General Office tips
SAVE TO COMPUTER BY DEFAULT
Microsoft is incredibly keen for you to save directly to OneDrive in later versions of Office, but it’s sluggish and slow. Open File > Options > Save and ensure ‘Save to Computer by default’ is ticked, then pick a default folder. From the February 2019 update you can do this via the new Save This File dialog that pops up when saving a new document: click the Location dropdown menu for a list of recent folders, right-click one and choose ‘Set as Default Location’.
MORE DEFAULT SAVE OPTIONS
File > Options > Save is where you go to also change the default location for any personal templates you create in each separate Office application – here, however, you need to manually type (or copy and paste from File Explorer) your chosen location into the ‘Default personal templates location’ box.
Things are easier in LibreOffice: select Tools > Options > Paths where you’ll find a host of folders covering My Documents, templates, dictionaries, autocorrect files and more can be moved – select your chosen setting and click ‘Edit…’ to change it, then Apply.
MAKE USE OF STYLES
Most office applications provide some form of Styles or formatting tool to help you make your documents look consistent. Get in the habit of using these – favouring Body Text over Normal if you make use of the various Headings – as opposed to manually styling up each element. In Office, press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S to bring up the Styles pane (press F11 in LibreOffice) – drag it to the right-hand side of the window to anchor it if needed. Right-click an existing style to modify it – In Office, you can also style up some text in your document, then select it, right-click the target style in the Styles pane (or on the Ribbon) and choose ‘Update… to Match Selection’.
ENABLE THE RIBBON
LibreOffice now has a similar tabbed Ribbon-like interface to Microsoft Office – switch to it by selecting View > User Interface > Tabbed (a Tabbed Compact option is also available). Once enabled, click the Settings button in the top-right corner to access key functions including the User Interface option to switch back. Sadly, it’s not (yet) customisable.
CUSTOMISE THE RIBBON
You can easily customise all aspects of the Ribbon in Microsoft Office – including removing and adding elements to each tab: right-click on some empty space on the Ribbon and choose ‘Customise the Ribbon’ to tweak existing Ribbon elements by adding and removing as required.
If you frequently switch between tabs to access favourite commands, why not go one step further and copy them all to a single tab? Click ‘New Tab’ followed by Rename and enter a name for your tab. You can also create groups within this tab in a similar way to help organise your commands logically. Select the tab and group that you want to customise and pick a tool from the list on the left. Click ‘Add’ to add this to the group. Next, click ‘OK’ to review your changes and perform more tweaks (like rearranging the tab’s position on the Ribbon) as necessary.
MAKE USE OF THE QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR
Office’s Quick Access Toolbar sits above the Ribbon as a handy alternative to a new Ribbon tab, and by selecting More Commands from its drop-down menu you can place more commands within a single click’s reach. Click the ‘Choose commands from’ drop-down menu to target those not in the Ribbon or hidden away behind multiple clicks like the Keep Text Only option under Paste (particularly useful in PowerPoint).
You’ll notice some items come with a generic circle icon, which makes them hard to distinguish. It’s possible to customise these icons, although this involves some editing of hidden files in a text editor. If that doesn’t put you off, visit tinyurl.com/APC471TWEAK for a full step-by-step guide.
CUSTOMISE THE LIBREOFFICE TOOLBAR
If you don’t switch on the Ribbon in LibreOffice, you will find the controls for customising its toolbar work in a similar way to Office’s tools: choose Tools > ‘Customise…’ > Toolbars to do so.
VIEW DOCUMENTS SIDE-BY-SIDE
Want to view different parts of the same document in the same window? The solution lies in splitting the screen: in Word and Excel, switch to the View tab on the Ribbon. Scroll to the point in the document where you’d like the split to appear and click Split under Window. Each one now works independently of the other and you can click and drag the split to make one side larger than the other. When you’re finished, doubleclick the split line to remove it and return to a single-paned view. The feature is also available in LibreOffice Calc: choose View > Split Window.
COMPARE DOCUMENTS
If you have two different versions of the same document, you can compare the differences between them even if you forgot to switch Track Changes on. The feature is available in both Word and PowerPoint as well as LibreOffice Writer: look under the Review tab on the Ribbon of all three apps for the Compare button. You can then either step through the changes between the two versions of your document, or view them with additions, deletions and other edits clearly marked.
LINK PICTURES
When you traditionally insert an image into a document, a physical copy of that image is created and embedded in your
document. However, it’s also possible to link rather than embed a picture – the advantages being that your document size is kept down and any changes to the original image are also updated in the document. On key disadvantage, though, is that if you lose the picture file you originally linked to, it will also disappear from the document image.
To link rather than embed a picture in Office, insert a picture from a file in the usual way, but click the down arrow next to the Insert button where you’ll see options to create a direct link as well as link and embed the file. In LibreOffice, you should tick the Link box to link rather than embed a file.
MULTIPLE CLIPBOARD ITEMS
By default, Office stores everything you copy or cut to the clipboard during the current session – across all open Office apps. To view and access these, make the Clipboard Pane visible by clicking the Clipboard’s More button on the Ribbon’s Home tab.
PASTE SMARTLY
By default, Office pastes items in a specific way – either retaining the source formatting or attempting to match it to the document styles it’s been pasted into. You can override this behaviour via the Paste drop-down button on the Home tab – you’ll see options for plain text as well as a special option that enables you to paste it in a specific format, such as HTML code. Some Office applications, such as Word, enable you to choose a different default paste behaviour – look under File > Options > Advanced – and tailor it to specific paste events, such as pasting text from other documents or apps.
There’s no default setting in LibreOffice, but you can bypass the frustrating Paste Special menu by mastering keyboard shortcuts. Don’t like the current combination for unformatted text (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-V)? Select ‘Tools > Customise… > Keyboard’ and select ‘All commands > Paste Unformatted Text’ to change it.
PASTE FORMATTING
Need to restyle a block of text or object to match another? Simple: first, select the object containing your desired style. Next, click the Format Painter (Office) or Clone Formatting (LibreOffice) button. Finally, click the paragraph or object you wish to restyle.
Note: in LibreOffice, only the character formatting is cloned by default – to apply paragraph formatting as well, hold Ctrl-Shift as you click.
SHRINK TO FIT
Frustrated because the document you want to print runs on to a new page by just a couple of lines or so? If you’re using Microsoft Excel, click the More button under Page Layout > Page Setup and use the ‘Fit to’ options to scale accordingly; in LibreOffice’s spreadsheet app, Calc, select Format > Page > Sheet and look under Scale.
In Word, to add the Shrink One Page command to a suitable Ribbon tab or the Quick Access Toolbar. When clicked, Word will attempt to resize document fonts to reduce the page count by one.
ADD THUMBNAIL ICONS TO OFFICE DOCUMENTS
It’s possible to replace the default Office icons with thumbnail previews of your documents. To apply a preview to a single document only, look for the Save Thumbnail option in the Save As dialog.
You can make this the default behaviour in Word and Excel – each application needs to be tackled separately. Navigate to File > Info, click Properties and choose Advanced Properties. You’ll see a ‘Save Thumbnails for all Excel Documents’ command or similar. Tick this and click OK to apply across all your documents.