For a long time, I was using SlideShare to host PowerPoint presentations from my technical talks. After SlideShare got acquired by Scribd, the files weren't available for download anymore without a Scribd subscription. I didn't like Scribd charging visitors to give them access to my content, so I started looking for alternatives.
Recently, I've been using Word a lot and became much more familiar with many of its features. In particular, I'm working with comments and other reviewing tools. To further speed up my work as I'm getting more comfortable with the commands, I wanted to start using keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse.
If an Excel file contains links to other workbooks, Excel will offer to update the data every time you open the file. If the linked workbook doesn't exist, it will provide an option to edit the invalid link. There is an option to remove it in the dialog that opens. Unfortunately, the command silently fails in certain scenarios.
Microsoft Access is an often overlooked part of Microsoft Office, but this doesn't stop it from still playing a mission critical role in some companies. In such cases AccessFIX can be a life saver when important data gets deleted or the database gets corrupted and there's no backup available.
Since Word introduced Office Open XML (docx) file format, it became much easier to programmatically generate documents from applications without requiring Word to be installed on the machine for Word Automation to work. Unfortunately Open XML SDK doesn't work with Windows Store applications. The only alternative available for Windows Store apps at the moment seems to be DocIO from Syncfusion.
A few months ago I worked on a small spare time project which included some manipulation of binary Excel (.xls) files. This seemingly simple task soon turned out to be quite a challenge if you want to handle it right. The post you are reading is a short summary of my experiences. They should make your choices easier if you are about to tackle a similar problem.
Query parameters are a very useful Excel feature allowing parametrization of database queries used to import data in Excel. Unfortunately there is a limitation for using this functionality which turns out pretty unintuitive in Excel 2007.
Unlike Word or Excel where the location of AutoRecover files is set in the options, PowerPoint does not have such an option.
If you need cheap and simple OCR functionality Microsoft Office Document Imaging Type Library (MODI) is a nice option if its requirements (Microsoft Office 2003 or later) and limitations (limited language support) don't bother you.
Microsoft Office 2007 applications (at least Outlook and OneNote in particular) require Windows Desktop Search 3.0 to be installed for their built-in search capabilities to work fully.