The Office Tech Pro

Permissions can become confusing in SharePoint. A few basic principles help clear the mist a little. The more complex you allow your permissions structure to become, the less secure and, ultimately, the bigger nightmare it is to administer.

One of the exercises to do while preparing for a SharePoint rollout is to think about how it can be used to answer questions that would otherwise fill up email or voice mail. A well-built company-facing team site should be a reliable resource for frequently asked questions. With a few tweaks, the Issues List app (or list template in 2010) can serve two functions: a place to record open issues or questions, and, when answered, an FAQ.

Could you use one or two dozen hours returned to you? Most people would. If you use Microsoft Word a great deal, there are opportunities to do things much faster and more accurately. Here are three ways to save time and be more accurate.

If you’ve ever inherited a workbook that has been passed down from several individuals without a lot of Excel knowledge who had a very definite idea of what they wanted, but not how to get it in the best way possible, learning opportunities abound. Here are the biggest lessons that came out of a real whopper …

One of the hardest things to do is to get people to put things in the right places. Even when you had “sub-sub-sub-sub” folders on your network drive, people still put things in the wrong spots. With the Content Organizer feature activated in your Document Center site, all they will ever have to do is upload their documents into a Drop-off library. SharePoint does all the routing based on content type and other parameters you set up. Here is how it works.

I had a great question on the Office Technology Today Answer Center free subscriber webinar. How do you manage bullet points in tables? Well, the answer wasn’t terribly easy, but it is doable.

Windows 8 boots up within 10 seconds and shuts down just as fast. All of my applications run just fine on it and much,much faster than they used to. To shut it down, click the power button in the upper right corner of your Start screen. Like shortcuts? Windows key, U, U works well. Plus, you can work with it exactly how you worked with Windows 7. Really! Read on …

If you use Categories in Outlook to identify and classify priorities or the type of work you have to do, you can work in a much less cluttered view of your Inbox. After categorizing your new items, click on the column heading called Categories.

Melissa Esquibel points out some common Excel blunders.

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There’s a little-known tool in PowerPoint called the selection pane. From the Home tab in the Drawing group, locate the Arrange drop down button. Choose Selection Pane at the bottom of the list. The order in which the objects are listed is also the front to back order of the layers. The top most item is at the top of the “stack.” The little eye icons on the right of each layer will make it visible or hide it. This makes it much easier to work with multiple objects that are layered on top of each other and revealed by animation.

Did you just inherit a mess of a document with hard breaks all over the place? Did you know that you can just do aMicrosoft Word find/replace to get rid of them? Try this!