Learning new Microsoft Office tricks in "just a minute"
People have a love/hate relationship with PowerPoint presentations… too many words, death by bullet point, having the speaker read the slides to them… a bad presentation can be a soul-sucking experience.
However, you can add a bit of motion and action to your slides when you go from one to another, and it can help keep your audience a bit more engaged (as in… “what’s gonna happen next time s/he changes the slide?”). You do that with Transitions.
This isn’t so much a cool “magical” tip as much as it’s a reminder to myself that it exists and I should use it more often. Excel has a Conditional Formatting feature that allows you to apply rules to a spreadsheet to have certain data situations display in different ways automatically.
A colleague sent me an email after last week’s tip on creating a calculator in Word. She wondered if you could create a “spreadsheet” of claims in Word, and use the calculator to add up the claim totals. Much to my surprise, you *can* do something like what she suggested.
Lately I’ve had a few panicked phone calls from my customers who are missing content (either pages or whole sections) in their OneNote notebooks. In order to help everyone reduce those feelings of dread, I’d like to make sure you know about the OneNote Recycle Bin, which almost always has the material that was deleted.
Normally if I have a chart that I want to add to a Word document, I create it in Excel and then copy and paste it over. However, Word has a decent charting function that makes it pretty easy to add basic charting on the fly.
OK… this tip borders on pure magic, and I had never heard of it before. The spike function in Word allows you to cut multiple sections in a Word document, and then paste them together in a single function. No more “cut, then paste, then cut, then paste, etc…”
Let’s say that a certain boss I report to asks me about an email she sent me, and I’m desperately trying to find it so I don’t look dumber than normal. This Outlook trick can quickly filter down all my emails to only the items she sent me.
This was a feature I never used before, but I can see where it would come in very handy at times… the Format Painter in Excel.
This is one of those things that I find more interesting than useful, but I can also see how some people might find this to be just the tool they need. So, with that… here’s how to add a calculator to Word. 🙂
