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:

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.

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.

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

Our friends at Channel 9 have produced a great series of demo videos about the new features of Office 2010. In this Access 2010 demo, you'll find out how to make the most of your information, even if you aren’t a database expert. Ryan McMinn, lead program manager for Microsoft Access, explains new features like community templates, and shows how you can track, report, and share more easily. For more of Channel 9's Office 2010 videos check out The Office Blog on Channel 9. For more about what's new in Access, check out the Getting Started with Access page on Office.com.

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...

PowerPoint 2010 has a lot of improvements, but there are two that I think are absolutely  game-changing features: Video embedding and PowerPoint broadcasting. These are the kinds of "if only" features that make you slap your forehead and go, "Dang, if only I'd had that X years ago." Like, if I'd only had this laptop in college. And Red Bull. Oh yeah, and the Internet.  But I digress.

Case in point:  I do some volunteering with a non-profit journalism organization, the Asian American Journalists Association. Last year I joined a committee to produce a  high-technology training event in Chicago for journalists from the ethnic press. Now, of our committee members, two of us live in Seattle, two in Chicago, one in California. Nobody uses the same computers or software, and we had documents to share, timelines to go over, deadlines to meet and proposals to make. The night before a crucial presentation....