IN THIS CHAPTER

Productivity tips that make life easier

Shortcuts that save you time

More help, in case you need it

Project organization using Office Projects

We've been Office users since time immemorial. We still remember Microsoft’s first effort at a spreadsheet, MultiPlan, and the pain of writing using version 1.05 of Word for the Mac.

We also remember the good qualities of Office. And, over the years, we’ve developed quite a few time- and effort-saving techniques that we share with you now. These tips and hints are all over the board (and all over the Office suite), but the one characteristic they have in common is that they all can save you time, keystrokes, or effort — or all of the above.

Memorize Keyboard Shortcuts

If you do only one thing to speed up your use of the Office apps, memorize frequently used keyboard shortcuts. The more you keep your fingers on the keyboard keys (and off the mouse), the more efficient you will become while using the Office apps.

The keyboard shortcuts in Table 22-1 have saved us lots of time and effort over the years.

Create a helpful printed list of keyboard shortcuts to memorize whenever you begin using a new program. We keep a list taped to the desk or monitor until the shortcuts become second nature to our fingers.

Get to Know Your Preferences

We mention app preferences several times throughout this book, but in almost every case we direct you to a specific preference setting that’s germane to the discussion at hand.

Direct your attention to the Preferences dialog in each app (choose App Name ⇒   Preferences or press ⌘  +comma to open it) and try various settings to determine which ones suit your style.

For example, we don’t like to see the paragraph marker included when we select a paragraph in Word and we don't like entire words to be automatically selected rather than just the text we drag the cursor over. If you feel the same way, you can fix both default behaviors by deselecting them in the Word Preferences Edit pane.

Here’s another example: We rarely want to convert URLs (internet addresses) to hyperlinks in our Office documents so we can avoid accidentally opening web pages by clicking, rather than selecting, links. So we always turn off that option in an app’s AutoCorrect preference pane.

We have no way to climb into your brain to figure out which preference settings will make your life better, so we encourage you to find some time to try them all.

Save a Document as a PDF File

Sometimes you want to send someone Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents but, for some reason, not the actual Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files.

Why might you not want to send the file? Maybe you’re not sure that your recipients have a copy of Office. Perhaps you don’t want them to be able to edit (change) the document. Or you might have used fonts that you don’t think the recipients have installed and you want to ensure that the document looks right when it’s opened.

The solution to all these dilemmas is to send a PDF file. The Portable Document Format (PDF), invented by Adobe in 1993, has become the de facto standard for sharing documents among different apps, operating systems, hardware configurations, and installed fonts. A PDF file always looks exactly the same, regardless of your computer type (such as Dell, HP, or Apple), operating system (macOS, Windows, or Linux, for example), app software (such as Adobe Reader or Preview), or fonts used in the original document.

To be sure that recipients see what you intended for them to see, your best bet is to send a PDF file instead of a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document. To create a PDF document from one of these document types, follow these steps:

1. Choose File ⇒   Print.

   The Print dialog appears.

2. Choose Save As PDF from the menu that opens when you click the PDF button in the lower-left corner of the dialog.

   The standard Save File dialog appears.

3. Name the file.
4. Navigate to the folder in which you want to save the file.
5. Click the Save button.

To email the file to someone, you can choose Send in Mail instead of Save As PDF from the menu that appears when you click the PDF button. Then a PDF file isn’t created on your hard drive; instead, your default email program (Mail or Outlook, for example) launches and creates a new email message that contains the PDF file, saving you several steps.

Save Time by Using the Share ⇒ Email (as Attachment) Menu Item

We often finish working on a Word or Excel document and immediately email it to someone to edit or review or to do additional work on it. We could switch to the mail program, create a new, blank email message, and then drag the document onto it to add it as an attachment. But Office has an easier way.

To send a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document to someone as an email attachment:

1. Click the Share button in the upper-right of the ribbon.
2. Click Send a Copy.
3. From the Send As pop-up menu, choose Word Document, PDF, or HTML.

4. Click the share icon, and then select the email app you want to use from the list.

   The icon looks like a box with an upward-pointing arrow.

When you do so, your email program (for example, Mail or Outlook) launches (if it’s not already open) and creates a new email message that contains the document as an attachment. As with the PDF trick in the preceding section, this little shortcut can save you several steps.

This trick may not seem like much of a timesaver, but do it a few times a day and it soon adds up to true time savings.

