Monday, October 15, 2001		Article

Office XP for digital album
Vipul Verma

WHAT you never thought possible earlier is now a reality with the help of computers. The world of computers is amazing as the kind of applications that you can perform could be far beyond your imagination. Moreover, with further introduction of the new and latest technologies, the vistas have widened further. The latest significant addition to the world of computers is Microsoft's Office XP. It is worth mentioning here that Windows XP as well as Office XP are going to redefine the way we work on computers. These products from the Microsoft's stable are truly of next generation of operating system and application program and have a lot of added features that can add a lot of power to the day-to-day working. Moreover it is also your ideal companion to keep pace with the digital technology.

Digital revolution that was once considered to be a high-end technical concept is now a household affair as most of the gadgets as well as technologies are going digital. Using Office XP, you can bring the digital revolution to home by creating a digital photo album easily by following a simple trick.

All you need to do is use Microsoft PowerPoint. For creating a photo album, open PowerPoint and on the insert menu click on picture and then click on new photo album. This will open the photo album dialogue box on your screen. In this box, choose to add pictures from your storage media by hard disk, CD-ROM, Floppy etc. or even a digital device like a digital camera, scanner etc. Then under the insert picture menu, click on File>Disk and then search the folder or disk that contains the pictures that you would like to use in your photo album. You can add as many pictures you want in your photo album by following the same procedure mentioned above.

Once you have selected the pictures, select a layout for the photo album from the various options available. Now click create and your digital photo album will be created instantly. The photo album so created is quite flexible and can be edited for adding or deleting for photos at any point of time by simply using the format photo album dialogue box under the format menu.

Moving beyond the digital mania, Office XP is power-packed for the common Office applications like Microsoft Word. In Word 2002, you can customise the grammar and writing style as per your needs. Normally, in today's world, the strict rules of language are being replaced by the language of common use, where grammar and other rules are not been followed strictly and slangs and phrases are more often used. In all such cases, Office XP can prove to be convenient.

Thus, using Word in Office XP, you can easily define your own rules of grammar and style that you would like to use in your documents and elsewhere. Moreover, you can also define the parameters to be automatically incorporated in the normal way. For example, you can customise world for providing only one space between sentences or a comma before the last item in a list or any other rules of parameters, which meet your specific requirement can be customised.

In order to go in for customisation grammar and writing style, click on the Tools menu and then click Options. Now click the Spelling and Grammar tab and then click settings. In the Writing style box, select whether you want to customise settings for grammar and style or grammar only. In the Grammar and style options box, do one or both of the following as per your requirement. Under require, select the options you want for serial commas, punctuation within quotation marks and number of spaces between sentences. Under Grammar and Style, select or clear the check boxes next to the rules you want the grammar checker to check or ignore. Following this procedure you can customise Word as per your need. If you wish to restore the original settings and rules, then you can do so by simply clicking on Reset all.

Microsoft Office has always been synonymous to convenience. Office XP is a step further as it provides a lot of other features, which makes working in office much easier. Moreover, if you also know some shortcuts, then working in Windows could become much easier. These shortcuts can prove helpful accessing the common dialog box used in Microsoft Word. These shortcuts are also handy references to words features. Some of the main shortcuts are mentioned below, but before you use them make sure that the ruler must be displayed. This shortcut is for opening the Page Setup dialog box and can be activated by double-clicking the ruler margin.

Similarly by double-click an indent marker you can open the Paragraph dialog box. You can also double-click a tab stop to open the Tabs dialog box. Moreover when working with a document in multiple-column format, double-click the grey region that separates one column from another to open the Columns dialog box. There are many other valuable short cuts and keyboard functions, which can make working in Microsoft Word 2002 easy. However in order to use them, you will have to explore the Microsoft Word 2002 first.

With the Internet reaching the masses across boundaries and borders, the interaction between persons across the globe has increased to a great extent. However, despite the fact that there has been an effective medium to communicate, the problem of language still persists. However now there's a solution to this problem in the Microsoft Office 2002. The Microsoft Office 2002 has a great feature of translation in languages other than English. Thus, using Word 2002 you can translate a word, phrase or even a whole document to another language by simply using the translate task pane. In order to use this feature, click on the Tools menu and then click on language and then click translate. This is a great feature of Word 2002, as you can use this feature for many practical purposes, including easy references to complete dictionary support and the translation. You can even add text from different languages in a single document. However, you may not find this feature as a default setting for most of the languages and thus you will have to install support for other languages separately.