5 tips to save time with Microsoft Office
Melissa Esquibel, a Microsoft certified trainer and contributing editor for Business Management Daily’s Office Technology Today newsletter, shares five tips to shave wasted time off your day with Microsoft Office in the video below:
Tip #1: Creating templates. In Excel, PowerPoint and Word, if you take all of your hard work and just do it once by clicking on File, Save As, Save as type: Template, you’re going to shave hours off of all that deleting you do. Opening up an old document, deleting the stuff you don’t need and using it again takes unnecessary time.
Tip #2: Quick Parts. Quick Parts in Outlook 2010 enables you to work fast. You can take a five-click process and turn it into one click. If you always folder a certain type of email, forward it to a colleague and then mark it for follow up, you can do all three of those things at once in a Quick Part.
Tip #3: Rapid-fire PowerPoint. A lot of you get the request, “Can you make a PowerPoint presentation for me?” Right away you’re looking at five or six hours of your day just spent in PowerPoint. When you’re in PowerPoint and you see all of your slide thumbnails on the left, look for the tab called Outline. You can just start typing your outline right there. You’re going to tab for each bullet and shift-tab for each new slide. When you go back to your slide thumbnails, your slide presentation will be all laid out for you.
Tip #4: Excel tables. In Excel 2007, 2010 and 2013 on the Home tab in the Styles group, you’ll see a button called table styles. If you click on that, you will instantly get filters, banded rows, banded columns and even a total row where you don’t have to type in any formulas — you just tell it what you want. Tables are a huge time saver and a problem solved for many of you with the lists that you use.
Tip #5: Outlook Rules. You know you’re getting emails that you don’t actually read right away, so you’re going to folder them to read later. Why even let them come to your inbox? You can write a rule that knows the subject, the sender and even content right in that email. Based on that criteria, Outlook will automatically folder it for you.
