Start with a blank Word document. Place your title at the top. Generally you will want to center it. Click Insert then Shapes on the Ribbon and select a shape in the Flowchart section of the shape menu. Word 2010 users switch to Insert and select a shape from the Shapes menu under Illustrations.

You then use the plus-shaped cursor to position and choose the size of the shape. It will be apparent how it looks once you let go of the mouse button. You can alter the position by left clicking the shape and moving it.

There are numerous options for linking the shapes on the flow chart. In this demonstration, an arrow will be used. You want to get the basic design established before concerning yourself with graphic effects.

Here is where you can choose the arrow. You can create a new shape to link the arrow to or you can copy the shape you started with. Here the shape is copied.

Just copy and paste and drag the shape to the desired position. Familiarize yourself with the different shapes and position adjustments. All you have to do is select shapes, size and position them, copy them if needed and link them together. Take 20 minutes or so and just play around until you feel comfortable with it. Now it is time to start adding text. Right click a given box and select Add Text then start typing. Adjust the font if necessary.

When the chart is outlined and the text is added, you can begin working with some graphic effects to make the flowchart attractive. Go to the format tab on the Ribbon. Word 2010 users only need to select a shape to automatically get the Format tab in their software.

Click on the shape in the flowchart and then select a color from the Format color chart, click on the color and the shape takes on that color.

Shadow and 3D effects can be added. From the Format tab on the Ribbon, find the 3D effects and click on a shape then click on “3D effects” and select effects from the dropdown menu. Click on the effect and the shape takes on that effect.

Use the Format tab to add shadow effects and change shapes and other effects. You can also use Smart Art. These are pre-designed graphic layouts that allow you to insert professional looking content without being a graphic designer. Select Smart Art from the Insert tab on the Ribbon and pick a design.

Here is what you can come up with after entering the text and changing the colors on the template design.

There is much more that you can do. This gives a basic idea of the procedure for those with no experience making flowcharts in Microsoft Word. You will be a pro in no time.

Microsoft’s reaction is a Word patch that is being delivered to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office users in the United States. The patch has been made available to Microsoft partners and original equipment manufacturers since October 2009 as a Microsoft Office Supplement Release. It is assumed that Microsoft will add the patch to Windows Update and Microsoft Update so that users in the United States will be supplied with the patch as well.

But what exactly is removed from Microsoft Word? Once the patch is delivered Word will not be able to handle custom XML elements in supported files, a feature that is not used by the majority of Word users as its usually used with server based processing of Word documents. In short: The patch will not affect the majority of end users at all. And if they are using custom xml they can still prevent the patch from being downloaded and installed on their computer system so that the functionality remains.

The Word 2007 Redaction Tool has been designed as an add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 to redact text and images in documents before they are shared with other users. The add-in will add a Redact group in the Review tab which can be used to control the process.

To redact text a user would select the text that should be redacted. The next step would be to click on the Mark option in the Redact group in the Word Review tab. This will mark the text by highlighting it. It is also possible to use the Find and Mark command to automatically highlight all instances of a phrase in the Word document. It is possible to review the document at any time before redacting the highlighted text by selecting the Redact Option under the Mark group in the Review tab.

The whitespace character length of each word is altered by 10% (in either direction) to make it harder to guess the correct words. The developer recommends to inspect the metadata of the document to ensure that these do not contain information that could leak the redacted information.

The Word 2007 Redaction Tool can be downloaded from the profile page at Codeplex. It requires the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and the VSTO 3.0 Runtime Service Pack 1 which will be automatically installed should they be missing on the computer system.

Damaged Docx 2 Txt and Corrupt Xlsx 2 Csv are two portable software programs for the Windows operating system that can recover data from corrupt Microsoft Excel 2007 and Microsoft Word 2007 documents. The programs require the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0. Both programs have been developed by the same software developer and work therefor similar. The user has to load a Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word document into the program in the first step. This can take a while depending on the size and complexity of the document.

All accessible worksheets or pages will be displayed in the program’s interface after the document has been analyzed by the software program.

The data of one or all Excel worksheets can then be exported into a Csv file. A similar process is applied to Word documents which can be exported into the Txt format. Both programs only work with the Office 2007 Word and Excel formats and not the former standard formats. They can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

Currently only students from the United States, Australia, Mexico and Taiwan are eligible. They also need a valid email address from the educational institute and be able to provide proof of enrollment if requested. Office Ultimate 2007 contains all Office 2007 applications in one package, including the obvious Word 2007, Excel 2007, Powerpoint 2007 but also rather exotic or lesser known applications like InfoPath 2007 or Groove 2007.

The interesting aspect of this new offer is that there are three additional products that will be available from September 8 on. Those are Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade for $64.95, Office Language Packs 2007 for $9.95 and Office Visio Professional 2007 for $55.95.

There is also good news for students from other countries. Microsoft plans to provide them with the same deal. Countries currently listed include United Kingdom, Canada, Italy and France. Students should check with the IT department at their University because they sometimes provide them with even better deals.

The so called Article Authoring Add-in is a Microsoft Word 2007 add-in that is currently supplied as a beta version on the official Microsoft homepage. The add-in enhanced the authoring of scientific and technical articles by providing the ability to read and write files from Word 2007 into the XML format used by the National Library of Medicine for archiving articles in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature and PubMed Central.

Information on the Microsoft website is sparse but from the information provided it looks like a niche add-in targeting “the staff of scientific and technical journals, Information Repositories, and early adopters within the scholarly authoring community, as well as developers of publishing solutions and workflows”.

Microsoft is offering a plugin on their homepage that adds pdf support to Office 2007 adding PDF as one of the options in the Save As dialog. That’s probably the most effective way to add support for PDF documents to Microsoft Office 2007.

The plugin can only be downloaded if you have a genuine Microsoft Office 2007. The check will be made before the download link for the plugin becomes available.

Some users prefer to remove the Recent Documents altogether for several reasons. Maybe the computer is used by more than one user and the profile is shared – believe me that seems to happen a lot of times in families – or if you borrow someone a computer without creating a new profile for him or, my favorite, if you want to eliminate the chance that someone could see the Recent Documents on your computer at work.

The amount of Recent Documents that are shown can be changed in the Word options (Excel options..). You can access them from the same menu. Click on the big Office button in the upper left corner and select the Word Options button which is located right under Recent Documents.

Click on the Advanced tab in the right menu and scroll down – way down – until you find the Display part of the settings. There is an entry entitled “Show this number of Recent Documents” and a number next to it. If you change that number to 0 Microsoft Office 2007 will not remember the last used documents and will not display them in the Recent Documents pane anymore.

The Recent Documents entries should get reduced immediately which means that you do not have to manually delete them. But, a big one, this is only valid for the application where you changed it. So, if you change the number of Recent Documents that are shown in Word 2007 you will only reduce it for Word 2007 and not for Excel 2007, Powerpoint 2007 and all the other applications.

There is no global way to handle this which means that you will have to open each application once and change the Recent Documents setting for this application.