developers offering ways to add functionality to Microsoft Office. Click here for a complete review of this plug-in (with screenshots) and see if it will help make Outlook work better for you.

2 Reader Question Follow-Up: Synchronizing Outlook with SynchPst

You may remember the Reader Question from a few weeks back involving synchronizing Microsoft Outlook information between two computers. I posted a list of possible solutions courtesy of Outlookipedia (and the comments to the post also contained some great suggestions, including using IMAP rather than POP3 email).

I also continued to follow up with this reader behind the scenes to see if I could find a better solution for this dilemma. I’m happy to report we did.

The developers of SynchPst (one of the solutions listed in the Outlookipedia article) contacted me and, after some back-and-forth via emails among the three of us, they consented to allow this reader to try a copy of their software free.

Here’s the reader’s review (edited for length as indicated by the ellipses):

Keep reading →

2 Converting from WordPerfect to Word: Getting rid of WP watermarks

A friend of mine was about to tear her (expensively and enviably coiffed) hair out the other day — she’d copied over some text from an old Wordperfect document into Word to start a new document, but for some reason couldn’t get rid of the DRAFT watermark.

It’s not like she didn’t know how to delete watermarks in Word; all you have to do (in Word 2007, which is what she’s working with) is go to the Page Layout tab, click on the Watermark button, and choose Remove Watermark at the bottom of the menu.

But she did that … and there was STILL this big ol’ word DRAFT stuck behind the text! Like so:

If you’ve either retrieved or copied your old WordPerfect documents into Word as a conversion method (something I suggested in an earlier post), you may have run across a similar situation. Here’s why it’s so messed up.