Exciting tips

When you download an MS Word document either from a cloud drive or from an email it opens in the ‘Protected’ view. In the Protected view, just about all editing options are disabled and the most you can do is copy text from the document. The document of course isn’t locked to the Protected view and should you wish to edit the document, you can quickly switch over to the editing mode. It’s only a few extra clicks but if you would rather get right down to editing a document and this security measure is an annoyance, here’s how you can turn it Off.

Open MS Word and go to File>Options. In the ‘Trust Center’  tab, click the Trust Center Settings… button.

In the Trust Center Settings window that opens, go to the Protected View tab and look for the ‘Enable protected view for files originating from the internet’ option, and disable it.

Once you’ve disabled this option, any file that you download from the internet, whether it came from an email or from a cloud drive, will open in the editing mode. We do think it’s apt to warn you that this is a security feature that you are disabling. It prevents you from opening a document or file that is potentially harmful so unless you’re always certain the document you downloaded is safe, turning this feature Off might be a risk for you. If you want to exclude only files downloaded from an email attachment, you can do so by disabling the ‘Enable Protected View for Outlook attachments’ option however, you must be using Outlook as your email client for this to work.

The Noun Project is a popular project that gives users access to hundreds of icons for free. Members of the project can contribute their own icons, and use icons by other designers. If you ever need a nice, neat icon for a document, the Noun Project is the first place to look. It will likely be the only place you need to look. Icons and little pictures in general aren’t just used by app developers. They’re also included in documents for both business and personal use. MS Word and PowerPoint are two of the most widely used apps when it comes to documentation or making presentations. Imagine the Noun Project and MS Office together. You can now get the Noun Project add-in for MS Word and PowerPoint.

Install The Noun Project Add-in For MS Word And PowerPoint

The Noun Project add-in for MS Word and PowerPoint is available for MS Office 2013 and above. Visit the link at the end of this article and click the ‘Add’ button.

On the following screen, select which app, MS Word or MS PowerPoint you want to install the Noun Project add-in for.

This will open a new document or presentation. Once the document/presentation opens, click ‘Enable editing’ and then you can close it. The add-in has been installed.

Using The Noun Project Add-In In MS Word & PowerPoint

Open either MS Word or PowerPoint. Go to the Insert tab and you will see an Icons button at the very end. Click it to open the Noun Project panel. Sign in with your account.

You can search for icons, select the size you need, and insert them in your document or presentation from the panel.

If you want to download and insert colored icons, you’re going to have to upgrade your account to a premium account. The add-in is not available for MS Excel, or any other MS Office app other than the two mentioned above however, that doesn’t mean you can’t use these icons in those apps.

You can always download an icon via your browser but you can also download it in MS Word or PowerPoint and simply copy and paste it to another app. In fact, you can copy and paste icons from a document or presentation to just about any other app you like including Photoshop and Paint. This beats using different fonts or digging through symbols in MS Office to find a simple envelope or phone icon for your resume. It’s also a great resource for creating a good looking, professional document or presentation.

Install The Noun Project Add-In

Microsoft Excel can recognize data for what it is; currency, numbers, string values, dates, and more. You can apply different formulas based on what a value is recognized as. Since Excel can recognize values as a certain type, it stands to reason that it can also tell when a value is repeating in a given data set. If you need to, you can find duplicate values in Microsoft Excel, and delete them. The highlight and delete functions are separate so if you only need to find duplicate values, but not delete them, you can do that as well.

Find duplicate values

Open the Excel file that you want to scan for duplicates. You can scan an entire sheet, or a few select cells. Select the rows and columns that you want to find duplicate values in.

On the Home tab, go to Conditional Formatting>Highlight Cells Rules>Duplicate Values.

This will highlight all duplicate values in the selected rows and columns, and it will also open a little window that lets you choose what color the duplicate values are highlighted in. You can choose one of the default color schemes or you can create your own scheme by selecting the Custom Format option from the ‘Value with’ dropdown. You can set the cell font color, fill color, and border color and style when you create the custom format.

