Sweet Suite Tips

Most of us have a pet office-suite application, one that we use more than all other applications combined perhaps, and one that we think we know pretty well. You may consider yourself a Word wiz or a PowerPoint pro, but are these and the other productivity tools in your office suite making you as productive as you can be? Consider these tips little productivity boosters.

General Tips for Office Suites

Smarten Up Your Clicks and Drags in Microsoft Office: It's easy to click and drag text or objects between Microsoft Office applications (as well as between most other applications). You may not get the results you want when the object is dropped into the target application, however.

Instead of simply left-clicking and dragging the object, right-click and drag it instead. When you do that, a context menu appears that lets you choose the action you want to perform when you drop the object. The most common options are Move Here, Copy Here, and Cancel. If the target application supports hyperlinks, you'll also see Create Hyperlink Here.

Store Your Office 2000 Settings Online: Microsoft offers an easy way for you to transfer your Office 2000 settings from one PC to another. The Office 2000 Save My Settings Wizard helps you store your settings in a secure area of Microsoft's Office Update site; afterward you can download them to the new PC so that all your Office applications are set to work the way you want them to. When you're done, the computer reverts to the way it was set up before you started. This is a convenient way to take your preferred Office settings with you on the road or to restore your settings in the event of a system failure.

Make Precise Selections: If you select a range of cells in a Microsoft Excel worksheet, for example, and part of the area you select isn't visible, you may select too few or too many cells if you simply click and drag with the mouse. This is especially true on notebooks, whose pointing devices are lousy at clicking and dragging.

The Shift-click technique, however, works when you make selections in any Windows application. To select a group of visible and invisible cells, click the upper-left cell of the desired selection, navigate to the bottom-right cell of the area you want to select, and click that bottom-right cell while holding down the Shift key. Doing so will select the entire range. This technique also works when you're creating a formula and need to give it a range of cells to calculate.

To select a group of nonadjacent cells when creating a formula or formatting a group of separated cells, hold down the Ctrl key while you select each cell in turn. If you make an error in selection, Ctrl-click the cell again to deselect it.