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!

Password-protecting OneNote sections

OneNote is a great tool for taking notes, storing information, and a million other things. A team OneNote notebook can do wonders for keeping everyone on the same page. However, there are times when some of the content in your OneNote notebook needs to be locked down for security and privacy purposes. This is where password-protecting a section in your OneNote notebook comes into play.

Audio recording in OneNote

If you’re in a meeting and you want to have a record of what was said, you can use OneNote to make an audio recording and save it automatically to a OneNote page. In addition, you can also take notes that will automatically have pointers to that specific part of the recording. Here’s how it works…

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in OneNote

There’s nothing more frustrating to see some interesting writing on a page, and you can’t copy it into a Word document as it’s actually part of an image (like an image caption). But with OneNote, you can use the built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature to get the text in the image turned back into real text you can copy and paste. Here’s how…

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.

Setting the Default Paste option in OneNote

This tip was pointed out to me by a colleague and was originally pointed out in this post Can I set the default paste in OneNote as “Keep Text Only”? It’s a nice way to make OneNote paste content in the way that’s most applicable to your working style.

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.

The OneNote Quick Notes feature you’ve likely never heard of…

This is one of those features I accidentally discovered by wondering what the Quick Notes entry was doing at the bottom of my notebook lists on the left-side navigation of my OneNote client. After a quick bit of research, I think this will now become a go-to feature for me.

Finding deleted content in the OneNote Notebook Recycle Bin

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.