Tips on using Microsoft Office

Here are two tips on using Microsoft Office. I use Microsoft Office at work on various works, including support and development documentations. Office documentations are common way to communicate at work.

The first tip is a simple one. In many cases, we need to copy content of an Excel cell as text. If you use normal copy by control+C key, actually you will get some extra information. This results in formats or extra carriage return be pasted. To copy text only, you can select text in the top input area next to toolbar items. Copy the text there will only get plain text only.

The second tip is about Word file. I like to use style to format text in word documentation. The style is something like css classes. You change one style, and all the text assigned with the style will be changed automatically. The second advantage is to layout the documentation by styles, such as title, heading 1, heading 2 and so on.

In the toolbar area, there one dropdown box for existing or current used styles. This list does not list all the predefined styles there. It is tedious to enable all the styles. One thing I noticed is that the dropdown box is editable. You can type in a style name. If it exists, it will be loaded. For example, Title is not normally in the list, but you can type it to bring it out. This is very handy way to use styles you remember.

Those are two very simple ones, but I use them very often.