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Use Office 2007 More Effectively

Matthew MacDonald

Thursday, December 06, 2007 10:00 PM PST

Go to the Mini-Bar

Works in: Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook

Formatting text is one of the most common tasks in any Office application. The ribbon can manage the task with ease, but you have a quicker alternative: the floating Office mini-bar.

Excel mini-bar. Click to view full-size image.
To see the mini-bar in action, select some text. (This could be text in a Word document, in an Excel spreadsheet cell, or in a rich text field in an Access database.) When you mouse over the selected text, you'll see a toolbar with buttons for changing the font, the text size, the text color, and a few other options. Making a selection here saves you the effort of digging through the ribbon to find the same options.

Use the Live Word Count

Works in: Word

Word count. Click to view full-size image.
In Office 2003, you had to visit the menu to count the words in your current document. In the Office 2007 version of Word, the word count appears in the status bar and updates as you type. If you select a portion of your document, the word count will show two pieces of information: the number of words in the selection, and the word count of the entire document.

Insert Quick Parts

Works in: Word

Here's a tip that will impress many seasoned Office users. In a Word document, type Sticky Quote and then press F3. Your text will disappear, replaced by a floating pink box that looks like a sticky note.

This odd trick works because Sticky Quotes are one of Word's many Quick Parts, or commonly used building blocks. (For the full list of Quick Part names, choose the Insert tab, find the Text section, click Quick Parts, and then click Building Blocks Organizer.)

You might find several other useful ingredients in the list of prebuilt Quick Parts; for instance, in addition to the Sticky Quotes, you can find CONFIDENTIAL 1, which adds a watermark to the background of the current page that reads "CONFIDENTIAL" in large block letters. An even better trick, however, is to create your own.

To do so, select some content (anything from a single word to multiple paragraphs of formatted text and graphics) and press Alt-F3. The Create New Quick Part dialog box will appear. Here you can give your Quick Part a name and choose whether it should always occupy its own paragraph or page (or whether it should appear in the middle of the content you're currently typing). Once you've finished creating the Quick Part, you can insert it in any Word document by typing the name of your Quick Part and pressing F3.

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