your favourite ms office process or tool

[StealthPolarBear]

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

Access compact and repair. Lovely.

I don't know why but I've also found create and update Table of Contents in Word really satisfying.

One little click and the document is all nicely indexed to page numbers.

I like colouring cells in tables within Word Documents

Also like MailMerge

I also like Freeze Panes in Excel when I fancy a good scroll.

Ooh stop talking dirty on my thread

Ooh thank you for this thread, I love a good concatenation
I also love a good mail merge, I can do anything with mail merges.

Text to columns is a good one.
And vlookup is the best invention ever. Revolutionised my life.

The formula in squiggly brackets are called array formula. I did lots of them today in fact, as we have oooooold excel at work and I needed to average cells in a column if the corresponding cells in a different column contained a certain value. Gather you can do this with a variety of 'if' in the new excel? But new excel scares me, I haven't used it enough yet - makes me feel ancient (I'm 35 btw )

Feel I have a lot more to learn about pivot tables.

bump for today

I don't really need to use Excel much in my current job, I just enter new info into a very basic ongoing table, no functions, very little formatting. I'm feeling a bit envious of those doing all the advanced stuff (I used to use it a lot more in a previous job).

Nothing to do with Excel now, but Word.

I use 2010 at work. When I'm typing the little formatting box that appears on the right side of the text drives me nuts. There must be a way to turn it off but I can't find it. Does anyone know?

Not sire sorry. Hope someone can answer

Woo hoo at ctrl enter - just tried it

Stealth, have you used Shift Enter?

I have now :) can't se that it does anything different from enter on its own

Well, Enter is a hard return and Shift Enter is a soft return.

What it does is treat the next line as though it's part of the previous paragraph. So if your default paragraph setting is single line spacing with 3pts before and after, then if you do Shift Enter you won't get that spacing. Also, sometimes if you're putting a box around the text, you'll find the box splits up into parts because you've pressed Enter - it thinks you need different boxes.

By doing Shift Enter it prevents that problem as it thinks it's one paragraph.

If you select that button which shows paragraph marks, you'll see the Shift Enter is an arrow, rather than an Enter mark.

Ahh that makes sense and will be useful, I have had the box problems nd that makes compete sense. Thank you

Forgot about the little paintbrush to copy formatting in excel and powerpoint. Love love love it.

Loved F4 and F11. I'm sure you all know, but F2 in Excel lets you edit that cell. Revolutionised my life when I found that!

No spark lines at work . Am actually going to turn my laptop on tonight to see if I've got it.

I am a self-confessed geek, but didn't know about concatenation (although always felt that there should have been this function). The first thing I did when I got to work was to concatenate a list of names. I also used vlookup for the first time.

Thanks, Mumsnet :)

use sumif!!! if looking up numbers. It's brilliant and does what it says on the tin
Sums...if....

fantastic excel stuff here - marking my place.

Cavemum if you like flowcharts get your work to install Visio for you. It is gorgeous. Best feature is 'Check flowchart' which actually makes sure that what you have constructed makes sense.

I am the Queen of Mailmerges at my workplace, and am also addicted to revisions in Word. The best new thing in Office 2010 is the option to view two documents side by side - when you scroll, the scroll together - brilliant for comparing two versions of something, creating two very similar documents etc.

Yes, i love the view two docs side by side thing, use it a lot.

Sumifs, I love it, why has it taken them do long to create this function.

The remove duplicates button has made my life so so much easier.

My favourite thing in excel though is to uncheck the box that says "allow editing directly in cell" in the options. Then when you double click on the cell it goes directly to the cell it's referencing or opens the spreadsheet it's referencing, rather than having to go to open abd then search through folders for the right spreadsheer People are always amazed and ask me how I did it.

Oops, terrible typos .

I absolutely detest pivot tables, but the new wizard thing makes it a lot easier to create and modify them.

how can you detest pivot tables

Because of someone who insists on using them to send me data every month, if a new product has been added then everything shifts so it makes my life so much more difficult.

Trixy you are so very right. Both about double-clicking through to follow the link, (I spend my life showing people stuff on their PCs and swearing because they don't have it set to double click through) and about the general awfulness of pivot tables.

Trixy, SUMIF has been around for a long, long time!

Think that was me! I thought it was new in 2007 bit prob wrong