Last week my team was trading emails on cool sites showing graphs and other plotting of numbers in a visual way.

Yes, we are geeks. But the results seen here are intriguing, sometimes beautiful images that deliver a story about numbers.

Kristin started it on The Inspiration Blog with 22 charts that look more like college dorm room posters. Anneliese chimed in with Nonsensical infographics, and I brought in Flip Flop Fly Ball, where baseball stats meet art.

And that led to a TED talk on why visualizing data is important. Give a listen to David McCandless:

In this excerpt from a previous Office Casual, I’ll show you the thesaurus that's available in Office programs like Word. It’s just one part of the Research Tool. You can view the video How to generate first-rate ideas, the Office Casual way in its entirety on the Office Blog.

For a recent Office Show, I demo'd how a PowerPoint Broadcast Slide Show works--a way to quickly send your slides to anyone on the Internet when you are presenting. And yes, let’s show you some of the devices this works on, even those that don’t have PowerPoint 2010.

New PCs often have a free version of Office preinstalled: Office Starter. These free versions of Word 2010 and Excel 2010 give you many functions and, hopefully, whet your appetite for more. Let me show you Office Starter:

Visiting New Orleans for the Mom 2.0 Summit, I created a few “Office Casually” videos about the tools we use on the road. Those videos appeared in the main Office Blog, but if you missed it, here is my take on the free Windows Live Writer for blogs. I love how it handles multiple blogs and the images tools. Take a look:

In this excerpt from a previous Office Casual, I’ll show you how dragging email is a quick way to create meetings in Outlook.

You can view the video How to generate first-rate ideas, the Office Casual way in its entirety on the Office Blog.

As reported in TechCrunch this week, Office.com recently added 1,500 free sound and music files from AudioMicro. These sounds can enhance a PowerPoint presentation, surprise readers in a Word doc, or provide background music for a slide show.

AudioMicro offers a free credit if you want to buy sounds and music from their immense 250,000 file site. But the array of free offerings at Office.com is far-ranging, including the mundane (a sneeze, a baby crying, typing on a keyboard, a Happy Birthday riff, and some excellent background music:

• A building synthesizer piece (And Now)
• A Schwarzenegger-ish action...

Here is how to subtly change your “background” color in Office 2010 and Office 2007 products (you can do it in earlier versions too). A comment in this blog led to this video, and a confession about how—and why—you should change your color scheme in Office.

Seeing something unexpected is a great way to hook your audience. When I showed this slide at a conference earlier this month, there were murmurs of “What’s that?” Granted, this is not ground-breaking, but  it’s different enough for folks to take notice. The cool thing is what people are going to do with this new way of showing slides.

I’m talking about video backgrounds in PowerPoint. It’s part of the updated photo and video tools in PowerPoint 2010 and something you will see more about in these blogs this year.

Let’s break it down. If this was a template you might use, it’s okay...

Our friends at Office Labs have spun a sequel: Ribbon Hero 2. Starting today, you can download this free game to learn some tips and shortcuts about Office. (Oh, to heck with that. Just download it because Ribbon Hero 2—featuring the time-travelling adventures of our old friend, Clippy—is fun. Even, dare I say, addictive?)

Ribbon Hero 2 follows Clippy (yes, he’s alive!) as he explores...