When planning a holiday event, face down inner panic by splitting tasks into three parts: Collaborate, Publicize and Personalize. This Office Show shows you how our intrepid hosts use those concepts to throw a last-minute Office party, avoid a meltdown and actually relax. Watch and read the full post to find out how.

Dude. Excel. Rocks.

Literally. The "video" for AC/DC's "Rock and Roll Train" was actually created entirely in Excel. You saw an excerpt of it in "The Office Show: Visualizing Data," and you can see the entire thing here.

I saw AC/DC in concert once, and you know, it wasn't like I was rocking out with my mullet flying around, going "Dude, this would be so awesome in an Excel spreadsheet!"

But then again, I'm not a interactive design genius like Phil Clandillon or Steve Milbourne at Sony Music Creative in London. Phil and Steve get paid to do amazing, creative projects to promote Sony's musicians. For AC/DC, they honed in on some insights that Sony researchers uncovered about the band's typically male fans.  "They generally work in quite stressful office environments, and they'll go home and they'll listen to something like AC/DC as an escape from that. It's a pure rock and roll escape," they told me.

Now for most of us, Excel is awesome, but it doesn't equal "Excape" (sorry). But that's where the genius part comes in.

Phil and Steve realized that if they could sneak a little AC/DC behind...

This Excel-centric Office Show episode shows you how to get better-looking, more meaningful charts without banging your head against the wall. And we've got some amazing things to show you that some folks have done with Excel, including -- speaking of head-banging -- a music video from AC/DC done entirely within Excel. Strange but true! After the break, guest blogger and Excel expert Anneliese Wirth gives you more info on how to explore the new features of Excel.

Yes.

OneNote helps me keep track of all my writing, so I can organize ideas and works in progress and find everything.


When the Office Show crew asked me to talk about how I use OneNote when I write poetry, I jumped at the chance.

In the last episode of The Office Show, award-winning author Jennifer Egan ("A Visit From the Goon Squad") filled us in on how she created a chapter of her new book with PowerPoint. It's an amazing chapter, as are her insights on using PowerPoint's features for compelling storytelling. We had to keep the interview on the shorter side for the Office Show, but we've included more of the interview in this excerpt.

Now, Jennifer uses PowerPoint to create fiction, but it's easy to see how her approach and process can be applied to any type of presentation. You can read more of Jennifer's tips for storytelling with PowerPoint here. What are yours?

-- Doug Kim

In this episode of the Office Show, you'll see how three very creative storytellers use Microsoft Office to realize their ideas. Joannie Stangeland uses OneNote 2010 and a digital pen to capture inspiration and organize her poetry. David Salaguinto uses a Visio template to create comics for his popular "Office Comic." And we'll show you how acclaimed author Jennifer Egan uses PowerPoint to create fiction. She actually wrote a chapter entirely in PowerPoint for her novel "A Visit From the Goon Squad."

Poet Stangeland's daytime gig is writing help articles for Microsoft Word, so you can find her work on  our  Word blog. She also hosts a special video series, " A Writer's Guide to Office," that's all about using Office for people who are serious about good writing. You can also find more great tips on OneNote at Michael Oldenburg's blog.

Salaguinto is the author/artist of the popular "Office Comics" blog, and he's got some special things coming, inspired by this edition of "The Office Show."

And you can find out more about Jennifer Egan on jenniferegan.com, and you can buy the book directly at Amazon.com. You can see her PowerPoint chapter on her website, but do buy the book. It's a powerful chapter on it's own, but seen in the context of the whole story it's a real mind-blower.

Don't forget to check out her 10 Tips for storytelling in PowerPoint which she wrote especially for readers of the Office Blog.

-- Doug Kim

Do you often work with really long Word documents? Do you sometimes collaborate with others on the creation of these really long documents? Check out the latest episode of the Office Show for a quick tour of some of the new features in Microsoft Word 2010 that could make your life just a little bit easier.

We’ll show you the new Navigation Pane in Word. It makes it easy to find your way around long, complicated documents.

People do astonishing things with PowerPoint, but author Jennifer Egan has brought PowerPoint into a whole new level: literature. She's written a chapter of her latest novel, "A Visit From the Goon Squad," (Knopf) entirely in PowerPoint.

You read that correctly. What she's done is frankly amazing. SmartArt charts show the relationships of the characters. Graphs show their conflict and the passion that both binds and divides them. A rich, multilayered story unfolds.

When I spoke with her recently, I was so inspired by her passion for the program that I asked her to come up with 10 tips for storytelling in PowerPoint. You don't have to be a novelist: Her tips apply to anyone using PowerPoint to convey complicated ideas. Here's her list:

1. Read as many PowerPoint presentations as possible, ideally on an array of different topics.  Copy and save individual slides that jump out as graphically interesting. Look at them outside the context of the presentations they came from and think about how and why they're successful at storytelling.

2. Write directly into PowerPoint, rather than sketching out ideas and trying to import them into PowerPoint later on.

3. Work in black and white initially; structure is what matters most, and color can be distracting early on.

4. Start by jotting down elements of a dramatic moment as bullet points on an individual slide. Add or subtract elements until you have a collection on one slide that feels organically connected.

5. Study this collection of bullet points and ask yourself HOW they're connected. What relationship do they describe -- a cycle? A chain of events? A hierarchy? Think also about which elements are primary. Are there two main ideas and three smaller ideas that are subsets of those main ideas?

Need a flyer or a newsletter? We'll show you how Microsoft Publisher 2010 makes creating publications easier with the new building blocks feature, plus we'll show you how to import inventory data from Excel and generate a product catalog in seconds. And for the explosive finale, we've got footage of how one Publisher fan has used it --  literally -- for rocket science.

We loved Gary McKay's Publisher rocket so much we built and launched one ourselves. Well, I don't know if launched is the right word. Let's say we fired it off, and it went up in the air, at least for a little while, before it all ended in smoking wreckage. Gary's works much better.

 If you're inspired too, here are some great links:

Get some of Gary McKay's Rebel Origami templates to try it for yourself.

Learn more about building blocks in Publisher 2010.

Learn more about creating a catalog merge with Excel and Publisher 2010.

If you have ideas and tips you want to share about how to make great publications, write a comment and let everyone know. We'd love to hear from you, and we'd love to hear more about what you think of the show. The folks at Office.com created this in partnership with our friends at Microsoft's Channel 9, where you can find even more videos about Office.

In this demo with Channel 9's Laura Foy, Microsoft design guru March Rogers shows more of the design features of Office 2010, including how Word makes it easier to work with text boxes and more about animation and editing shapes in PowerPoint. Also: How Stylistic sets enhance fonts in Publisher, and how to customize the look of Visio diagrams. For more of Channel 9's Office 2010 demos check out the Office videos on Channel 9. And, of course, you can learn more by watching "The Office Show: PowerPoint Design."

-- Doug Kim