Delete Duplicate Values

If you decide the duplicate values need to go, you can manually delete them, or you can have Excel purge them for you.

Select the row or column that you want to remove duplicates for. Unfortunately, you can only delete duplicates from one row or one column. Go to the Data tab and click the Remove Duplicates button.

If you select multiple columns, or multiple rows, Excel won’t find any duplicates. This is because when it comes to deleting them, it looks at values as a whole data set. A value may be repeating itself in a cell but the values in the row above/below it, or in the column on the left/right side might have a different value making it unique.

To understand this, consider that you have a table with the names and birth months of fifty people in it. It goes without saying that you will have duplicates in the birth month field however, the name accompanying the birth month is what makes it a unique data point which is why Excel will not delete it.

MS Office 2016 doesn’t have a long list of awesome new features. The new additions made to Office 2016 are few and they aren’t for everyone. Moreover not all new features are functional in nature. MS Office 2016 has made an effort to make the UI better looking. It comes with a dark and light theme now, and it’s added a background design to the title bar. The design by default shows clouds but you can change it or remove it altogether if you like. Here’s how.

The design options for the title bar background are limited to those that come with Office 2016 so you can choose one of them or you can choose to hide the background and keep the title bar plain like it was in older Office versions.

To hide or change the background, open MS Word (or any other Office 2016 app) and go to File>Options. In the General tab, scroll down to the ‘Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office’ section and open the Office Background drop-down. You will find a list of all available backgrounds and a ‘No background’ option that you can select to disable it completely.

If you don’t see a background on the title bar and this setting is missing in the Options window it’s because you aren’t signed in to your Microsoft account in MS Office. Doing so enables it. Windows 10 users will see it without any problems if they’ve connected their Microsoft account to Windows 10. For Windows 10 users using a local account, and for anyone not on Windows 10, the background can be added by signing into MS Office with your Microsoft account.

Facebook added a bookmarking feature a few years ago to both its web and mobile apps. This feature, known as ‘Saved’ allows you to save anything from links, photos, pages, to places and events. It’s useful for when you need to recall something. After 4 years, the feature is finally being updated. You can now selectively group items from your Saved list into collections. You can then share collections on Facebook with your friends and invite them to contribute to them as well.

Collections on Facebook

You can create and share collections on Facebook from both the desktop web version and from the apps.

Facebook Web

Visit Facebook and from the column on the left, click Saved. On your Saved page, you ought to see a New Collection button. Click it, give your collection a name, and you’re done.

Once you’ve created a collection, return to the Saved list and you will see a ‘Add to Collection’ button next to every single item in the list. Click it, select the collection you want to add the item to, and it will be added to the collection.

To share a collection with a friend, and invite them to add items to it as well you’re going to have to go to the Facebook apps. The collaboration feature has not been added to the web interface.

Facebook app

Make sure your Facebook app is up to date. Open the app and go to the hamburger tab. Tap Saved, and on the Saved screen you will see a Create a Collection button. Tap it, name your collection, and you can start adding items to it.

Collections on the Facebook app are far better designed compared to the web interface. You can add collaborators from the collection’s page by tapping the Invite button, and you can add items to it by tapping the Add Items button. On the app, you can add items from your Saved list and also from outside it.

This feature is going to be handy. The Saved list allows you to retrieve pages and posts you’re interested in and Collections will allow you to collaborate with your friends if you’re planning an event e.g., a lunch.

It certainly beats sharing links and pages over a chat thread where you have to constantly scroll through it to find something. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many friends you can invite to a collection or how many items can be added to one.

MS Word has a really useful find and replace feature. It lets you search an entire document for a word and replace it with another. This is useful in a lot of cases e.g. if you need to replace names in a document. By default, the ‘Find’ function looks for a matching sequence of letters. If you look for the word ‘he’ using the Find feature, it will highlight the word ‘the’ in its search. This is because the default search looks for a matching text string. It doesn’t know that you’re looking for a particular word. That said, it is possible to find whole words in MS Word instead of text strings.

