Top 14 Incredibly Useful Microsoft Office Tips

Spend less time doing more with the tools you use every day!

If you use Microsoft Word, Excel or Outlook often, you’ll want to know and use each of the tips below regularly to save time, organize yourself better, and be more efficient. And let’s face it, most of us have to use these programs at work (or similar software) to complete day-to-day tasks. So whether you’re a power user or just getting started, you’ll want to check these out!

Microsoft Outlook

There are many people who say email has killed productivity but the truth is we've been able to do a lot more in our day with asynchronous communication like email. Email abuse, like any other tool, can become unproductive so here are some tips to help you own your email efficiency.

• Schedule Send/Receive Every 30 Minutes – Outlook can be set to only check for new email periodically – I suggest every 30 minutes.  Why?  Because email is an easy distraction, and distractions quickly drain productivity.  If you only get to distract yourself every 30 minutes with email, then it opens up chunks of time where you can focus and be productive.  If you need to receive an email immediately, just push the “Send/Receive” button, and Outlook will check your email right away. You can change this in Outlook by going to the Tools --> Options menu and then clicking the button below:
  
  

Bonus Tip: Disable your “You’ve Got Mail” pop up that appears in the bottom right corner of your screen when new email comes in.  Again, this is just a distraction.  Set aside time to check email and try to do it only during that time.  Don’t make email a game of whack-a-mole.

• Delay Delivery of Email – Before you press “send” on an email, you have the option to delay delivery.  Some great uses of this are: a) Send an email reminder to yourself to do something in several days b) send a follow up to a vendor or colleague next day c) leave a message in your outbox for an hour or two, just in case you have thoughts you want to add before it sends. Click the following in the message options box:
  
  
  
• Send Replies to Another Address – In the same screen where you can choose to delay an email, you can also choose to have replies sent to someone else.  In other words, when people press “reply” in their email program, it will reply to an address of your choice.  If you’re sending an email on behalf of someone else, this is a great way to have replies sent to them rather than you. In the image above, look for the checkbox labelled "Have replies sent to" and enter an email address of your choice.
  
  
• Turn On and Off Reading Pane - The preview pane in outlook is handy because as you scroll through your emails it opens them so you can see what they look like. The problem is that a lot of spam and viruses come into your inbox. If you open up every email that comes in, you're gonna get a virus - no way around it. It's better to turn off the preview pane on your inbox only. Each version of Microsoft Outlook is slightly different, but in Outlook 2007 you can find this option in the View Menu (see below):
  
  
  
• Keep Your Outlook File Size Small – Your outlook file size ideally should be under 1GB.  You don’t have to be tech savvy to do this one – just go to the menu Tools --> Mailbox Cleanup.  This menu gives you tools to find all emails over a certain size, to delete all items in your ‘Deleted’ box, and to run Auto-Archive.  I recommend you do all of these, on a somewhat regular basis.  That will keep your outlook running quickly and avoid problems where your Outlook can really slow down or freeze your computer.
  
  
• Keyboard Shortcuts! – You can send an email by pressing CTRL + Enter in Outlook.  When you’re on an email binge and need to get through emails quickly, being able to work without moving your hands from the keyboard is awesome.  Another useful  shortcut is CTRL + R replies to an email and CTRL + F forwards an email.
  
  
• Add Emails to Your Calendar Appointments – Many times your calendar appointments are for meetings or to take care of an email that you received earlier.  When you have an appointment open, you can drag and drop an email from your inbox into the calendar appointment, then save the appointment.  Later when the appointment comes up, you’ll be able to see the email and remind yourself about the details of the project/meeting/etc without having to dig through your inbox.
  
  
• Add or Remove Sorting Columns From Your Inbox – This doesn’t come up often but when it does it’s incredibly useful.  By default, Outlook shows you information about your emails but what if you want to see more?  For example, sometimes while looking at your inbox, Outlook will show you who and email is from but not who it was sent to.  Do this by clicking with your right mouse button on the existing set of fields (from, subject, received, etc) and choosing the “Field Chooser” menu item.  From that menu, you can drag and drop new fields right onto the menu bar. See example below.
  
  

Microsoft Word

• Keyboard Shortcuts! – The thing that fumbles most people up in Microsoft Word is editing of existing text. There are a ton of useful shortcuts that are worth learning and remembering to help save a bunch of time (all of these tricks can be used while composing email in Microsoft Outlook too).
  • CTRL+Right Arrow jumps one word to the right
  • CTRL+Shift+Right arrow selects the world to the right
  • CTRL+B = Bold
  • CTRL+I = Italics
  • CTRL + Period = Make Font Bigger (while the text you want to increase is highlighted)
  • CTRL + Comma = Make Font Smaller (while the text you want to decrease is highlighted)
  • CTRL +D = Font Menu with lots of choices for font styling
  • CTRL + K = Add hyperlink to the highlighted text
    
    
• Avoid Annoying Extra Spaces – Sometimes when you press “Enter” in Word, it adds 2 lines of space rather than just jumping to the next line. When that happens, you have 2 choices. 1) Select the text you’re working on and change the font ‘style’ to Normal. If you don’t know how to do that, that’s okay tool. You can just press SHIFT + Enter to jump to the next line.
  
  

Microsoft Excel

• Content Copy Tool – whenever you’re editing a cell in Excel, you’ll find a little black box in the bottom right corner of the cell (see below):
  
  If you click on that box and hold it, you can drag it up, down, left or right. As you drag it, you’ll be copying the data and format of that cell to every other cell you choose. This is a huge timesaver – let’s take this example. If you enter the word “January” into a cell, then click the Content Copy Tool box and drag down about 15 cell and let go of your mouse button, you’ll find it auto-created each month after January for the next 15 months in order! This is a powerful tool and there are many online tutorials that walk through the advanced uses of this function, but for now you should know it exists!
  
  
• Format Painter – Here’s another big timesaver. Let’s say you wanted to copy the formatting of a cell (font size, font color, font formatting) but didn’t want to change the content of any existing data cells, you can use the format painter tool! The Content Copy Tool described above will also copy formatting, but it will also replace the content in the cells that you drag over. The formatting tool will *only* copy the formatting. To use the tool, first click on the cell that has the formatting you want. Next, click the format painter tool icon () which is usually near the font editing tools just below the main menu. Then just click on the cell or cells that you want to assign new formatting to. That’s it!
  
  
• Add A New Line in a Cell – While entering content into a cell just press ALT+Enter to add a jump to a new line in that cell (you can’t press “ENTER” by itself because that will tell Excel that you’re done editing the cell)
  
  
• Freezing Panes – In most spreadsheets it would be useful to always have certain cells visible regardless of where you are in a spreadsheet. For example, most data has at least 1 header row that names the columns below it. Keeping the cells visible is at all times is called “Freeze Panes” and is located in the View Menu in Microsoft Excel. Sometimes you have to select the rows that you’d like to freeze before choosing “Freeze Panes” depending on which version of Excel you’re using.
  

Well there you have it. By following these steps you will be a Kung-Fu Master of office productivity. Have feedback for us? Send comments to info@headsetdiscounters.com.