To my long-time, short-time, or maybe even first-time Crabby Office Lady readers:

After nearly 10 years writing the Crabby Office Lady columns, blog, podcasts, videos and more, it's time to try something new. This is Crabby's last post. However, I'm not really going away. In fact, my role is expanding. From here on you'll find me writing under my own name, Annik Stahl, on the Outlook blog for starters. You'll also find me writing for the other Office blogs and for Office.com about selected topics and events.

As Crabby, there's so much I'd like to say here...and much I can't say here because of space and emotion. The jist of it is thank you.

Here's more information about what's happening to my posts and columns, and how to follow my work as Annik from here on...  

Last Thursday, my colleague, Holly, wrote about some of the new and updated features coming with Office for Mac 2011: Excel Sparklines, PivotTables, photo editing, and some other stuff.

Today I want to focus to sparklines (for the PC; I'll address this for the Mac when it's all ready for the prom).

First of all, I like the name; you don't really hear of developers giving groovy, trendy, fabulous monikers to software features—particularly for data-related, spreadsheet features. And secondly, sparklines are such a great idea when you're someone who plays show-and-tell with important data...

Publisher has a lot in common with Word. Both have to do with text, images, and complicated types of formatting. But consider this: You wouldn't use a hedge clipper to trim your precious baby's toenails, now, would you? So when you're creating posters, greeting cards, catalogs and brochures, or any sort of branded marketing materials, there's only one way to go: Publisher — it's made for these sorts of jobs.

I've always found that working in Publisher is really more like playing: All those fonts, all those design templates, the images I can move around to wherever I want, the colors, the borders, the effects...

Publisher 2007 added some really great new features:  Email merge, the Content Library, and being able to save your publications in the PFD and XPS format, were a few features that were new to that version. Publisher 2010 has taken some of these features even further to make them easier to use and dare I say...more fun ,too.

Some things we just can't do without in life: love, friendship, a bathroom door that locks. With Office, the same is true: Some features should not be overlooked. Today I'll list five features that I think should come as second nature to you to use: the Bcc box, revision marks, AutoCorrect, AutoArchive, and security.

Friday I'll give you five more (because you love this sort of thing and because that's just how I roll).

Last week I wrote about what accessibility is and who it's for, and this past Monday I talked about what accessibility features are already available to you in Windows. 

For today's post (which is the last one in this series) I'm going to give you a snapshot of what accessibility features and technologies are available Office and also how and why to make your documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other Office files accessible to ALL people.

PowerPoint 2007 enables you to embed only the specific characters actually used in the presentation, (which is baggage you packed yourself).

See, when you embed a font into your presentation, the file size grows by as much as the font file (which is usually a lot — some of the new Unicode fonts are monsters). This means you are carrying umlauts and italics you don't use.

Read the full post to find out how to do this; embedding just the characters you used will cut down on the size by quite a bit.

For Wednesday's post, I offered up five useful features that I feel you should know about and use. Today I want to continue that list but I want to dig a little deeper into a few programs to uncover some features that, while useful and neat-o, may be underutilized (by you, by me, by the public at large).

So let's get crackin' and expose some of these things so that we can start using them...pronto!

Knowing how to compile all your data into one huge Excel spreadsheet is one thing; making sense of it is another. Let's get an overview of PivotTables, those flexible little contortionists of the data world.

Read the full post to learn more about PivotTables. There is simplicity and beauty in them— no, really!

(And be sure to read my column Pivot, swivel & roll: Data management with the stars)

As you can imagine, I, Crabby Office Lady, have a long, LONG list of things that chafe me, people who annoy me, and behavior I can't abide. But what's worse is when those three irritants come together and it's ME who's the guilty party.

When I came in this morning and saw that I had 326 emails in my inbox, I dug right in, starting at the bottom and working my way up, which is the totally, absolutely, and irrevocably WRONG way to do this. Why? Because if I start popping off knee-jerk replies and retorts, how do I know there hasn’t been a more recent change/reaction/addendum to the various conversations I'm replying to?

See, if I’m responding to an older message, chances are, someone else had the same opinion as me, sent it out there and then everyone discussed it resolved it. But ME! I've opened up a can of worms by just jumping in there willy-nilly, not taking the time to figure out how this particular topic has progressed. Well, how could I have known that there was more to this conversation?

How indeed, Crabby. Here's an easier/safer/appropriate tack to take when considering into an in-progress email thread: Group all the messages within a conversation. Read on, o' impetuous ones.

Since I'm going to be writing some accessibility-related posts in the coming weeks and today is the first of that series, I want to refresh your brains about (or maybe tell you for the first time) what "accessibility" means in the context of computing.

Everyone sees, hears, feels, and maneuvers around the world differently. Very few of us have 20/20 vision, perfect hearing, and 100-percent use of every single part of our bodies. In fact, among adult computer users in the United States, 1 in 4 has a vision difficulty, 1 in 4 has a dexterity difficulty, and 1 in 5 has a hearing difficulty. But even if you don't have any issues regarding vision, dexterity, or hearing, chances are you may know, work with, or love someone who does.

It'd behoove you to learn about what accessibility means, why it's an important topic, and how it applies to everyone.