To find whole words in MS Word, you need to access the advanced options for the Find feature. Open the  file you want to search. On the Home tab, click the dropdown next to the Find tool and select Advanced Find.

This will open the Find box.  Enter the word you want to search for. Next, click the ‘More’ button to view the advanced options. Check the ‘Find whole words only’ option. If you want, you can have it match the word down to the letter case. To match the letter case, select the ‘Match case’ option. Click the Less button to hide these options, and then click ‘Find Next’ to start searching.

MS Word will now search for the word you entered instead of looking for all occurrences of the letters you’ve entered. The screenshot below shows that when searching for the word ‘he’ with these two options enabled, the ‘he’ in the word ‘the’ is not detected.

The Find function has a lot of other options to refine the results. The matching case option is just one of the many useful ones it has. There’s also a ‘wildcards’ options in the advanced Find feature.

You’re probably familiar with the asterisk as a wildcard character but MS Word supports quite a few of them. These wildcard characters allow you to find, for example, all text preceding a particular word or phrase in the document. For example, you can use the < and > wildcards to look for all words that start with C and end in E.

Other apps in the MS productivity suite don’t have as advanced a Find feature as MS Word does. In MS Excel, for example, you can only match the case or the entire contents of a cell.

MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel all come with a library of charts and graphs. With Excel, they’re much easier to insert. You can select the data you want to plot on the axis of a graph, and Excel will take care of the rest. These charts can be copied and pasted to other MS Office files. In Excel, they’re pretty intelligent; if you, for example, update the value of one of the plotted points, the chart will update automatically. The preset charts include certain elements e.g. how the title will look and where it will be placed, where the data labels will appear, where the axis titles will go, what the legend will look like, among other things. For each chart, there’s a pre-decided legend however, you can change the chart legend in MS Office to any other one that you prefer.

Customize Chart Legend

This works in all MS Office apps that you can create a chart/graph in. For apps that you cannot create charts in but can paste them in e.g. Outlook, this option will not be available.

Open the file with the chart you want to change the legend for, or insert a chart in a document. Make sure it’s editable. Charts that you copy and paste between MS Office apps are generally editable so you won’t have any trouble.

Select the chart you want to change the legend for. When a chart is selected, the Chart Tools tab becomes active. Go to the Design tab on the Chart Tools tab.

At the very left, you will see a button ‘Add Chart Element’. Click it and from the menu, select Legends. It will show you the different legend layouts that are supported by charts in MS Office. You can select any one of them to replace the current one. Based on the amount of space you have, you can replace the default legend with whichever one is easier to read and fits in your document.

You can drag the legend to position it anywhere within the chart however, if you want to position it automatically, select the ‘More legend Options’ option from the same menu. A sidebar will open where you can customize the color and the layout of the legend.

Other Chart Elements

This works for other chart elements too. They’re all listed under the ‘Add chart element’ button’s options and have sub-options of their own. MS Word suggests the chart elements that are best for a particular chart type but it doesn’t take into account the layout of your document or if the elements are easy to read or not.

When you’re presenting a PowerPoint presentation, you can use the Backspace key, and the forward and back arrow keys to cycle between slides. The Backspace key lets you go back to the previous slide. These buttons are great if you need to return to a previous slide, or jump ahead to the next one mid-presentation. Unfortunately, there’s no button or keyboard shortcut that lets you jump to a specific slide. It’s not practical to add one by default. That said, you can link to other slides in PowerPoint. PowerPoint has a built-in feature to do just that. All you need is a good way to add it your slide without making it look ugly.

In order to link to other slides but still make it look good you need to make use of a shape and link it to a slide. A shape is a good choice because it will automatically follow the color scheme for your presentation.

