What is Microsoft Office? Office is a suite of applications which pretty much covers the whole gamut of PC services required in general office and administrative work. Typically the Office suite comprises a spreadsheet application, called Microsoft Excel, and word processing application, called Microsoft Word, and a Personal Information Manager (PIM) application, called Microsoft Outlook. There are other applications, such as a simple database application, an HTML editor and others, but for the most part, these three applications are common to all versions of the product.

There is a bit of confusion about the different options available for Microsoft Office: there?s a Small Business Edition, a Professional Edition, a Premium Edition, etc. As Earthlings, we?re probably mainly interested in the three I?ve mentioned here, and it is a perfectly legitimate and non-idiotic question, to ask your supplier which applications are included in which version of the product.

Before we get down to the good stuff, a word about Product Activation: When Microsoft Office first came out, I could buy a copy, install it, and then give the CDs to you, so you could install it. This could go on, and on. Not fair to the manufacturer, some would say. So, Microsoft introduced a system of product licensing, whereby legitimate copies of the software were delivered with a 15-or-so-character product key, which is typed in at installation time. Unfortunately, this too was open to abuse.

Thus, since Microsoft Office XP was first launched, Microsoft provide you with ?49 application initialisations?, which in English, means that they allow you to open this particular application forty-nine times before they will stop you from using it. And they do stop you ? the application will not even start if you attempt to do so fifty times. The best way to overcome this is to activate your product as soon as you can. To do this, simply wait until you?re next connected to the Internet, and open either of the Office applications, and it will prompt you to activate your product ?now?. When so prompted, say yes and wait just a few minutes for your product to be activated. If you have a legitimate product, it will activate directly with the Microsoft website and no further activity will be required.

OK. Microsoft Word: The application that is a powerful Word Processor. A word processor is simply a typewriter, whereby the letters you type appear on a screen instead of directly onto paper, and you can therefore correct any errors before printing it out. Additionally, it has immense power in terms of design and layout capabilities, which borders on desktop publishing quality. Microsoft Word is what is known as a WYSIWYG word processor (What You See Is What You Get), meaning that the way it is displayed on your computer screen, is more or less how it will appear when you print it out. This makes using Word very easy for earthlings like us. Here?s a few tips and tricks for using Microsoft Word.

Firstly, one of the most common issues with Microsoft Word is that the page-layout is not the same as the paper-type in your printer.

What that means is, you can design and type your written article on, say, Legal sized paper in Microsoft Word, but your printer is stocked with Letter sized paper. Thus, when you print out your article it will differ from what you expected according to the design on your screen. More sophisticated printers will detect the paper you are trying to print on and request that you load Legal-sized paper. This represents the single most common problem with Microsoft Word. To set your paper-type to the correct one, select ?File? ?Page Setup? from the menu-bar. There will be an option to change the paper size (which will probably be ?US Letter? or some other derivative), to whatever kind of paper your printer can take. Change to the correct type of paper and click ?apply?.

Spell-check is the next thing I want to cover. Spell-check utilises a dictionary of recognised words and, when you run it on a written article, will suggest spellings for words it does not recognise, which is very powerful, and assists greatly with proof-reading activities. Spell-check can be found under the ?Tools? menu, and is labelled ?Spelling & Grammar?.