Specifications

Ofce Fluent user interface. I wrote about the Ribbon
when the 2007 Ofce release rst came out, and
some of you already love it (while others, well, not so
much). Hopefully, those of you who’ve been working
in the 2007 release for a while now love the Ribbon
and can’t imagine ever going back to the old way.
The main purpose of the Ribbon is to make the
commands you need the most, available at your
ngertips. In earlier versions, you often had to use the
Tools | Options menus to hunt for what you needed to
do. And sometimes the command you needed wasn’t
even there, and so you had to continue your search.
With the Ribbon, everything — or mostly everything
— that you need to do is organized in logical groups.
And if the Ribbon, as it is, doesn’t provide enough
options for you, you can create a Quick Access
Toolbar, which contains any command available in
Word. It’s like your own personalized Ribbon.
Of course, as with anything else, you need to take
a little time to familiarize yourself with how the
Ribbon and the Quick Access Toolbar work. If you
don’t do that, you may nd yourself cursing these
handy helpers rather than praising them. An ounce of
prevention (training yourself and customizing your
workspace) is worth a pound of cure (the cure being
your increased efciency, of course).
Final words
And those are my four methods for making sure
you’re getting the most out of your time at work. And
I didn’t offer these so that you can work more hours
in a day, strapped to your chair in an airless room
for days on end. I want you to gure out ways you
can work smarter so that you can nish your work,
get up and out of that chair, and go on with your
life. All work and no play make Jack and Jill very
dull storybook characters (and you, one inefcient,
ineffective, and inadequate part of the workforce). A
little thought to how you can organize your time and
your tasks will save you time and frustration later on.
I suggest you give it a try.
“Do not be awestruck by other people and try to copy
them. Nobody can be you as efciently as you can.”
— Norman Vincent Peale
About the author
Annik Stahl, the Crabby Ofce Lady columnist, takes
all of your complaints, compliments, and knee-jerk
reactions to heart.
CyberLink DVD Suite 7
By Terry Currier
If you have CyberLink DVD Suite 5 or 6 and just read
the features for version 7, you would probably think
the only changes between them was that they added
support for Blu-ray discs. Well that is partly true, but
they have improved many of the things the product
does and did a good job of modernizing the interface.
My favorite part of the suite is PowerDirector now 7.0.
It makes editing your videos easy. There is a picture-
in-picture (PiP) feature which makes the video more
interesting. It’s also very easy to create a slide show
disc of digital pictures you’ve taken. There are wizards
to help you clean up video (lighten, color x), or audio
(background noise.) Want help with editing? There is
a wizard for that also, including putting a style to it.
Output it to DVD, iPod, iPhone, PSP, tape, MPEG,
AVI, or even YouTube.
The Slideshow Designer has been enhanced with more
styles to choose from. PhotoNow will let you edit