Daily Tips and Tricks Special Delivery - Microsoft

Enter the PowerPoint Slide Show Mode Beginning at Any Point You Want Pressing F5 in Microsoft Office PowerPoint starts the slide show, but by default, it will open with the first slide in the deck. To start your slide show with the current or selected slide, press SHIFT+F5 instead. 2003 to 2007 Quick Parts In Microsoft Office Word 2003, you can use AutoText to automate the typing of oft-repeated text like names and addresses. But what if you want to reuse more than text? You can use Quick Parts in Microsoft Office Word 2007 to save any document content—text, pictures, Microsoft SmartArt graphics, headers and footers, and more—to an easily accessed Quick Part Gallery. 1. Click the Insert tab, and then select the document content that you want to reuse. 2. Click the Quick Parts button in the Text section, and then click Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery. 3. Enter a name and description, and then click OK. 4. To reuse the content, click the Quick Parts button, and then select the Quick Part that you want to use.

Preview Type and Color Formatting You can see how formatting will look in Live Preview before applying it to the Microsoft Office Word document you're working on. Select a formatting option (for example, click Page Layout, click Page Color, and then point to a color), and Live Preview will temporarily apply it. To keep the result, just click the color, or keep browsing for alternatives. Turn Off E-Mail Notifications Because an e-mail notification icon appears whenever you receive new e-mail, it's tempting to stop work and open new messages immediately. But you can turn off the notification and then check your e-mail when it's convenient for you. Here’s how: 1. In Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, click Tools, click Options, click E-mail Options, and then click Advanced E-mail Options. 2. In the middle of the dialog box, clear the Display a New Mail Desktop Alert check box.

Convert Text to Tables Sometimes you may find different types of information within the same piece of text, where the only thing separating the information is a space. Microsoft Office Excel makes it easy to redistribute this data by using different columns, and to display the data in a more digestible format. 1. Choose delimiters and column separators. a. Select the cells containing the data that you want to separate. b. On the Data ribbon, in the Data Tools section, click the Text to Columns button. c. Select your preferred data type (that is, Delimited or Fixed width) from the options in the first step presented by the wizard. d. In the second step of the wizard, select your preferred delimiters from the Delimiters options, or the column separator position from the Fixed width options. 2. Define the data format of your new columns. a. In the dialog box of the wizard’s third step, select one column at a time and define its data format by clicking your preferred option under Column data format. b. Click the Finish button. The text chains will now be distributed into columns according to your chosen data format.

Format Several Graphics from One Dialog Box When you format graphics (such as a SmartArt diagram, an Excel chart, or a picture) in the 2007 Microsoft Office programs Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the Ribbon provides most of the formatting options you need. But when you need to open a dialog box to see more options, you may notice that many of the formatting dialog boxes have changed. One of the most helpful changes is that you can now click between the dialog box and your document without closing and reopening the dialog box. Even if you change your graphic selection to a different type of content (such as selecting a chart axis and then a chart data series), the dialog box automatically changes to accommodate your selection. To open a formatting dialog box for the type of graphic you’ve selected, click the dialog launch icon in the lower-right corner of a tab section. (For example, clicking that icon in the Picture Styles section on the Picture Tools Format tab in Word opens the Format Picture dialog box.) Then click between the dialog box and document as needed.

To Paste Values Instead of Formulas Sometimes you want to copy the values within a series of cells rather than the formulas in those cells. Here’s what to do: 1. Select the cells that contain the values you want to copy. 2. Right-click the selected cells, and click Copy. 3. Select the cells into which you want to paste the copied values. 4. On the Home tab, in the Clipboard section, click the down arrow on the Paste button. 5. Click Paste Values. Group Contacts by Category You can use categories in Microsoft Office Outlook to add criteria and areas of interest to your contacts. Then when you have a specific announcement to make, you can get the right information to the right people quickly. Here’s how: 1. Open each contact in Outlook. 2. Click the Categorize list. If the category you want isn’t in the list, click All Categories, and then click New to create a new category. 3. To group your contacts by category, click View, point to Current View, and then click By Category. Note that you can’t sort by category, because in a single category field, there may be several entries separated by semicolons; if you assign more than one category to a contact, that contact will be listed under multiple categories. 4. Select the icon at the top of a category, and double-click it to collapse the group. 5. Select the icon again, and then click New Message to Contact to send your e-mail message to everyone in that category. Be careful when working in the Category view. If you delete a contact under one category, you’re deleting the contact from your address book completely. Instead, do the following: 1. Right-click the contact, and point to Categorize. 2. Click a selected category to clear it, or click Clear All Categories to remove all categories from the contact.

