Dennis Reilly at CNET's Workers' Edge blog notes that when you've got a whole bunch of text you want people to get through, a two-column layout, with or without titled headers, makes the reading go much smoother than with a page-spanning blog. He posts up plain-English instructions on how to create a dummy template to post your text into, and how to make it easily accessible for every report. Newb-ish? Sure. Helpful for non-ninja-level Word users? Definitely.

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If you're sick of co-workers with older versions of Word not being able to open your .DOCX files, weblog Technix Update explains how to change the default file format to .DOC when you save files in Word 2007. [via]

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In Office 2007, Word automatically defaults to full print preview mode, which is fine if you're a design obsessive but a big waste of screen real estate if you just want to get some words written. Fortunately, you can make Word default to draft view, though it's a very obscure option. (Proving the point: while Microsoft notes how to fix this in its online support site, somewhat remarkably this information isn't included in Word 2007's own online help.)
To make Draft the default view, select Word Options from the main Office menu (or just type Alt-T then O), and scroll down to the General section. Tick 'Allow opening a document in Draft view' (despite the confusing phrasing, this actually affects new documents as well). In my experience, you need to exit and relaunch Word to make the setting stick. To really maximise your available screen real estate, you can also minimise the Ribbon (an option under the nearly invisible 'Customize Quick Access Toolbar' downward arrow button to the right of the Office button).

Windows only: Freeware screencasting application Community Clips records screencasts of your Office software in action. Developed by Microsoft, Community Clips integrates with the quick access toolbars of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint so you can quickly record a quick demonstration or an audio/video version of a PowerPoint presentation with one click. We've featured several screencasting applications in the past, but Community Clips' Office integration makes it perfect for anyone needing to do a quick demonstration in your Office app of choice. Community Clips is freeware, Windows only.

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Windows only: Easy Microsoft Word Properties is a helpful tool for anyone who uses Word documents' details listings—Author, Subject, Title, and the like—to keep their work organised or incorporate Word files into databases and spreadsheets. Install and run the application, point it to a folder and tell it which files to search for. In the next tab, all the standard properties of the documents returned can be edited in batch fashion, no right-clicking required. If nothing else, editing the "key words" line can be helpful in guiding along Windows and other search tools. Easy Microsoft Word Properties is a free download for Windows systems only.

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Seeing a giant Word file arrive in your inbox can leave one feeling like it's the last chance to cram before a test—you just want to find the portions with relevant information in them, in context. The How-To Geek blog shows how to use Word 2007's AutoSummarize feature, creating a new document that scores sentences by the occurrence of certain words and using whatever percent of the original's length you want. It's a mighty helpful tool for students, and for anyone whose co-workers tend to, say, get lost in their own verbiage.

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A team at Microsoft is looking at the iPhone Software Developer's Kit with an eye toward Mac Office functionality, according to Fortune. Sounds like Word docs might soon be viewable without web-based converters. [via]

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Windows only: The latest editions of Microsoft Office might have made some welcome interface and functionality improvements, but the newer .docx file formats can leave your co-workers (and your other computers) struggling to open its files. Free conversion utility Docx2Rtf can take whatever Office 2007 (or OpenOffice) files, and then display them for copying or save them as Rich Text Format, the standard nearly every text editor can understand, as well as PDF if you want. The conversion isn't always perfect, due to RTF's limited special characters and images, but Docx2Rtf can make it easy to send out documents to recipients across the computer spectrum. Docx2Rtf is a free download for Windows systems only. To convert older Word documents, try using Google Docs as a go-between.

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Tech help site Of Zen and Computing describes how to use Microsoft Office to do Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—that is, recognize text inside digital images (like scanned documents). The Microsoft Document Imaging application comes with Microsoft Office (who knew?) and can grok text from TIFF images. Haven't tried this one myself, but after wrestling with various OCR apps several years ago, my expectations are low. What's your favorite OCR application or method? Tell us about it in the comments.

Windows only: There are many, many tools to convert Microsoft Word files into PDF documents, including those built into the latest office suites, but what about the other way around? Free PDF to Word Doc Converter is a small program that solves a big headache for some office and document workers. Load up a PDF, choose how you want to export the file—including images, shapes and text layout functions—and hit the convert button. My own tests found, like others, that some pretty big Word files can come out, especially if you've got images and graphs embedded, but for your standard text-only document, the free tool gets most of the text and layout right. Free PDF to Word Converter is a free download for all versions of Windows.