Navigating Options Settings

Office applications provide you with a great deal of control over the desktop environment that you work in. You can control options such as how the application window looks for a particular Office application and where the application should store files, by default, when you save them.

Every one of the Office applications has an Options dialog box that provides access to different settings that you can customize. First, you take a look at how you open and navigate the Options dialog box in an Office application. Then, you look at several of the applications and some of the key options they offer that you might want to customize.

Customizing Office Applications You might want to work with the Office applications described in this book before you change a lot of options for the applications. A good way for you to do this is to explore the other parts of this book and then return to this lesson when you are ready to customize some of the options in the Office applications you use most.

To open and navigate the Options dialog box in an Office application, follow these steps:

1. In an Office application (such as Word), select Tools, Options . The Options dialog box for that application appears (see Figure 6.1).

   Figure 6.1. The Options dialog box in an application enables you to customize various settings.

   

2. To switch between the different options, click the appropriate tab on the Options dialog box. Each tab controls a subset of the options available in that application.

3. To change settings on the various tabs, use the check boxes, drop-down lists, or spinner boxes to make your selections for various features.

4. When you have finished customizing the various options in the Options dialog box, click OK . You are returned to the application window.

You will find that you can set a large number of options in the Options dialog box for each Office application. This doesn't mean that you have to change them all (if you're not sure what you're doing, in many cases you shouldn't change them). Next, take a look at some of the common settings that you might want to change in your Office applications; you'll look at Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access individually in the sections that follow.

Customizing Outlook Because Outlook is customized differently than the other Office applications, see Lesson 20, "Customizing Outlook," in the Outlook section of this book (Part III).