There are several ways of capturing the screen using tools built into Microsoft Office 2010 programs. My favorite — and most flexible — method is using OneNote. Watch my video to see how you can take a picture of what’s on the screen and paste it into a document. (For full HD size, watch it on YouTube).

Microsoft SharePoint and Office 2010 work and play together very well. In fact, it could be hard to tell that your files are on a secure web server, rather than on your own hard drive. Here is a quick tutorial showing several ways of saving, opening and moving files around using Office and SharePoint 2010.

Happy new year! Let me start off 2011 by giving you a handy tip I’m sure you’ll like. Something that’s useful and even kind of fun: There are plenty of ways to capture part of your screen, but they usually involve messing around with dialog boxes every time or cropping out areas you don’t want, or they involve spending money on a utility. But there’s a good chance you have a better way already but don’t know it, yet.

I’m not talking about the Snipping tool in Windows 7 or the old Print Screen key. What you can do instead is press a keyboard shortcut that lets you select any rectangular area on your screen and have that selection in your clipboard. You can then paste that selection into almost any document, as I’ve done below.

What makes this work is Microsoft OneNote. If you have any edition of Microsoft Office 2010 or the Home or Enterprise edition of Office 2007, it means you have OneNote. Here’s how you set it up (you have to do this only once):

1. Start up OneNote (Select Start/All Programs/Microsoft Office/OneNote 2010 or click the Start button and search for OneNote).
2. Click the File tab, select Options, then click the Display category on the left.
3. Check the option for “Place OneNote icon in the notification area….”. If you have Office 2010, also check the option at the bottom labeled “Disable screen clipping notifications”.
   
4. Click OK.
5. If you’re using Office 2007, you need to do one more step (ignore this step if you have 2010). Look at the Notification area of your taskbar (lower-right corner of your screen, near the clock). You should see a OneNote icon that looks like this: . (You might have to click the small Up arrow to see it.) Click the icon and from the pop-up menu, select Options/Screen Clipping Defaults. Select Copy to Clipboard Only.

Now you can use it:

1. On your keyboard, press  + S. The mouse pointer will become a cross hair and the screen will gray out.
2. Now click-and-drag the cross hair over an area of your screen.
   
3. When you release the mouse button, the screen will return to normal.
4. Open up almost any program — Word, Excel, a new Outlook e-mail, a OneNote page, a Photoshop or Illustrator document — and paste (Ctrl + V). You’ll see your screen capture.
   

Back in June, I posted that if you’re running the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office, you couldn’t insert Flash movies, since the Flash player is only a 32-bit plug-in. Users of 64-bit Windows have also experienced a lot of problems when watching Flash videos, which is the format of most videos on the Web, like on YouTube, Vimeo and elsewhere.

So it was an excellent gift today when I downloaded the beta of Adobe Square, the x64 Flash player. There are actually two downloads: an ActiveX control for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office, and a plug-in for Firefox and every other browser. You’ll probably want to install both.

As soon as I did — wham! — I was able to place Flash objects into PowerPoint and Excel. On the Insert tab, select Video/Video from File.

Someone had sent me an Excel workbook that contains videos (a teaching aide that I’ll review in the near future) and originally, all I saw were blank boxes. Once I installed Square, the videos played just great. I also noticed that YouTube videos play a lot more smoothly, without jumping, jittering, starting-and-stopping. Flash player 10.1 fixed a lot of that already, but Square seems even better.

A couple of caveats: since Square is still in beta, there’s no guarantee of anything, so if you experience crashes and whatnot, don’t say you weren’t warned. Also, the beta won’t update itself automatically and you won’t get reminders to do so. It’s up to you to visit the download page every so often to update it manually. Download it here.

Microsoft always releases a new Mac version of Office one year after releasing a new Windows version of Office, and the 2011 version is now available, following Office 2010 for Windows.

The two biggest changes over Office 2008 for Mac is that Outlook now replaces Entourage as the mail/calendar/contact/task application, and macros are once again part of the team. This means you can now record, write and play macros using Visual Basic for Applications. Microsoft inexplicably removed VBA in Office 2008.

Like the 2008 version, 2011 looks and feels like a native OS X application. They didn’t try to stuff a Windows program into a Mac. So the toolbars and panels are right where you left them, and there are some cool, new features and the look and feel is updated, like Excel PivotTables:

(Click for larger image)

PC Magazine has a great slide show of screen shots from Office 2011. Take a look.