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.