As you all know, I am the queen of saving time and keystrokes in MS Office. I am actually quite lazy because I try to find the quickest and most easy way to accomplish tasks in the Office Suite so that I have time to do the things I enjoy the most.
One way to save time and keystrokes is customzing your applications. Starting with version 2007, this is possible. Most folks never scratch the surface when it comes to customizing but I will now tell you one of the easiest ways to customize in MS Office – namely, your Status Bar!
Your Status Bar resides at the bottom of any Office application. It sits above the Windows Taskbar. It’s that bar that has information in MS Word that tells you the page, section, line etc.
Most folks do not realize that they can actually change the lowly Status Bar and make life much easier for themselves in the process.
Follow the steps below to learn how:
Right-click your mouse anyplace on your Status Bar.
- Select the options that will make your life easier. You can go hog wild and add whatever you like. Some easy choices are the Track changes indicator and Word Count.
- Once you have made your selections, click someplace else on your screen to save your selections and close the Customize Status Bar menu.
Ok, now that you have taken the first step and put something new on your status bar, I will tell you how this can save you lots of time and keystrokes (using the two selections I recommended).
If a colleague has sent you a document to edit and revise and they left Track Changes on you will know immediately as soon as you start to make changes to the document. So now, you look down and see the status of Track Changes on your Status Bar and you can simply click on that selection one time to turn it off. Think about it – isn’t that much more efficient than displaying the Review tab and using the drop down Track Changes menu to do the same thing?
Now suppose for instance, that you have imported text from WordPerfect and see that the headers and footers have changed. Look at your Status Bar. It will let you know that the section numbers have changed. Aha! You have now very quickly seen what your problem is. We all know that imported text from WordPerfect embeds random section breaks in our documents right??
Want to get a quick sum or count of highlighted cells in your Excel worksheet? Instead of taking the time to create a formula to do that for you, simply add Count and Sum to your Status Bar. You can also get speedy calculations of Averages, Minimums and Maximums!!
So like I said, go hog wild and add whatever you think will be helpful to you. It is just as easy to remove items from you Status Bar.
Please note that you cannot customize the Status Bar ins MS Outlook.