BlogOffice

Open Em All

Am I the last Office XP user on the face of the earth to discover this? I was working in Excel this morning (one of my favorite clients wanted an update pronto! and I was scurrying to send the info via email) and I was trying to find the right document. Opened one--nope, that's not it. (Here's where I put in a plug for naming your files in such a way that you know instantly what they contain later...). Opened another one--no, that's not it either. In my rush, I was surprised to see Word open over my Excel window and I realized that I'd just selected the business plan document as opposed to the sales projection spreadsheet (same root name, different extensions). Who knew I could launch Word and open a Word document from the Excel Open dialog box? Way cool!

The moral is that if you've been minimizing applications and going to the Start menu (or clicking the desktop shortcut icon) in order to launch a different Office program, you can save yourself some wasted steps. No matter which program you're using, just choose File Open and select the file you want to use (make sure All Files is selected in the Files of Type field so you can see all the different files in the selected folder). Leave it up to Office to launch the program you need to work on the file you want. It's the little things like this that make this program so completely cool, dontcha think?