Manage the Office Task Pane

If you use Microsoft Office XP or Office 2003, you’ve probably seen the Task Pane. It’s a column that pops up on the right-hand side of the screen, most commonly encountered when launching an application.

However, it disappears as soon as you create a new document, allowing you to concentrate on editing the new file ­ and forget about the Task Pane at the same time. This is a pity because the Task Pane has lots going for it, from managing formatting to aiding online research, and in this feature we’ll show you how to use the best bits.

We should point out that Office 2007 dispensed with the Task Pane in favour of the ‘ribbon’ control, but we know that most of our readers still use Office XP or 2003. So if you regularly use applications like Word and Excel 2003, read on to find out how the Task Pane can make your life easier.

What is the Task Pane?
The Task Pane appears on the right-hand side of the screen whenever you launch any core Office application ­ meaning Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Publisher and Frontpage. We know that most people will use only the first two of these programs on a regular basis, so we’ll focus on this pair. That said, the basic navigation of the Task Pane is the same across all Office applications.

It’s possible that you didn’t even realise the Task Pane existed ­ even though it should appear every time you launch an Office application. This is because, in this guise, it is not labelled ‘Task Pane’ but ‘Getting Started’. But, Getting Started is just one many different Task Panes. Click the little down-facing arrow alongside the Getting Started heading to view a list of the others available.

Incidentally, if for some reason the Task Pane is not displayed when an application is launched, either tap F1 or select Task Pane from the View menu. There are other ways to launch it, too, which we’ll come to later.

Now, the roster of Task Pane panels will depend on the application. Word, for example, includes a Styles and Formatting Task Pane that doesn’t exist in Excel, while Excel has an XML Source option that would serve no purpose in Word. We can’t hope to cover every last permutation, so, again, we’ll focus on those we think will be useful to most people.

Everyday Task Panes
The Getting Started Task Pane is the one you’ll see most often, because it appears when you launch an Office application. It contains clickable shortcuts to the most-recently used documents, links to Microsoft’s Office Online home page (see ‘What is Office online?’, left, for more about this) and a search box that will hunt online for answers to common Office questions. However, beyond this, it’s not a terribly useful Task Pane and, if you want, it can be disabled by clicking Tools, choosing Options followed by the View pane and removing the tick from the ‘Startup Task Pane’ box.

Next up is the New Document panel which is accessed either by selecting New Document from the Task Pane dropdown menu or by selecting New from the File menu. You’ll be presented with a list of file-creation options, such as starting a blank document in Word or downloading some ready-made spreadsheet templates for Excel from the aforementioned Office Online website. Simple stuff.

Ditto the Help Task Pane, which is prompted by pressing F1 in any core Office application (or selecting Help from the dropdown menu if the Task Pane is already present). To find help on a topic, just type some relevant keywords into the search box and hit Enter or click the green, right-pointing arrow alongside it. The Office application will then look for matching entries in its help database and display a list of results. The icons alongside each entry indicate whether it is online help (requiring an internet connection) or local ­ entries with blue question marks are help files that exist on your hard disk. Just click on an entry to read it.

Before we finish with the basics, it’s worth pointing out that the Task Pane can be anchored to any side of the screen or set to ‘float’ in a desired spot. Just left-click the small column of four dots alongside the Task Pane heading and hold down the mouse button to drag and drop it to a new place. It can also be resized by clicking and dragging the divider bar, or any side or corner if it is floating. Finally, make the Task Pane disappear by clicking the little cross at the top right.