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What is Microsoft Visio used for? Diagrams. That's what Microsoft Visio does, and it does it better than any other app I've seen yet. From flow charts to floor plans, there isn't much it can't handle. Now, being honest, I didn't know much about Visio until recently. But that changed when I decided to take it for a test drive - right out of the latest Microsoft Office. Visio Templates Office 2013 - www.office.com/setup Microsoft Visio can be used to create simple or complicated diagrams. It offers a wide variety of built-in shapes, objects, and stencils to work with. You can also make your own shapes and import them if you're willing to do all that extra work. The driving idea behind Visio is to make diagramming as easy as possible for the user. I think Visio is on the right track for that! Note: Click images below to open them at Full Size. The Visio 2013 welcome screen features a dozen different templates to get you started. Each template equips you with the appropriate menu and objects already open and ready for use. Even more templates can be found in specific categories within the application, or from Visio's online download page. visio welcome screen - www.office.com/setup Visio's primary clientele have been Enterprise users at the corporate level. If you think about it, it's not too often that the home user needs to write up professional diagrams. Usually, a paper and pen will suffice because a home user's diagram isn't being sent out to an entire department. That's why Visio has always been considered a program for "serious" diagrams. But it doesn't have to be. table chart with live data - www.office.com/setup Visio can be used to create 3D map diagrams, though the built-in tools for this are limited. It works well for simple maps that you might print on a brochure or campus directory. visio map - www.office.com/setup Another thing Visio can do is pull in live information from an external source, such as an Excel shee

Whether you are a novice user of Microsoft Project 2013 or you want to learn about IT Professional or developer topics, please consider our new quick start training for Project 2013-it's free and available on demand! www.office.com/setup You get over 9 hours of content divided into 13 modules. Don't have much time? Don't worry, each module is broken down into individual videos so you can go at your own pace.

Free patterns for crochet and sewing

This article is about the importance of allowing a child to "free flow" write, and stresses the importance of allowing a child to write without the pressures of grammar, spelling, etc.

This is Billy Collins' website. At this site you can find out more about Billy Collins the former U.S. Poet Lauerate. You can listen to books and readings by Billy Collins. There is also alot of free audio downloads if you wish to do .

Free writing activities for the classroom

Free Crochet Patterns and instructions

Pogo.com is a great place to play free online games, downloadable games and win prizes.

A relatively simple, free, online handwriting analysis tool.

If you're a fan of PowerPoint, you may have heard about Microsoft's latest presentation tool, Microsoft Sway. With Sway, you can create and share presentations like never before! In today's blog, we'll give you a basic overview as to what Sway can do as well as some of our personal favorite features. Let's dive in! Sway is a free app from Microsoft Office that helps gather, format, and share reports, newsletters, web pages, and presentations on an interactive, web-based canvas that looks great on almost any screen. That's right, we said interactive! Use videos or interactive charts to engage your audience like never before.

Part of the thrill of working for the Office Division is the opportunity to tackle thorny business issues on behalf of our customers while providing them with a road map for the future. That may be why an interesting article caught my attention this week. In it, the author examined some of the investments Microsoft is making in the unified communications space. While I didn't agree with all of the conclusions it contained, the article certainly underscored the interest in communications and collaboration and how to make people more productive. Communicating and collaborating with others is really at the heart of what we do every day. Whether at work or at home, people have the need to make meaningful connections with one another. Compounding that need are the realities of the world we live in where instant access to information is expected, friends and coworkers are scattered across geographies and many adults are juggling multiple mobile devices. At Microsoft, we believe technology isn't the problem to these complexities, it's the answer. We're committed to providing capabilities that help people make sense of it all and to do so in a way that is intuitive, barrier free and agnostic to the devices on which we rely. We're incredibly proud of the fact that our long term-term vision for communications and collaboration not only marries the best of the cloud and the desktop, it's a holistic approach that spans "from the living room to the boardroom" placing people at the center of everything we do. Our communication and collaboration vision comes to life utilizing client and cloud assets, including Lync, Skype, Yammer, Outlook and SharePoint. These tools are enabling enterprise social capabilities, HD video conferencing and document collaboration as part of a highly secured, reliable and extensible platform. At the risk of looking geeky, I have to admit that I have a soft spot for Lync and it's comforting to know I'm not alone. More than 90% of

Five shows into the series, we've looked at what your options are, what's changed and what's new with the new Office. We threw skydiver Fully Sik out of a plane to test if Office 365 ProPlus could be installed during 90 seconds of free fall; we took a look at the new Office telemetry to help you optimize your Office configuration; and we've explored identity and data access with the new user-based Office and caught up with Zero Day and Trojan Horse Sci-Fi author and industry renowned cyber-security expert, Mark Russinovich on the security model for online services. We even performed the great race of Office installs. We've received a lot of your questions along the way so, for our sixth show, we changed gears to present a live 60-minute episode of the Garage Series Live! on real world adoption tips and tricks with live Q&A. If you missed the show you can see it again here.

