Office 2007

After getting a new system at work, I was automatically migrated (well, okay, I opted in) to Vista and Office 2007. Who cares, right?!? Well, after helping Nicole with an assignment this morning, I learned that Word in Office 2007 has an amazing feature that I just love! So, this may not ever help any of you, but it was hugely beneficial to me typing my kids paper. Yes, I know she should type her own, but I can type pretty quick* and we were running short on time. Watching her peck the keys and knowing how long it would take her just kills me, so I typed it for her in about 20 minutes. So sue me ;) *http://www.typingtest.com/ tells me it’s actually about 70WPM

The only thing that slowed me down was that I was typing a Spanish paper. Yea, you read that right. Heath walked by and said, “is that another language?!?” Nicole wrote this entire paper (a made up journal about her trip to see humpback whales in Brazil) and I was blown away. The little bit of Spanish I do remember was helpful because I knew what I was typing, and amazed that my 8th grader knew all these words! I did have a twinge of sadness that she won’t study Spanish next year b/c she’s so far along, but after resenting my own father for making me take Spanish instead of French like I wanted to, I let my kids decide on their own what language to study. This would be why Paige will take French next year and Nicole is moving onto Latin even though they live in Texas and yes it’s slightly helpful to know Spanish. But I digress ….

This nifty thing in Office 2007 is that you can change the language and it will correct spelling AND grammar in that language. It was the best thing ever!! (Did it do this before?) I couldn’t insert the upside down question mark and explanation mark (whatever those are really called) without the right keyboard, but this was still cool. Even more impressive than her writing this paper in another language was that she only had a few errors which were corrected by this super cool Office 2007 feature. ;) And, yes, I really did blog about a feature in Word. What has the world come to?!?!