If you want to add emphasis to an image in a Word document, you don't need a special piece of software or app to edit it — you can use a tool that's built right into Word.
Here's a Word document "sampler" showing different ways I modified one image to create different effects:
Watch this 30-second video to see how you can do it too:
It must be the wintery weather — my mind is on freezing things.
When you freeze a pane on an Excel spreadsheet, you're keeping a row or a column still while the rest of the cells below it can scroll freely. This step lets you view your column and row headings continuously while you scroll your document. This is great when you have a spreadsheet with enough data that you have to do a lot of scrolling to see all the cells, then lose track of the headers that label the columns.
Take 15-minutes to watch this demo to learn...
How to freeze & unfreeze rows and columns
How to print frozen rows or columns
The difference between freezing panes, locking cells, and splitting the window
Other tips that let you see and work with data more easily
When you create a new Excel file, it contains three worksheets — they show as small tabs at the bottom of a worksheet. Each tab has a name, like Sheet1, Sheet2, an so on. You can see the data stored on each worksheet by clicking the tab of the sheet you want to view.
Renaming a worksheet or changing the color of the worksheet's color makes it easier to organize and keep track of the data you've created.
Are you starting work on your 2014 calendar-year budget? When sharing it with your board of trustees or co-workers, you might want to add a "Draft" watermark to it, indicating it's a work in progress.
But Excel 2010 doesn't let you easily insert a watermark, unlike Word 2010. How can you do it?
Writing a Word document, but unhappy because you can't think of exactly the right word to use?
Good news — in Microsoft Office you always have Word's Thesaurus tool to find exactly the right / correct / accurate / exact / precise synonym to make your writing sparkle.
Watch this one-minute video to see how easy it is to do in Word 2007 and Word 2010:
Positioning text in Word using spaces or tabs can be tricky to get words and figures to line up the way you want, and presenting data in paragraphs can make it hard to read.
Good news: it's easy to convert your text into a table to make it more readable, and arrange it in rows & columns instead of paragraphs.
It's easy to get lost in spreadsheets — if data fills lots of rows or columns, when you scroll down or across you lose sight of column or row headers, and then information loses its meaning.
Freeze Panes can help by letting you view column and row headings continuously, while you scroll your document. It lets you keep a row or column still, while the rest of the cells around it can scroll freely.
Computer crash? Power went out during a storm? And you were in the middle of editing a budget spreadsheet and didn't get a chance to save your work? Ugh.
Microsoft Office programs (which include Word, Excel, PowerPoint) are by default set to automatically save an open file every 10 minutes. So when you re-open the program, your file should still have all the changes you have made — except for the last 10 minutes of work. (Your file may retain more recent changes if you manually saved it yourself by pressing Control+S on the keyboard.)
10 minutes between autosaves not good enough for you? Me neither. Here's how to better protect your hard work:
Need to create mailing labels from an Excel spreadsheet or your Outlook Contacts? Go from raw data to a sheet of Avery labels that are ready to affix to your mailing: