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!

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.

Various Copy/Paste options between Excel and Word

On more than one occasion, I’ve been in the position of having some data stashed in an Excel spreadsheet, but I need to have it be part of a Word document. I could give my audience two files to see everything, but I really want to have everything in a single Word document… What to do?

Instead of just copying and pasting some cells from Excel into Word, I can use the Paste button dropdown to get some interesting options on how the data will show up in Word.

Customizing AutoCorrect in Office programs

I think AutoCorrect in the different Office programs (such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) is a lifesaver when it comes to creating documents with no (or fewer) typos.

What you may not know is that you have the ability to do a lot of customization in AutoCorrect in order to make it work best for your particular situations.

Changing the Office Theme colors

So are you tired of the normal color background and theme of your Office apps, such as Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote? Well, you can change them, and here’s how you do it.

Cleaning spaces and line feeds in Excel

A while back, a colleague pinged me and asked if there was a way to remove line feeds from an Excel spreadsheet. I didn’t know of a good way to do it, but I came up with a hack-ish solution using Find and Replace. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about the Trim and Clean functions at the time.

The Properties Pane is back in Office ProPlus

When we first started upgrading to Office ProPlus (aka Office 2016), we were excited and happy… until someone noticed that the Properties Pane for things like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents was no longer visible. Needless to say, this made some of our customers “not very happy”.

Somewhere along the way, Microsoft fixed that problem in the Office clients, and now you can once again see and access the properties. Here’s how you do it…

Calculating date differences in Excel using DATEDIF

If you work with Excel spreadsheets, you’ve likely ended up with the need to compare two dates to find the number of days, months, or years between them. Using the DATEDIF function, you can easily accomplish that.

Clearing all filters with a single click in Excel

One of my colleagues at work wondered if there was an easy way to clear out multiple column filters in Excel without having to go into each column separately. A quick search on Google showed that you definitely can do that…