Here are a few tips and shortcuts to simplify working with Microsoft Office Applications.  We’re always happy to provide software support to increase your productivity!

Format Painter - Format painter is one of the most helpful buttons/commands within the Microsoft Office suite, and probably the least commonly used! Format Painter can help when you’re struggling to make a bulleted list look exactly like the one on the first page, or when you want to duplicate a cell on a spreadsheet without going through six or seven steps in the process.

Let’s say that you’re working in PowerPoint and have created a bulleted list on slide number one that is just perfect. The indent, font, font size and color are just right.  You can’t remember which font you used or what size it is, but you want to have the bulleted list on slide number four look exactly the same. Here’s what you do:

• Highlight the bulleted list on slide number one.
• Click on the Format Painter button (an image is shown at the top of this paragraph)
• Once you’ve clicked on the Format Painter button, a paintbrush will attach itself to your cursor.
• Go to slide number four (with the paintbrush attached to your cursor) and highlight the bulleted list on page four. 

Voila! The formatting from the bulleted list on slide number one is now applied to the bulleted list on slide number four with one simple click. It works exactly the same within Word or Excel. Simply select the text (or a cell, or a header) that has the formatting that you want to duplicate - click on the Format Painter Button - then click on the text (or a cell, or a header) that you want to assume the new formatting.

This can save lots of time when you’re creating complex and attractive documents. Good luck!

 

Hard returns within a cell in Microsoft Excel - When you’re working in Excel and want to insert a line break, simply hold down the ALT key and then press ENTER. This will insert a “hard return” or a line break and allow you to move to the next line to begin typing again.

 

Setting tabs in PowerPoint - When working in PowerPoint, if you want to set tabs and move to them within a text box or a table, press the CTRL key and then the TAB key. Otherwise, you simply move to the next cell in a table, or to the next object on a PowerPoint slide.

 

Printing Problems in Excel - Have you ever printed an Excel worksheet and it prints to 7 pages instead of one simple table that you created?  Isn’t that frustrating? To avoid the frustration, go to the View menu and select “Page Break Preview”.  This will change the on screen view of your page showing solid blue lines where the pages will break when printed.  You can drag the blue lines to wherever you want the pages to actually break OR you can force Excel to print to a single page by using the following steps:

• Go to the file menu and select Print Preview
• Click on the Page tab
• Under the heading of “Scaling” make sure to activate the radio button that says “Fit to 1 page wide by 1 page tall” (or however many pages you need it to print to)

Good luck printing!
 

WordWrap - In the old fashioned typewriter days, it was necessary to hit the RETURN key at the end of each typed line to advance the paper and start typing the next line. With computers this is no longer necessary, and can actually cause problems when formatting complex documents.  You should NEVER hit ENTER at the end of a line when typing a text document on the computer. The computer automatically knows when to move to the next line so you don’t ever have to think about it.  The ONLY time to hit that ENTER key is when you’re ending a paragraph or starting a new section.

Why does it matter?  Let’s say that you’re creating a text document that will be an article in the company newsletter.  You are required to send the article in electronic format so that the publisher can simply copy and paste it into the publishing software that’s being used. If you have typed the article using “WordWrap”, when the text is dropped into the publishing software, it will automatically flow into the designated space and fit perfectly with no editing required.  If you forgot about WordWrap and hit that ENTER key at the end of each line, when the article is dropped into the publishing software those hard returns will be required and appear in the wrong places. So you’ll see output like this:

When creating a newsletter it can be
very frustrating when you realize that the author of an article
has used hard returns
while creating their article.  You now have to go
back into the article and remove the hard returns so that the text
will flow
properly into the area designated for the article.

The newsletter editor will have to spend a lot of time removing the hard returns and will probably glare at you the next time you pass in the hall!

Put a post-it note on your screen or your keyboard to remind you to NOT hit that ENTER key at the end of each line. I even heard of a typing teacher who put a tack on the ENTER key with the pointy side up to discourage students from using the key at all!  OUCH!
 

Send questions to the GetHipp wizard for software ideas and support. We’re always happy to help!