Ever wish Word had an encyclopedia you could tap, or Excel could generate some dummy numbers? Office add-ins provide this kind of added functionality to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft Office apps. Here are some of the handiest add-ins you can install for Office 2013 and above to get more out of your office suite. We previously highlighted Office add-ins and apps for Office 2013 and earlier, but since then Microsoft has renamed "Office Apps" to "Office Add-ins". Now there are more than a handful of these plugins you can install to enhance Microsoft Office, whether you're using Office 2013 or 2016, Office Online, or Office on the iPad.

We're bringing Yammer to a city near you with Yammer on Tour-a free event series that brings together customers, partners and thought leaders for a unique opportunity to hear our vision for enterprise social, network with like-minded peers, and learn directly from customers how to usher in success in today's rapidly changing business environment. Yammer on Tour features an action-packed half-day agenda including: Keynotes and appearances by Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni and customers Breakout sessions featuring product insights and expert discussions on enterprise social success Hands-on training and certification Networking and demos from Yammer and our partners in the expo hall Join us at Yammer on Tour in the following cities: New York-April 9: Register today Chicago-April 16: Register today Dallas-May 15: Registration opening soon We look forward to seeing you at one of these events!

Remember the vintage game "Pull the Rug Out?" It is a board game where players stack different items on top of a rug. Eventually, one of the players tries to pull out the rug without tumbling the pieces stacked on top of it. Google's recent announcement that it is phasing out several additional services, including the highly popular Google Reader, reminded me of this game, as I recall that the stack most always toppled to the ground. Google introduced Google Reader, gradually built up its popularity, and then pulled the rug out with little warning, causing its customers to stumble. As one Google customer put it: "Google spends millions of wasted dollars on pet projects, then kills one of their best products on a whim." Google's most recent spring cleaning brings the total number of services it has discontinued to 70 in just a year-and-a-half. That's right-a whopping 70 services that have been shut down in just 18 months. Among the services Google will discontinue with little warning is Google Cloud Connect, introduced with a lot of fanfare just two years ago. Cloud Connect is a plug-in that enables Google users to share and edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. To continue collaborating with Microsoft Office, Google users have just four weeks to uninstall Cloud Connect and install Google Drive. Companies that can't get to it by April 30 will be out of luck, leaving them without a way to collaborate on Office documents used by millions of employees, partners, and customers. But of all the services Google is discontinuing this time, the one that's drawing the biggest backlash is Google Reader, a service used by hundreds of thousands of users to keep track of their favorite websites and blogs via RSS feeds. The news of Google Reader's shut down drew outrage from users, who put together a petition demanding that Google reinstate the service. "Our confidence in Google's other products - Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus - requ

It's possible to save your Word 2016 document in the Adobe Acrobat document format, also known as a PDF file. This type of electronic publishing is secretly a form of printing your document. Obey these steps: Finish your document. Yes, that includes saving it one last time. Press Ctrl+P to summon the Print screen. Click the Printer button. A list of available printers appears. Choose Microsoft Print to PDF. Click the Print button. Nothing is printed on paper, but the document is "printed" to a new PDF file. That requires the use of the special Save Print Output As dialog box. Choose a location for the PDF file. Use the dialog box's controls to locate the proper folder. Type a filename. Click the Save button. The PDF file is created. The original document remains in the Word window, unchanged by the print-to-PDF operation. You need a copy of the Adobe Reader program to view PDF files. Don't worry: It's free. Word 2016 document files are considered a standard. Therefore, it's perfectly acceptable to send one of your document files as an email attachment or make it available for sharing on cloud storage.

