Stop holiday panic; party with the Office Show (video)

When planning a holiday event, you can stem the oncoming waves of panic by breaking down your tasks into three parts: Collaborate to get ready, Publicize to get your guests excited, and Personalize to make it special. This episode of the Office Show shows you how our intrepid hosts use those concepts to throw a last-minute Office party, avoid a meltdown and actually relax. More after the break.

Collaborate. In the show, boss Mitch Grizzard dumps a last-minute party in the laps of hosts Tina and Laura. It's got to be "pretty and festive," lots of fun, and oh yeah, it's tomorrow.

Tina's solution for fast collaboration: OneNote Web App, which allows anyone with a browser and an internet connection to see and work on a OneNote notebook. Setting up her lists and tasks there allows everyone to see what everyone else is doing simultaneously. First off, she needs a visual theme that everyone else can work from, and calls on design guru March Rogers.

March takes this template set from Office.com and puts his own spin on it to create the party's design guidelines, which he puts in the notebook. That allows everyone else to use the same design themes in invitations, party favors, etc.

Laura goes supply shopping with OneNote Mobile, so she can take photos of her purchases with her phone and paste them into the notebook list in real time.

Back at the office, Tina can see the pictures pop up and comment on them. (You can see how this could work in other holiday situations. You're at one end of the mall, spouse is at the other. You both find the "perfect gift" for Aunt Margie. She uploads a photo of the porcelain mushroom and you upload a shot of the sock monkey. You can look at the photos side-by-side in the notebook and argue about them in real time...)

Publicize: Throwing a party isn't much good if nobody knows about it. Tina and Laura send out an email invitation in Outlook, but they take an extra step with a custom email signature. Doug Thomas uses March's guidelines to create the signature, and demonstrates how to send it to the right recipients. (Check out more of Doug's holiday tips.)

Personalize: Here's where we use a cool technique to make our guests feel special. Jessica Reading uses Mail Merge to create a personalized gift box for every guest. The gift box is based on a template by Office.com contributor INGTERNET. (The one we used on the show was created in Publisher, but INGTERNET's originals are all for Word.) You can learn a lot more about mail merge and the holidays on Office.com.

For more on surviving the holidays with Office, check out our Top 10 Tips. And keep checking back to the Office blog; we've got lots of info, and lots more coming, on how to make your holidays a lot easier.

-- Doug Kim

For more free Office resources, visit Office.com.