Get Productive

By Jon Kenton

There are over a billion PCs out there, and a large majority of them has one version or another of Mr. Gates’s productivity suite, Microsoft Office.

Although the premium versions have lots of extras (e.g., database software or Web development/publishing tools), the three foundational legs of the Office suite are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Millions of people use these now de facto tools every day for word processing, number crunching, and creating presentations. Most, however, probably use less than ten percent of the capability of the software, typing simple documents or using Excel essentially as a calculator.

I am frequently asked about a variety of issues, to which the answer is: “Office can do that.” “Really? I never knew!” is the usual response.

Here are a few suggestions that will help you get more productive with your productivity software. First and foremost, treat yourself to a book. There are numerous types; for example, the For Dummies series that will walk you through all the clever things the software can do. I guarantee that you will be pleasantly surprised and find many easy ways to achieve results you have been ignoring or doing by hand. You have spent hundreds of dollars on a PC and the software—another few bucks on a book is money well spent.

I obviously don’t have room to cover a book’s worth of tips and instructions, but here are some of my favorites that I use all the time. Many are implemented across the entire MS Office suite. Others are specific only to certain tools.

Keyboard Shortcuts Many if not all of the most commonly used commands can be accessed via a keyboard shortcut. This means that you are not continually removing your hands from the keyboard and reaching for the mouse. To use them, it requires hitting a couple of keys at the same time, usually the Ctrl (Control) key. Examples might be Cut and Paste—Ctrl C and Ctrl V—or Undo, which is Ctrl Z.

Format Painter This is one of my favorites. Once you have set up the style of a particular portion of text, the painter allows you to literally paint that style onto other areas. You use it by selecting the original format and then clicking on the paintbrush icon on the main toolbar. If you double click, it will stay active until you click it again. Try it out.

Images Management With digital cameras now so prevalent, everybody is adding his or her own pictures into documents. If you need to do some simple editing, rather than going back to your photo program, right-click on the image and select the picture toolbar. This gives you access to simple adjustments, brightness, contrast, and even cropping tools. It also has a compression button. This resizes the data in the images to match the usage of the document. The worst culprits are PowerPoint presentations in which the addition of numerous full-size images will quickly make for a 10+Mb file—not very e-mail friendly.

AutoCorrect You may not realize it but these applications actually take care of your mistakes for you. Try typing t-e-h instead of the—miraculously, it changes automatically. This is the AutoCorrect feature. You can make this work even further for you. If you type a phrase or long name frequently, you can set this feature to help you. For example, you can make it automatically change nvm to North Valley Magazine. Look under Tools for the AutoCorrect options menu.

Drawing tables Many people have a hard time with adding tables and figuring out beforehand how many rows or columns they need for the dialogue box. A much easier way to create a table is using the Tables and Borders toolbar. You will see a pencil and eraser icon in the top-left of this toolbar. Simply use these to draw and/or erase lines, and voila—there is your table.

You can find out more about these features by looking at the included help in each application, and of course, in the shiny new book you have just bought.