Did you know? Random MS Office tips

Excel 

• Double-click on the edge of an individual cell in a block of data to go to the corresponding edge of the entire block. Hold down the shift key while you do it to select the intervening cells.

• Right-click on one of the sheet navigation button at the bottom left of the Excel window to bring up a list of all the sheets in the workbook. If there are more sheets than can be displayed in a simple list, there will be a 'More Sheets…' button that will display all the sheets in a scrollable list. (Thanks to an attendee at one of last year's IT Faculty roadshows for pointing this one out).

• Use Format, Sheet, Background to add a background picture to an Excel Worksheet. Use Format, Sheet, Delete background to get rid of it when you realise it wasn't such a good idea after all. The Excel 2007 equivalent is in the Page Setup section of the Page Layout ribbon.

Word

• Treble click in a paragraph to select the whole paragraph. Hold down the Control key and click in a sentence to select just that sentence.

• Control+Space removes all formatting from the selected characters.

• You can add anything from individual words to phrases to paragraphs to the contents of whole documents as AutoText. Just select what you want to make available for re-use, then press Alt+F3 and give the item a sensible abbreviation. Prior to Word 2007 you could start typing in your abbreviation and, if it was unique, after 4 or so characters it would display a yellow tip with the beginning of the full text, just press the Return key to expand to the full text, or carry on typing to ignore it. This is known as AutoComplete. In Word 2007, AutoComplete seems to have gone missing, and you will need to type in your full abbreviation and then press the F3 key to expand it. If anyone knows how to make AutoComplete work in Word 2007. I'd be very pleased to find out!

• If you want to generate lots of text in Word then type =rand() and press the Return key.

Outlook

• Right click on an email to add a reminder to 'Follow up' by a particular time.

• To choose the fields you want to display in any of Outlooks 'list' type views, right click on one of the column headings and choose 'Field Chooser' from the menu. Drag the chosen field from this list to the required position in the column headings. Drag a column heading out of the column area to remove it.

• It's better to read your emails through before you send them, rather than afterwards….