Microsoft Office products are among the best tools in any professional’s toolkit and with every release Microsoft improves on the functionality and ease with which you can create, distribute and save information. With 2007 once you get past the foreign ribbon layout I believe you will find a really robust system that fixes a lot of the gripes and complaints that users have had over the years.

Well my favorite fix is that you can now save your documents as PDF files without shilling out a lot of money for Adobe Acrobat or messing freeware offerings such as cutepdf or primopdf. Instead of setting up a print driver you can actually save directly to the pdf file format which is awesome if you have ever had to go through the pain printing 30 pages individually and binding them all into a single pdf file because adobe ran out of memory while printing.

Setting it up could not be easier:

1. First Download and install the 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS.
2. From any Office program (Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007 etc.) click the Office button in the top left corner.
3. Select Save As.
4. Choose PDF.
5. Select either Standard (publishing online and printing) or Minimum size (publishing online).
6. Click Publish and you’re done.

If your using Office 2003 or below I would suggest you check out either cutepdf or primopdf.

- Mark Flavin

Between monitoring servers, checking email, and just surfing the internet I find that I quickly run out of screen real estate so for me multiple monitors are a must have. However multiple monitors have their drawbacks for instance one monitor has the taskbar and the other monitor has only whatever windows you drag onto it.  

Enter UltraMon, frankly after only a couple days of using UltraMon I can’t imagine running multiple monitors without it.  There are ton of features to UltraMon and to be honest I am still exploring the program but some of the best ones I will describe below.

First, I love being able to easily stretch a single wallpaper across the monitors.

The next thing I love about UltraMon is a feature called smart taskbar which essentially extends your taskbar across both monitors and clearly identifies which program belongs to which monitor. This makes it much easier to switch back and forth between programs without hunting for the window which you minimized.

Another really cool feature is Mirroring, Ultramon will allow you to show the exact same screen to two or monitors. This could be really useful for presentations or if you are sharing a document with a client who is across from you or if you would like to show your desktop on a TV mounted behind you (a broker asked me to help him set this up).

The last feature I really like about UltraMon is that it lets you quickly move programs between monitors by right clicking on the window title. UltraMon will also allow you to maximize any window across all monitors which can be really helpful when working with large images.

As I said there are a many more features to this program but if you are using or plan on using multiple monitors I would definitely recommend that you give UltraMon a try. 

-Mark Flavin