Microsoft Word – 10 Features that will Improve Your Workflow

With so many features packed inside each Microsoft application, it’s easy to overlook some that can really add value to your daily workflow.  Below is a list of some of the features you may have never noticed but will quickly become part of your daily routine.

Styles

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Styles are not only a great time-saver, but they form the basis of a variety of other Word features.

Styles allow you to assign in bulk a variety of different formatting attributes, like font size, style, color, alignment, line spacing, borders, shades, indentation, etc…  The list is quite voluminous.  Once styles are applied to text, the text can then be bulk-updated simply by changing the style.  If you modify the style, Word will automatically apply the change to all text whose appearance was created from the style.  Imagine the time saved when making minor alterations like changing the font size of all headings.  Change the style and all of the headings are updated to match.

Once you have your styles in place, you can now also navigate more effectively through your document via the Navigation Pane.  Any text formatted with a heading style will appear as a list entry.  This will become one of the greatest time-savers when navigating large documents.

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Excel – Hide Records with Zeroes in Pivot Table Calculations

One of the most asked questions of beginning, and sometimes seasoned, pivot table users is “How do I hide the entries in a pivot table whose totals equal zero?”  On first blush, this seems like an easy feat, but users quickly discover that it’s not as easy as predicted.  There are ways to sort the source data and then exclude the entries with zero values, but that task of sorting and filtering the source data would have to be performed each time the source data is updated.  This is not an appealing prospect.

There is actually a very easy way to not display pivot table records that equal zero.

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