Add Shape

Open your PowerPoint presentation and navigate to the slide that you want to add the link to. Go to the Insert tab and select an appropriate shape to add to it. Resize it so that it’s not too big and select a color that is visible on the background. You don’t want it to get lost in the background. If you want to make it less obvious, you can try reducing the opacity. Those are all editing options that are available for shapes in PowerPoint.

Add Link To Shape

Select your shape and again, go to the Insert tab on the ribbon. Click the Action button.

In the Action Settings window, select ‘Hyperlink to’ under the Action on click section. From the dropdown, select the ‘Slide’ option. This will open a second small window showing you all slides currently in your presentation. Select the slide you want to link to and click Ok.

That’s all it takes. When you click the shape in presentation mode, it will take you to the slide you linked it to.

Add Link To Text

If you don’t want to use a shape, and instead prefer text because it’s easier to remember during the presentation, you can do just that. The process of adding the link is the same. You will add it via the Action button. To add an action to text, you have to first add a text box. Type in the text you want on your slide. Add a text style if you want. Next, select the text box and go to the Insert tab and click the Action button. Follow the process above to add your link and you’re done.

A good presentation is consistent and uniform in the way it presents information. That’s why it’s always a good idea to stick to the same font, the same color scheme, and the same font size for all your slides. If you use PowerPoint to make your presentations, you probably know that any text you enter in a text box results in the box itself resizing. It does this to fit the text but it ends up messing with the layout of the slide. If you want all text boxes to be the same size, you can disable auto-fit text in PowerPoint and the text box will no longer resize itself. Instead, it will indicate how much text overflows from the current box size.

Disable auto-fit text

Open PowerPoint and go to the Insert tab. Click the Text box button and draw the text box on the current slide. Right-click the text box, and select Size and Position from the context menu. This will open a menu bar on the right.

Expand the Text Box controls and select the ‘Do not Autofit’ option.

Once you’ve done that, click inside the text box and paste or type in whatever text you want to use in the slide. The text that won’t fit in the box will overflow from it. This text will still be visible in the presentation so make sure you edit it to fit before you finalize the presentation.

To fix the text, and still stick to the font size and font type that you’re using in the rest of your presentation you can do one of two things; you can change the size of the text in all your slides so that it’s small enough to accommodate all the text you’ve added to your slides, or you can split the text and spread it out over two or three slides.

The second option will take less time and visually, it’s probably a better idea since no one really likes looking at a wall of text.

A third option is to automatically resize the text so that it will fit the text box. The option can be enabled from the same panel where you disabled autofit text from. This option will allow you to have the same text box size but the size of the text inside it will differ based on how much text there is. This may, or may not look good visually so be careful if you opt for this solution.

We shared a tip a while back on how selecting a collapsed heading in MS Word selects everything; images, tables, sub-headings, under it, making it easy to cut, copy, and paste quickly. If you’re looking to copy a section from one document to another, this is possibly one of the easiest ways to do it. If however you have a large document that you need to reorder headings in you might want to do it in Outline view. MS Word’s Outline view has a tool that lets you select headings and move them up/down in the document.

Open the MS Word document you want to reorder headings in. Go to the View tab and select Outline. In Outline mode, select a heading by clicking the minus sign next to it. The minus sign indicates an expanded heading. With the heading selected, click the minus sign to collapse it. Collapse all headings.

When a heading is collapsed, the minus sign next to it changes to a plus sign as shown in the screenshot below. Select the collapsed heading and click the upward facing arrow on the Outline Tools set to move the heading up. Click the downward facing arrow to move the heading below the one that follows it.

In the above screenshot, selecting the heading ‘Application Architecture Overview’ and clicking the downward facing arrow button will make it the second heading in the document and automatically promote the heading ‘Security Strategy & Application Request/Response’ to the first heading.

This doesn’t change the heading style applied to a heading i.e., a heading with the style Heading 1 applied to it will remain unchanged. It’s position in the document is the only thing that will be effected.