Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

The Project Gallery

No matter which Office program you launch (by clicking its Dock icon, for example), you’re greeted by a special document-launching window elegantly named the Project Gallery. The idea is that you don’t have to even know the Office program you’re going to use for the document—they’re all accessible from this central point.

Since Office 2001, the Project Gallery has been the repository for icons that represent the kinds of Word documents and other types of files Office can create for you. (Use the scroll bar to see all of them.) You’ll see canned templates for résumés, budgets, brochures, fax cover letters, and dozens of others—not to mention Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage documents like spreadsheets and blank email messages. The idea is that you don’t have to launch (or even know) the Office program you’re going to use for the document. From anywhere in Office, you can create or open any kind of document. Choose File → Project Gallery in any Office program, or memorize the keystroke Shift-⌘-P.

Tip

If you want to save some of your valuable dock real estate, you can delete those bulky Excel, Word, and PowerPoint icons, and whenever you want to work in Office, just click the Project Gallery icon. Unless you tell it to do otherwise, when you install Office 2008, it plunks the Project Gallery icon. (If not, you can drag it there from Applications → Microsoft Office 2008 → Office Folder.)

The Project Gallery also boasts the nifty ability to access projects you create ...