your favourite ms office process or tool

[StealthPolarBear]

I expect this thread to run to thousands of posts :)

Access compact and repair. Lovely.

Pivot tables, VLookup. Love excel too getorf.

I have a horror of Times New Roman though. It's pants.

Tell you what though I used to think Word for PC was bad till we got a Mac at home, luckily I don't do much Word at home because it is dire, very limited functionality.

Anther thing I love with my edited documents is the View as Final mode when you have got track changes on, makes it far easier to read.

Oh oh oh - and the 'if' function. Lovely.

Very excited about trying F4 tomorrow.

Putting in page breaks with the keyboard totally baffles those who don't know how to do it. Gasps of amazement.

actually can this thread morph into a "share your office hints and tips"
there are so many things that you just struggle through then one day you discover a better way and life is so much easier

mine:

• figure out array formulas, particularly for when you want to apply a formula to the range you're vlookuping into - eg you can vlookup(left(a1,6), left(D:E,6), 2,false) which you can't do normally iyswim. So if you were searching for part of a surname in a list of longer names, you can cut it to the first 6 characters
• as someone else mentioned, learn to do the ctrl-up, ctrl-down, saves hours of scrolling, combined with copying and pasting your formulas donw
• use indirect when you're using values in the sheet to look up in other worksheets or workbooks, eg column A is your 201011 column, and you want to look up these values in a workbook called 201011.xls. Fine, type it in manually, but if the one next to it is 200910, 200809 and so on, indirect will save you all the typing and the re-typing when you invariably correct somehing!

ooh how do you do page breaks with the keyboard?
Again, I on;y discovered them at all a few years ago, after years of enter-enter-enter and repeat, with the resultant loss of formatting if I changed anything

ahandbag - spark lines sound brilliant.

F11 in excel.

I have recently discovered how to make flow charts in Word. Love it!

This is Most Useful Thread Of The Year.

I too have always been in the love Excel, hate Word camp (and am also a ppt ninja). But then I discovered the Shauna Kelly website on how to tame Word - highly recommended. I am now Queen of Styles and have my own normal.dotx and numbering and bullets bend to my will and EVERYTHING.

God, I fucking hate pivot tables.

Oh, i can learn much from this thread,...

brawhen, that sounds awesome. I will be Queen of the Office.

Ctrl D copies the cell above, I use this every day. Ctrl Arrow takes you to the next used cell. Ctrl Shift Page Up or down flips between pages on a spreadsheet.

I frigging love excel, the Ctrl button is king.

Stealth - if you're that much in to array formulas and complex looky-up stuff, have you thought about learning SQL and using it with Access? (Or maybe you do)

Do you mean in Word, Stealth? It's Control Enter.

This is my spiritual home. I'll be back later to make copious notes.

stealth am on my phone so can't double-check and it's my fingers that know how to do it, iyswim, but I think it's CTRL+ENTER. With a flourish if anyone's watching over your shoulder!

Here it is: www.shaunakelly.com/word

Pivot tables in Excel. Alignment tools in Powerpoint.

Yes, brawhen, I did. loved SQL, not so keen on programming, now I am just SQL and Office :)

Just off out but would be v.v. grateful if anyone would tell me how to do sparklines.

Kelly2525 PLEASE be careful, every keystoke you make is stored in your computer and can be recovered by someone with the right access. Its called METADATA. my boss wrote Dear Shitface, then deleted it and wrote Dear Mike. Mike did the metadata thing, and we lost an important client.

I love F4. Been using it for years, and I love people's faces when I pass it on

And If formulas. My proudest moment was making a nested IF formula, which had 7 (count them, 7) formulas inside it. And it worked perfectly and made a few months at work so much easier!

I run a software development business - 7 developers who are Kings of SQL and me who has to be Queen of Everything Else. I may elevate myself to Emperor after consuming this thread.

lol at with a flourish
will try it tomorrow (if my doc shuts down without saving I WILL BLAME YOU)
ooh bookmark for me to tell you the best thing ever I learned the other day

And Find and Replace, when you've got columns of 0s or #N/As. All gone in the blink of an eye.

Save first!

What are you going to teach us?

I love this thread.