Making Office Easier to Use

Several accessibility features make Office easier to use. You will become familiar with many of these features as you work with Office. Following is a sample of some of these features:

The Change document option magnifies documents for easier viewing. Even the toolbar buttons are larger to make them easier to find.
The Office programs contain many AutoComplete features with which you can begin typing items such as dates, times, days of the week or month, names , and any other AutoText entries you set up. Office completes the entry for you. If you begin typing a month name such as Nov , for example, Word displays a small box with November above your month abbreviation. If you press Enter, Word completes the month name for you! If you type a full month name, such as July , Word offers to complete your entry with the current date, such as July 7, 2003 . You can accept the complete date by pressing Enter or ignore it by typing the rest of the sentence as you want it to appear.
You can rearrange toolbar buttons and customize toolbars so that they contain only the buttons you use most frequently. As you learned in the previous lesson, Office analyzes how you use the menus and toolbars and begins to hide those options and buttons you use less frequently to reduce screen clutter. You can always see all menu options and toolbars when you want by displaying a menu for a couple of seconds until the hidden options appear. In addition, you can drag a toolbar left or right to see hidden options.
PowerPoint presentations provide a special high-contrast viewing mode in which you can more easily see the details of a presentation in virtually any light.
You can assign shortcut keys to just about any task in any Office product. Suppose that you often need to color and boldface an Excel value. Create a shortcut keystroke and press it whenever you want to apply the special formatting.

Clip Art

Not only can Office work with text, numbers , and even Web hyperlinks , but it can also work with sound, pictures, and moving video.

Office includes a huge collection of royalty-free clip art files for personal use that you can use when you want to embed a special data item ”such as a picture or video ”into a document, spreadsheet, or Web page. When you need a graphic to spice things up, or when you want to include an attention-getting sound file in an Outlook email message, select Insert, Picture, Clip Art to access the Office clip art collection (sometimes called the Microsoft Clip Art Gallery ). The gallery includes several hundred sounds, pictures, and drawings arranged by category, as Figure 1.9 shows.

Figure 1.9. You will have no shortage of clip art to use with Office.

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Perhaps one of the most impressive features from the Office clip art is that you can click the Clips Online button to link to Microsoft's clip art Web site and search for even more files to use in your documents.

Templates

A template is nothing more than a formatted outline of a document. Suppose that you follow a monthly budget, and you prepare monthly statements to follow. You like to include your savings account interest calculations, so you determine that Excel will function well as the creation tool for your statements.

When you create your monthly statements, you have three options:

Create each monthly budget from scratch.
Modify a saved monthly budget to change the details for each subsequent statement.
Create a monthly budget template and fill in the details for each statement.

Obviously, the first option requires the most work. Why create a new statement for each budget, adding the titles, date, time, details, summaries, creditors, and new investment information if many of those details remain the same from statement to statement?

The second option is not a bad idea if the statements are fairly uniform in design and require only slight formatting and detail changes. Some people feel more comfortable changing an existing statement's details than creating statements from scratch or using a template. New Office users might prefer to change an existing statement until they get accustomed to Office's programs.

Although templates are great for Office newcomers, you do not always want to start with them. Sometimes, it's easier to understand an Office program if you create your first few data files (documents, databases, electronic worksheets, and so on) from scratch.

When you get used to Office, however, you discover that the template method makes the most sense for repetitive statement creation. The template literally provides a fill-in-the-blank statement. You don't have to format the same information from statement to statement, and you're guaranteed a uniform appearance.

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Making Office Easier to Use