Software School Design and Training
Software trainer, published author, web and multimedia developer

Archive for March, 2011

Restore Office’s ability to send documents in the body of an e-mail

Friday, March 11th, 2011

Here’s a tip from an anonymous person who left feedback on one of my Excel courses.

Older versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint had two ways of e-mailing the document you were editing, using Outlook for e-mail: either sending the document as an attachment or inserting it into the body of an e-mail.

For some reason, Microsoft removed the second option from Office 2007 and 2010. Here’s how to put it back — either on the Ribbon bar or on the Quick Access Toolbar. The technique is similar in both the 2007 and 2010 versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

  1. In one of the 2010 programs, right-click the Ribbon bar and from the pop-up menu, choose either Customize the Ribbon or Customize Quick Access Toolbar.
    Right-click menu
  2. OR: in either one of the 2007 or 2010 programs, click the down arrow on the end of the Quick Access Toolbar and select More Commands. (You can customize the Ribbon in 2010, but not in 2007.)
    Customize QAT
  3. Click the drop-down list at the top and select Commands Not in the Ribbon.
    Drop-down list
  4. Scroll down and choose Send to Mail Recipient.
    Send to mail recipient
  5. Click the Add button to insert it on the QAT, or in 2010, you can also insert it into a custom group on the Ribbon. (You can add items to groups that you create, but not to any of the built-in groups. Watch my video on customizing the Ribbon.).
    Add
  6. Click OK to close the dialog.
  7. Now when you have a document open, click the button you just inserted.
    Send button
  8. The top of the document will get mail fields like To and Subject. This is not a separate Outlook message — you’re still in Word, Excel or PowerPoint.
    Top of screen
  9. If you click the button again, without sending, the mail fields disappear and the screen returns to normal.

Note that this works if you have Outlook. It will not work with web-based mail like Gmail.



YouTube and Vimeo now supporting HTML 5

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

If you’re on YouTube or Vimeo and click an Embed button to get the code to embed a video on your site or on your blog, you might notice something new: the code they give you is a simple 1-line iframe, rather than the long, complicated object and embed tags.

Years ago, people predicted that iframes would go the way of the dodo, but developers still find them useful. The reason YouTube and Vimeo are now using them is that the iPad and iPhone don’t support Flash, and that’s the format these videos are coded in. But when you insert an iframe, the video sharing service can insert something more compatible. The iframe code also has the advantage of being a lot more simple, and it’s easier to re-size the video to fit your web page.

If you still need the old method for backwards compatibility, both sites let you click a button to get the legacy code.