Focus on the Task at Hand

As you can probably gather by our geeky diatribes, we use the computer as much as the next person, which means we’ve got a lot of apps and reminders and alarms and notifications vying for our limited attention.

Focus view to the rescue! Focus view (available only in Word) removes every element from screen except the page and the words you’re typing. This sparse landscape makes it incredibly easy to concentrate on your words.

To engage focus view, click the focus icon at the very bottom of the current Word document window or choose View ⇒   Focus from the menu. If you need to access a command from the menu or ribbon while in focus view, simply move your mouse cursor to the top of the screen and the menu and ribbon will temporarily pop into view, retreating out of view again once you’ve selected a command or moved your mouse cursor back down the page.

To exit focus view, press the Esc key or move your mouse cursor to the top of the screen and choose View ⇒   Focus from the menu.

As in much of life, when it comes to using focus view in Word, sometimes less really is more.

Use the Open Recent Feature to Open Items from the Dock

Office has an easy way to open any document you’ve worked on recently: Right-click (or Control-click) the dock icon of any open Office app. When you do so, you see the Open Recent menu item, which lets you open any of the last ten documents you worked on in that app.

Get Help

You can find extensive help on the Help menu in each of the Office apps. Furthermore, if you can’t find a topic in the built-in Help system, you might find it online by visiting https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office in your favorite web browser. The point is that you don’t have to stop working when you can’t figure out how to accomplish a task. At least try the Help system or the online help before you throw in the towel.

Use Format Painter

We cover the Format Painter feature elsewhere in this book, but we want to mention it again in the context of enhancing your productivity. Format Painter lets you select any text and copy all its formatting. Then you can “paint” that formatting on other text by clicking and dragging.

By formatting, we mean all formatting attributes applied to the selected text — font, font size, bold, italic, line spacing, space before or after, color, and so on.

We promise that if you learn to use Format Painter, you will save yourself a lot of time and mouse clicks. In fact, after you get the hang of it, you rarely need to visit the Font or Paragraph dialogs (or palettes or toolboxes). When you know how Format Painter works, you can almost always change the appearance of a word, paragraph, or page with one or two clicks (or, better, keyboard shortcuts).

Format Painter does what the Copy and Paste and Match Formatting commands do. But unlike those commands, Format Painter is always right in front of your eyes on the ribbon’s Home tab.

Outlook doesn’t offer Format Painter, but it is on the ribbon’s Home tab in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Speak Your Mind with Dictation

Most computers these days have a built-in microphone. But did you know that you can use that microphone to dictate your words in your Office apps?

We thought not.

Here’s how to do it:

1. In your document, place the cursor in the location you want your text to be.
2. Select Edit ⇒   Start Dictation (or press Fn+D) to open the Dictation window.
3. Your app begins listening immediately, so simply begin speaking your content.
4. Click the Done button when finished.

You can also click the Dictate button on Word’s Home tab (this isn’t available in other apps) to open the Dictation window at the bottom of your document.

Don’t forget to speak your punctuation! For example, when you're dictating your text and come to the end of a sentence, remember to enunciate the word “period” to place a period at the end of the sentence. The same goes for adding question marks, exclamation marks, and any other punctuation.

Fair warning — your computer’s microphone can’t discriminate between your voice and that of others, so make sure you’re in a quiet environment to avoid any errors and to prevent words from being accidentally recorded.

Don’t Forget Your Free OneDrive

Although our daily Office workflow has remained basically unchanged for years, our work habits and tools have changed a lot. These days, for example, we use a laptop computer much more, we have an iPhone and an iPad, and we take advantage of free Wi-Fi at Starbucks (and at many other places) almost every day.

We’ve already mentioned the browser-based Office for the Web apps and Microsoft’s free OneDrive system, but we sometimes forget to use these great web-based tools — and you might forget too. So follow these tips to get the most benefit from the web-based Office components:

• Remember to save files to your OneDrive (click the Share button in the upper-right of your current window and upload the file, or a copy of it, to OneDrive) in addition to saving them on your local hard drive. That way, you can edit them on any computer with a web browser.
• Bookmark Office.com (at www.office.com/signin) in your browser’s bookmarks bar. That way, you’re reminded about it every time you look at your browser. From there you can access not only OneDrive but also other online Office apps.
• You can download the OneDrive app on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device to access your stored files on them as well. Just go to the App Store on your device and search for Microsoft OneDrive, and then download the app.