Jumping to a specific slide in PowerPoint (without letting your audience see you doing it)

We’ve all been in PowerPoint meetings where the presenter is projecting onto a screen and using the Presenter view to see the current slide and the next one coming up. Someone asks a question, and they want to show a different slide to address the point. So, they drop out of presenter mode or they start rapidly scrolling through the upcoming slides (and then back to the original slide) to find what they want. It gets the job done, but it doesn’t look very professional. Here’s a way to skip to a slide of your choice without the audience getting vertigo from all the scrolling…

Getting Word to read your document to you

Haven’t you wished at times that your computer could just read a Word document to you so you could… “multi-task” while getting the document content? Or, in a more realistic scenario, you have vision issues and having the document read to you would be more accessible? Actually, there *is* a way to make that happen. Here’s how…

Using Text Fill for interesting graphic effects in PowerPoint

In today’s attention-deficit world, you sometimes need to take an extra step to make things pop in a presentation. In today’s tip, I share how to fill text in a PowerPoint slide with pictures for that extra bit of pizazz…

Creating your own private Outlook Contact Lists

There are times when you want to create distribution lists that serve your organization as a whole. But there are also instances when you want a personal contact list that only affects you and the people you want to reach on a regular basis. This is how you set one up in Outlook…

Deleting grouped emails in Outlook

I tend to keep (or at least try to) a fairly lean Outlook mailbox, and I tend to delete items in my Sent, Conversations, and Deleted Items folders on a regular basis. I stumbled across a way to delete things by group the other day, and I thought I’d share it with you…

Reordering your Tasks in Outlook

A colleague shared this with me a while back, and I thought it was a cool way to group your Outlook tasks if you want to do something different than first in, first out…

Adding comments in your Excel spreadsheet

There have been times I would have liked to have made a note or two in a spreadsheet so I could remember something associated with a piece of data. I wish I had known about adding comments, but I do now!

Changing the date format in your Outlook Inbox

Depending on how you format your Inbox layout in Outlook, you may be interested to save as much room as possible to show more information in the Subject column or have more room for the preview pane. Sandra showed me a way to reformat the date column that works really well for me.

Why the names in a Skype meeting vary in how they are ordered

On our “you ask the questions, we try to answer them” call this week, someone brought up the question of why some names in a Skype meeting are in first/last name order, and others are in last/first name order. Even more confusing, it’s not consistent for a particular name across all the people on the call. We presented the question to our Skype expert Brandon Bettle and found out the answer.