Microsoft Office 2010 tips collection continues, this time with ten tips for Word and Excel users. Most of these tips are fairly straightforward, and most apply to the most recent versions of Office. Some of them, however, offer new twists for the latest version of Office. Expert users will be familiar with some of these ten tips, but we hope that any user will find at least a few of these to be useful.
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What kind of tips am I talking about this time? Finding ways to perform poorly documented functions in Word and Excel. One of these tips, for example, tells you what to do when Word inserts a horizontal line across the page when you only wanted to type a few dashes. In the past few months, everyone in my family has tried and failed to wrestle an unwanted horizontal line out of a Word document. It might not sound like a big issue, but once you’ve got it in your document, good luck finding help from Microsoft on how to get rid of it.
Some software vendors, like Adobe, continue to provide help systems that work like improved versions of traditional software manuals. In those apps, every menu item, every toolbar icon, is carefully explained, and with a little patience you can find all the information you need. Microsoft, in contrast, provides with you a kind of information supermarket, with huge essays about topics you don’t care about, dozens of selections when you only need one, and no consistent way to find the information you want. When I need help with Office, I don’t click the help button on the upper right of the ribbon—I go to Google or Bing. Curiously, Google is more likely than Bing to send me to useful pages at Microsoft.com.
I’ve focused these tips, therefore, on convenient ways to do things that Office doesn’t offer much guidance about, either on its menu or on its ill-conceived online help system, which has a bad habit of not telling me what I need to know.
Whatever your level of Word and Excel expertise, you’ll find a technique worth remembering among these ten tips. Click on the slideshow above to read the rest of our Word and Excel 2010 tips story.
Looking for even more Microsoft Office 2010 tips? Check out the rest of our ongoing series.