Working Smarter with Microsoft Office
part 2

In last month’s article, I gave a few features that let you get more out of the applications you use every day. Here are a few more ideas to be able to do more with less effort.

Highlighting is probably one of the most underappreciated skills in these applications. Most people learn one or two ways to highlight and stop there. But, although they may work, it can be frustrating at times. For example, if you’ve tried highlighting several screens in Word or Excel with your mouse, you know it will go into warp drive and highlight way more than you want. Here are a couple of alternative methods to reduce your frustrations.

First, the cursor movement keys can be used to highlight as well. Just hold down the Shift key while using any of those cursor movement keys. Below are some cursor movement keys.

Arrow keys (up, down, left, right)—one letter, line or cell
Page up, page down—a screen at a time
Home—beginning of line
End—end of line
Using Ctrl in combination with those keys alter how they move the cursor. For example: Ctrl+Home takes you to the beginning of the document, worksheet, or to the first slide.
Ctrl+End takes you to the end of the document, worksheet, or to the last slide.*

* This is especially helpful in Excel. If you’ve ever printed a spreadsheet and ended up with a lot of blank pages, it’s because Excel thinks your worksheet is larger than you do. Ctrl+End will show you where Excel thinks the end is (and that’s all that really matters). The simplest way to fix it is to either delete all extra (empty) rows and columns; or, cut and paste to a new worksheet.

Second, you can highlight either a contiguous range (one big block of text or cells) or a non-contiguous range (scattered blocks of text or cells that are not adjacent to each other). Simply hold down the Ctrl key while using the mouse to highlight.

Take control of the Paste feature. When I copy and paste text into a Word document from another source (e.g., another document, a web page), the formatting is all wrong. Fixing this is simple. After you paste you should get a little drop-down menu appear at the end of what you pasted. If you click on it, you’ll see several choices. The default is to keep the original formatting. Instead, you can choose to match the destination formatting or keep text only (this will strip out any graphics).

Finally, pay attention to the cursor shape. It indicates what the application will do so it helps to notice the changing shapes (again, what it thinks is all that matters):

	Arrow — select
	Double-headed arrow — resize
	Four-headed arrow — move
	Thick white plus — select cell
	Thin black plus — fill/copy

Those are a few ways to work smarter, not harder. In next month’s article I’ll give a few more tricks to get more done in less time.