Save a Set of Quick Styles for Use in Other Documents You may already know that you can customize which styles appear in the Styles gallery on the Home tab in Microsoft Office Word 2007 (also known as the Quick Style Gallery) for any document or template. But did you know you can save the set of styles that appear in that gallery for use in other documents? Here’s how: 1. On the Home tab, in the Styles section, click Change Styles. 2. Point to Style Set, and then click Save as Quick Style Set. 3. In the Save Quick Style Set dialog box, name the file, and then click Save. After you do, the name of your new style set will appear in the Style Set list, where you can apply it to any document. Note: Do not change the folder location when saving a style set, or your list will not automatically appear in the Style Set list. Also note that only styles appearing in the Styles gallery on the Home tab are included when you save a style set.

To Control How AutoCorrect Modifies Data That You Enter 1. Click the Office button. 2. Click Excel Options at lower right. 3. Click the Proofing category header. 4. Click AutoCorrect Options. 5. Select and clear the check boxes next to the types of changes you want Excel to make. Have Tasks Appear in Your Calendar on the Day You Want to Start Them By default, tasks appear in your calendar on the date when they are due. You might prefer to have them appear on the date when you should begin to work on them instead. To change when your tasks appear, click View, point to Daily Task List, point to Arrange By, and then click By Start Date.

Create a Photo Album Using the new Photo Album feature in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, you can quickly create a photo album presentation with pictures consistently sized, placed, framed, and even captioned. To create a photo album, on the Insert tab, click Photo Album. In the Photo Album dialog box, click File/Disk under Insert picture from to locate and select your pictures. You can edit pictures, add captions to pictures, and customize the picture layout and framing format, all from the dialog box. When finished, click Create to generate the presentation. To enable captions, in the Picture layout box, select a layout other than the default Fit to slide layout. If you have enabled captions for all pictures, the default caption text is the picture file name. Note that if you don’t select a theme in the Photo Album dialog box, your album uses the Office theme. You can apply a different theme at any time from the Design tab. You can edit album slides directly as in any PowerPoint presentation. Or on the Insert tab, click the arrow at the bottom of the Photo Album icon, and then click Edit Photo Album. 2003 to 2007 Workflow Routing a Microsoft Office 2003 Editions document for approval or review often means sending it as an e-mail attachment. Unfortunately, doing so creates multiple copies of the same document and requires the document owner to manually merge all the returned documents together. Alternately, you can place the document on a centralized file share, but approvers and reviewers must have access to the share, and they may have trouble if more than one of them attempts to access the document at the same time. With the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can initiate and participate in automated document workflows from within the application. To initiate a workflow: 1. Save the document to a SharePoint document library. 2. Click the Office button, and then click Workflows. 3. Select the workflow you want, and then click Start. 4. Enter the workflow participants, type a personal message, select the number of days or weeks allowed for completion, and then click Start. The document will be automatically routed to the first approver's Inbox, where he or she can review the document and then click Edit This Task in the Outlook 2007 Reading Pane to approve or reject the workflow task. If the task is approved, the document is routed to the next approver in line. There is one version of the file, and the process runs automatically until it is completed or rejected by an approver; in both cases, you are notified and can take further action if necessary.

Check Address Book Entries Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 will try to check that e-mail names are correct by scanning the address book as you type your e-mail message. Other checks happen when you click Send. You can force Outlook to run its e-mail completeness check (and highlight any addresses that it doesn't recognize) simply by pressing ALT+K anytime.