Microsoft Office 2003 Tips and Tweaks

One great thing about Microsoft Office 2003 is that it’s jam-packed with useful features. Of course, digging through Help to find out about these features can take a lot of time—time you would probably rather spend doing other things. To make it easy for you to become more efficient in using Office, we’ve compiled a few of our favorite ways to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

by Linda Bird.

Organize Your Stuff (Excel)

Like a well-organized set of file folders, each Microsoft Excel file (a workbook) includes a set of individual worksheets: Think of an Excel workbook as a notebook and the individual worksheets as pages in the notebook. This arrangement is great because you can use it to organize your data. For example, you can track production or sales for a year by using a worksheet for each month but keeping all the worksheets together within a workbook. By default, each new workbook file includes three worksheets. You can
switch between sheets by clicking the tabs at the bottom of Excels’ application window and then enter data and formulas in each worksheet.

Add & Subtract (Excel)

If you feel limited by the three worksheets included in each file, you can add (or delete) more sheets. In fact, to give you maximum flexibility, Excel allows you to create a workbook with one to 255 worksheets in it.

To add a worksheet, right-click any visible worksheet tab and then choose Insert from the tab’s shortcut menu. On the General page of the Insert dialog box, double-click the Worksheet icon. The newly inserted sheet will be placed to the left of the selected worksheet.

To remove a worksheet, display it and choose Edit and then Delete Sheet. Alternatively,
you can right-click a worksheet tab and then choose Delete from the shortcut menu.
This is NOT an undoable command, so if the worksheet includes data, you’ll be prompted
to confirm your action.

Give Your Worksheets A New Identity (Excel)

Face it. The generic names associated with each worksheet (Sheet 1, Sheet 2, and so on) are pretty dull. Luckily, you can assign descriptive names that more clearly indicate what information is contained in each sheet, such as First Quarter or Eastern Region. To rename a worksheet, double-click the sheet’s tab. Type a new name and then press ENTER.

Reorganize Your Worksheets (Excel)

If you don’t like the order in which your Excel worksheets are arranged, you can change it. Right-click the tab for the worksheet you want to move and then choose Move Or Copy from the shortcut menu. In the displayed Move Or Copy dialog box, indicate where you want to place the selected sheet and then click OK. As an alternative, you can drag a worksheet tab to a new location. When the black triangle is where you want to place the sheet, release the mouse to drop the sheet in the new location.

Color Code Your Work (Excel)

Besides adding, deleting, and rearranging worksheets, you can color-code Excel’s worksheet tabs. This can help you categorize your sheets and make it easier for you to find the information you need.
To change the color for a worksheet tab, right click the tab and then choose Tab Color from the shortcut menu. In the displayed Format Tab Color dialog box, click a color block, and then choose OK.

Use Formulas In Word

OK, so Word isn’t known as a calculation powerhouse like Excel. But you can still run simple calculations within the program without pulling out your calculator. To do this, create a table and enter your numerical data in a row or column. Place your insertion point in the last cell in the row or column for which you want to run your calculations and then choose Table and Formula. Word automatically assumes that you want to add up the data in the adjacent cells and enters a formula in the Formula dialog box, such as =SUM(LEFT) or =SUM(ABOVE). Click OK to enter the formula in the cell.
Unlike Excel, Word doesn’t automatically recalculate a formula if you change data in the cells that feed into it. To recalculate the formula cell’s data, right-click the formula directly and then choose Update Field from the shortcut menu.