In Part 1 of this Office Show, Tina and Laura used Office 365 to get their dog grooming business up and running with email, calendars and shared documents. In Part 2, they step up their game and create their own website, edit a Word doc simultaneously and set up a customer database in Access. Cool things for sure, but will it be enough to fight their ruthless corporate dog-washing competitors? Watch to find out...

So what is Office 365 and how can it help your small business? This Office Show answers those questions with a special two-part episode, wherein our heroines Laura and Tina start a business from scratch with Office 365. Like many of you, they're strapped for resources and face some nasty competition. Office 365 is their key to surviving and thriving. And stay tuned, we'll post Part II soon. For key links to more info, check out the full post.

Can we talk? We all know that in the past, Office for Mac hasn't necessarily played that well with Office for PC. On this episode of The Office Show, we'll show you how that's all changed with Office for Mac 2011. More info on the full post...

Huge congrats to author Jennifer Egan, whose novel A Visit from the Goon Squad just earned the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Jennifer was a guest of the Office Show late last year, and spoke to us at length about how important PowerPoint was in formulating her book.

A Visit from the Goon Squad features an entire chapter written in PowerPoint, and to hear Jennifer talk about it, it was a key chapter in forming the structure of the book. She also wrote a special blog post for us, detailing her top tips for storytelling with PowerPoint. Since then, her book has racked up dozens of awards and landed on just about every major "top 10" list, but the Pulitzer is obviously the big one. Congratulations, Jennifer!

-- Doug Kim

Working with data in Excel 2010 can be a beautiful thing, but getting your data into Excel can be a huge chore. PowerPivot, a free add-in from Microsoft, makes it easy to pull in data from multiple sources and merge it all into one workbook. It's like supercharging your spreadsheets with live data.

In this excerpt from The Office Show, Oliver Chiu demonstrates some of PowerPivot's incredible features:

Some folks look at Outlook as another source of info overload, but here's the thing: Outlook 2010 and the Outlook Social Connector are the most powerful tools you have for mastering all your information streams. Check out the video to see how, and learn more on the full post...

In the Office Show Holiday episode, we had to create a "pretty and festive" holiday party invitation really quickly. But you don't have to be a design guru to do the same for your party. Microsoft Office helps you get great-looking results, whether your work hangs in galleries or you can't draw a straight line. Just keep these simple principles in mind:

The New York Times recently came out with its 10 best books of the year list, and on it is Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad." Jennifer is an amazingly innovative author, and created a chapter of her book entirely in PowerPoint.  Jennifer was featured on an episode on the Office Show recently, and talked about why PowerPoint formed the foundation for her brilliant novel. More on the full post.

For your next party, how cool would it be to customize a gift box for every guest? Ridiculously time-consuming right? No, dear Office user, because you have a time-cheating secret weapon for rapid-fire customization: Mail merge. Check out this excerpt from the Office Show Holiday episode, and learn more about how it's done on the full post.