Feature: Top 50 Microsoft Office tips

Microsoft Office is a productivity suite with near-diabolical capabilities.

The irony is that all this power comes with controls that aren’t immediately obvious to the average home user. We’ve decided to redress the balance on the following pages.

The tips and tricks that follow are not aimed at Office whizzes, but at the rest of us who use Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel, and can’t find out how to kill off the Paperclip, or how to stop Word from changing words to American spellings automatically.

Read on for more ways to make life in the Office easier.

GENERAL OFFICE TIPS
1. Zoom around
If you’ve got a scroll wheel mouse, try holding down the Ctrl key and using the scroll button. You can zoom in and out on documents in Word, PowerPoint and Excel. It’s much easier than tinkering with the Zoom menu in the tool bar.

2. Use keyboard shortcuts
Some keyboard shortcuts, such as those for cutting and pasting text, are well known but Office includes many more that can speed up tasks.

Any menu item that has a letter underlined can be a keyboard shortcut. Hold down the Alt key, then the underlined letter.

For example, press Alt and I, and the Insert menu will open. Continue to hold down the Alt key, and select P, and the Picture menu will open.

3. Peek without the program
Not everyone has Office, and if you want to send documents for someone else to open, this can be a problem.

No fear, for the Office viewers are here. These free downloads enable you to open, but not alter, documents created using Office applications.

4. Font of all wisdom
Showing fonts in the font toolbar as themselves, rather than the plain system font, can slow down older PCs. To switch off this feature, go to Tools, Customize and select the Options tab.

Find the tick box for the option labelled ‘Show font names in their font’ and uncheck it. Of course, if the PC is fast, it can be switched on by doing the reverse. This works for all of the basic Office applications.

5. Get free fonts
Rather than just using Comic Sans, try downloading some free fonts. A word of warning, though: some of the websites that claim to offer free fonts actually charge for them.

6. Take a font with you
Sending a document to another person who doesn’t have the fonts used in the document can be frustrating; if Office can’t find the font used in a document, it automatically picks another font – usually Times New Roman.

If it’s important that the recipient of your document gets the font as well, it is possible to embed a copy of the font in the document.

Go to Tools, then Options, then select the Save tab. Select Embed TrueType fonts, and tick the two boxes that open below it.

A word of warning: this will increase the size of Word documents considerably. It also only works on TrueType fonts that are non-commercial.

7. Install more fonts
Add more fonts to Windows, and you’ll have more choice for presentations, posters and newsletters. Go to the Start menu, then Control Panel, then Fonts.

If you have a TrueType font, drag and drop it into the Font window that opens up. You should be able to use the font immediately.