Fixing your quirky spelling errors in Office

Admit it… you have a few(?) words that you always misspell or mistype when working on a Word document, a PowerPoint deck, an Excel file, a OneNote notebook, or an Outlook email. And, for whatever reason, the program decides that your quirky spelling isn’t important enough to fix for you automagically. Well, you can actually add your own spelling quirks to Office so that you don’t have to wear out the backspace key fixing your errors. And yes… this is a case where you can fix it once, and *all* the programs will pick up the change!

Controlling paragraph spacing in Word

For those of us who don’t spend a lot of time in Word documents, getting the right and/or consistent paragraph spacing seems to be an effort in manual line feeds. But as pointed out by a colleague, there is an easy way to set the paragraph spacing automatically for a specific paragraph or an entire document. Here’s how…

Adding Page Breaks to your Word document

We’ve all been there… you have a Word document where the last few lines of a paragraph spill over to a new page, and you would rather have it all together. Rather than try and manually move the paragraph down to the new page with line breaks, it’s better to use the Page Break feature in Word to do that!

Adding background colors and images to Outlook emails

I hesitate to share this tip, as I see it abused all too often… but hey, it can be fun. 🙂

You can add images and colors as the background to emails you create in Outlook. This can be helpful if you need an email to stand out, or even if you just want to be a bit unique.

Finding folder names in Outlook search

This tip came to me via Sandra in the typical fashion… a Skype ping that starts “I just figured out something cool… wanna see?” She shared her screen and showed me how to search for items in your Outlook mail file and have it show you what folder it’s in! Here’s how it works…

Inserting screenshots in Word

This is an awesomely cool trick I learned from Christian Buckley during our last Office Productivity Tips Grudge Match webinar. This allows you to easily pull a screenshot of an open Window into your Word 2016 document. Here’s how it works…

Checking the readability of your Word documents

When you create a Word document, there are a number of things to consider. After making sure you don’t have any typos or grammatical errors, you should check to see how easy it is to read and understand. One standard in this area is the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Readability Score. Microsoft can provide these statistics for you automatically.

The “Tell me what you want to do” feature in Office 2016

There’s no question that Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook have a ton of functionality. However, sometimes it’s nearly impossible to remember or find the right menu option to trigger it. In Office 2016, there’s a new feature called Tell me what you want to do. It is a lifesaver in finding what you need to know when you need to know it.

Adding color to your Outlook inbox

I’ve been asked a number of times, “Hey Tom! Is there a way I can make my inbox show emails from my boss in a different color?” To date, my answer was always an apologetic “no”. But a colleague recently sent me a screen print of her inbox doing just that, so I had to figure out how she made that happen… and I found it!