your favourite ms office process or tool

[StealthPolarBear]

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

Access compact and repair. Lovely.

Only just come back to this - conditional formatting in 2010, there's lots more rules, you can find duplicate or unique values, tag by colour, assign icon sets (loads of cool choices of arrows and little pictures). You can have as many rules as you want, you can format and then sort by colour. Oh, I'm not doing it justice, it is just FAB.

Jareth - just tried F11 - wow- how could I never have known that before
Nice to know I'm not the only lover of pivot tables

awesome, isn't it

Brawhen - I went through one of the Shauna Kelly style guides last week to try and tame the section numbering thing, I've set it all up but can't seem to get it to apply to existing documents. I agree that they are very helpful.

Ctrl Enter for page breaks is another favourite of mine.

Also the thing for stripping all formatting is great when all else fails with my crappy old docs. For example we had an old spreadsheet which for no apparent reason was converting all the script in one column into the Greek alphabet, we could not find out why, so just stripped the format, started again, job done.

And the Windows Button-M to minimize all windows and get to the desktop.

I am on my iPad so can't watch this thread so I've had to post to mark my place. No useful tips (though I do so love access) but I will be trying all your tips well the ones I understand just as soon as I can

WhoKnows - your problem might be that it's not very obvious/easy how to apply styles from new templates in to old ones - you have to use the Styles Organiser on the Developer tab (and you have to opt-in to seeing that tab).

Try this:
cybertext.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/word-use-the-organizer-to-copy-macros-styles-from-one-document-to-another/

You can also copy it in to the normal template, if not already there.

What's F11? I can't try it until tomorrow and may burst with curiosity.

Thanks, Brawhen I'll have a look next time I've got my laptop on, I'd love to crack this one as it wastes a lot of my time.

F11 = make a table in excel and hit F11. It will build your graph instantly.

Lunatic - I used to do that to create a stock level spreadsheet. Was AWESOME.

ooh tell me how to strip formatting, I ens up copying into notepad and back aain

Ah, I haven't got the PC on, so can't describe exactly, but in the home tab, in the box where Bold, font etc are it's there, I think it looks a bit like the format painter button, if you hover I think it says Remove All Formatting.

Ok mu other tip was that autorecover in excel 2007 really works! I'd done a chart and because ot was a quick thing I hadn't saved it...only when it crash did I realise how much I had actually done and lost. Someone in ly office showed me autorecover which I have always been aware of bit its never worked in the past.
Open up excel options )from the button) and somewhere inbthere, maybe advanced, shows you where it saves stuff. Mine was something like c temp excel
In that folder there will be a file with a strange extension, but just click on it - it opens!
Have to say never used it with more complex stuff in the sheet, not sure how well modules etc are backed up.

Excel/Word newbie here. I have so much to learn and waste so many hours not knowing.

I have organised an excel foundation course for July though

Hope it goes well pd :)

My tip is only tiny, but it really helps me when I need to enter multiple rows of text in one cell. Alt and enter gives you another row in a cell :)

Can anyone help with this problem we all have at work (it needs to be simple as none of us are excel experts)? We need to copy some info from one spreadsheet to another - its addresses actually. In spreadsheet 1, each line of the address has been put into a different cell. In spreadsheet 2, we want to copy it across, but all into one cell iyswim. How do we do that?

Thanks v much

Concatenate(string1," ",string2," ",string3...)
Where string1 etc is the cells containing the addresses. I guessed you'd want a space in between each one, but those double quote could contain a comma or whatever.

Be careful if your addresses have double quotes in

Most recent discoveries in Excel 2010 that I love are

• the one click "remove duplicates" which I previously could only do with advanced filter and 6-7 clicks

• filter on colour or font

• conditional formatting in Excel 2010 is really good

• (was also in previous versions but I never noticed before) - you can add macro code to a folder called "This workbook" and set it up to run your macro automatically when you perform functions on the workbook ie. open, save etc the excel

Every day's a school day with Excel.

Going to try F11 and IFERROR tomorrow (also always used IF(ISERROR before).

Do you know you dont need to type concatenate, you can do string1&string2&string2 and it concatenates them as string1string2string3

or string1&" "&string2 if you still want the spaces

I only discovered this recently after years of typing concatenate!

Ooh will try that :o

Genuinely impressed at the length of this thread.
Am posting so it's on threads I"m on so I remember to move it geeky stuff at some point.
HTH
MNHQ

Oh no special tips for Office, but I have a fab little programme called Mavis which I can put grassland data into and it tells me what it thinks the habitat type is. Except I don't usually agree with it. Hmmm.

Yeah me too, I was being sarcastic in my first post, thought I'd bump it a few times, get a few polite but uninterested responses and then it was vanish into the ether (net)
Groan :)

Ok what on earth do you do? :o