Forms are the cornerstone of business applications, and plenty of options exist to create a form in SharePoint. Which one you use will depend on your needs, technical skill and the version of SharePoint you are using. In this article we'll explore seven ways to build forms in SharePoint along with some of the pros and cons of each. All these options will be storing the data in an existing SharePoint list. SHAREPOINT LISTS Default forms are available for any SharePoint list. Create a list and you have a corresponding form to add and modify items. Options are available to organize the order of fields, format them, validate input, add basic calculations and attach files. There are also more advanced options such as limiting permissions to item owners and enabling workflows. You can modify all of these under List Settings for the list. These generic SharePoint forms are a good choice for simple applications that don't have too many columns or records and that only require basic functionality. Lists also offer a data sheet view to edit a limited set of columns, much like a spreadsheet. What you see is what you get with these basic forms. If you need to break fields up into multiple tabs, or perhaps have business logic run on them in real time, you'll need to keep on reading. And although theoretically a list can store millions of items, you can only access up to 5,000 items in any view (in reality the numbers are far lower before performance degrades considerably). Basic Sharepoint list form - www.office.com/setup SHAREPOINT DESIGNER Creating a custom form in SharePoint Designer is relatively easy. You take an existing SharePoint list and use Designer to create a new .aspx page which renders and controls the form. There are files used by a list to create forms, one each to add, edit and view. These are located in the same folder as their associated SharePoint list. With Designer you can show or hide fields based on certain criteria, change the layout, use va

WHAT IS MICROSOFT PROJECT? www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft Project is a flexible tool for project portfolio management (PPM) and daily work, delivered through Office 365. The first place in this category of products is held by Wrike which has a total score of 9.8/10 and is the winner of our Best Project Management Software Award for 2016. You can try out Wrike for free here. You can also compare Microsoft Project with Wrike and see which one is better for your company. Microsoft Project enables businesses to get started, manage project portfolio investments, and deliver successfully with the intended business value. Microsoft Project Professional gives businesses a powerful, visually enhanced way to efficiently manage a wide range of their projects and programs. From meeting important deadlines, to choosing the right resources and empowering your office teams, Project Professional delivers new as well as intuitive experiences to plan, manage, and collaborate with various individuals, teams, and the enterprise.

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft Office www.office.com/setup Blogs: Windows 10 has grabbed the attention of social media and customers alike more so because it is a crucial operating system for Microsoft after the debacle of Windows 8 and a not so great reception for Windows 8.1. But, Microsoft has another major product on their cards now, Office, which enhances the Windows productivity of five major products into a system of applications. With Office 2016, Microsoft plans to build from scratch, a mobile and cloud first approach which is customer centric and doesn't only focus on web compared to Office 365 and 2013. Office 2016 has recently been launched on September 22, 2015. www.office.com/setup The Cost factor The first and the most important thing we look at during major software products and updates is the price tag that comes along with it as there are so multiple updates for major software and it is not feasible to go through each and every revision. The all new Office 2016 suite is free for customers on mobile and tablets (conditions apply) and pretty cheap at $145 for "Office Home & Student 2016" and the RRP version of the same is priced at $165, along with subscription version of the suite (Office 365 Personal) at about $70 per year. Built for collaboration Office suite has changed how businesses operate and more focus is laid on connectivity and collaboration of projects. So, the latest offering from Microsoft, Office 2016 is emphasized on collaborations among spread out team members who may never work in the same office environment, but easily enhance productivity by accomplishing a major task that took a week to get it done. Touch centric user interface If you have used the Office for Windows 10, it is quite evident that Microsoft has given a universal app style for the apps and a touch friendly UI which is more familiar to the iPad owners. For instance, in Word, Microsoft lays focus on providing touch friendly controls for ease of

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Good Morning America's newest segment, "Boosting Your Business," sponsored by Microsoft Office, provides entrepreneurs with simple tips and tools to help grow their businesses. In this first segment, Good Morning America brought in Carol Roth, a small business expert and host of Microsoft's Office Small Business Academy, to visit a popular Chicago salon. Living out the American dream, Goran Cobanovski opened his own hair salon after arriving in the U.S. from Macedonia, where his flagship location now employs a team of 18 people and serves up to 50 clients a day. Carol gives Goran advice on employee engagement, delegating responsibilities and scheduling appointments. She shows him how Microsoft Bookings can make front-desk scheduling run more efficiently-creating happier customers. Microsoft Bookings is a new service as part of Office 365 that allows customers to book appointments online directly through your website or Facebook page. Unique vision and unquestionable talent made Goran's dream his reality. Microsoft Office will give him more free time to enjoy it. Register for the Office Small Business Academy webcast series to get more tips and tricks to help you start, grow and manage your business.