Microsoft Office Tips, Tricks, and How-to's to help you use MS Office like a pro!

Carol's Corner Office

Monthly Archives: March 2024

Carol’s Ramblings

Posted on by Posted in Carol's Ramblings

It appears that spring has sprung in my neck of the woods, regardless of what the the calendar and weatherman have to say. My daffodil and dahlias are in bloom along with my Hyacinths! I am hoping and praying we will not have any more hard frosts to kill them off!

I have been extremely busy and I like to be bus, but am looking forward to things slowing down a bit so I can relax!

I hope this finds you well and that you enjoy this months newsletter.

Until next time, please scatter kindness wherever you go and let the folks you care about know! Look in on those who are housebound and above all, always be kind!

Carol-signature

 

How To Turn On Dictate in Word 365

Posted on by Posted in Subscribers Office 365

Dictation allows you to use speech-to-text to create content in Microsoft 365 with a microphone and reliable internet connection. It saves time and keystrokes and lets you get your words and thought on pate, create outlines, notes, etc.

Follow the steps below to learn how:

Open a new or existing document and go to Home | Dictate

While signed into Microsoft 365 on a mic-enabled device,

Wait for the Dictate button to turn on and start listening.

dictate-button

 

 

 

Start speaking and you should see text appear on your screen

Please remember that that if you cannot find the Dictate button, this feature is only available to Microsoft 365 subscribers.

How To View Word and Character Counts in Word 365

Posted on by Posted in Microsoft Word

Word Count is set to display the word count in your documents, but it also keeps track of several other statistics.

It can help you to better understand things in your document like readability, when you know the word and character court and how much space you are using in your document. Did you know you could use your word length and count in a sentence to help determine readability?  Knowing these things are also very helpful when publishing and typesetting. And lucky for you, Word has a a most excellent word and character count tool to do just that!

Follow the steps below to learn how:

  1. The Word Count tool is located in the lower left-hand side of your Status Bar. The Status bar is at the bottom of your document, just over Windows Start and and search box.
  2. Word is set to display your word count in your document by default, but it also will keep track of several other statistics.
  3. Click on the word count and the Word Count window will open.
  4. You can also find the Word Count window on the Review tab.
  5. Your Word Count window will display a list of the statistics below:

Pages: The number of pages in your document.

Words: Count of words in your document.

Characters: Characters in your document. This includes punctuation but not spaces.

Paragraphs: Count of paragraphs in your document.

Lines: Count of lines i n your document. This includes lines with no text.

  • At the bottom of your window is a check box that will include textboxes when checked, as well as footnotes and endnotes. This box is, by default, checked.  You can uncheck it if you do not wish these inclusions.
  • You can also display your Character Count with spaces option on your Status Bar. In order to do this, you will need to customize your Status Bar:
  • Hover your mouse over word count on your Status Bar and right-click. The Customize Status Bar menu will open.
  • There are many options in this menu but the ones you are looking for can be found in the second section from the top. You will see Word Count and Character Count with spaces. To the left you will see a small check mark. This indicates that Word Count will appear on your Status Bar. You can click in the space to the left of the Character Count with spaces option to add the check mark and display that option on your Status Bar.
  • Both options will now appear on your Status Bar.

That’s all it takes!

 

 

Subscribers: How To Work with Tab Stops in Word 365

Posted on by Posted in Subscribers Office 365

There are a couple of ways to deal with tabs in Word 365, It is really a matter of your selection.  You can drag things around on your Ruler, but that is not my preferred method. I find it too confusing and that takes up for time for me and we all know Carol hates wasting time!

So my preference is to use the Paragraph settings, rather than my Ruler. Your Rule will provide a quick way to check whether there are tab stops or indents inside your document, but I am not fond of using my mouse to drag everything around on the Ruler. I will now show you how I work with tab stops

Follow the steps below:

  1. Click on Home and Paragraph which will open your Paragraph window at the Indents and Spacing tab.
  2. Near the bottom of the Indents and Spacing tab, you will see a button labeled Tab. Click on it.

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  1. In the Tabs window, you can see the tab stops for your selected paragraph, your default tab settings, and your alignment and leader choices. You will also see buttons you can use to set and clear your current tabs, and an option to clear all tabs from your entire document.

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  1. Click Clear All to clear all of the tab stops in your document.
  2. Click OK.

All your tabs should now be removed from your document.

I think you will agree that this is the way to go but feel free to make your own decision!

Subscribers: How To Change Line Spacing in Word 365

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It is possible for you to  control the vertical space between the lines of text in your document by simply setting your line spacing. You  can also change the vertical space between paragraphs your paragraphs by setting your spacing before or spacing after paragraphs. And get this, you can also decide to keep lines of text together or keep paragraphs together on your page.  Wild and crazy huh?

Follow the steps below to learn how:

To change the line spacing in your entire document:

  1. Go to Design | Paragraph Spacing.
  2. Select an option.
  3. To single space your document, select No Paragraph Space.
  4. To return to the original settings later, go to Design | Paragraph Spacing and select the option under Style Set. This may be Default or the name of style you’re currently using.
  5. To change the line spacing in a portion of the document:
  6. Select one or more paragraphs to update. Press Ctrl + A which will select all.
  7. Go to Home | Line and Paragraph Spacing.
  8. Select Line Spacing Options and choose an option in the Line spacing box.

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  1. Adjust the Before and After settings to change spacing between your paragraphs.
  2. Select OK.

Takes all the mystery out of it doesn’t it?  Easy peasy!

Subscribers: How To Create Custom Quick Parts in Word 365

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In an earlier posts, we have talked about using using Quick Parts in Word. This is a great way to save you lots of valuable time and keystrokes when you are working with short documents, (i. e., memos, letters, resumes, etc.), tend to be used over and over again.  This time around, we will talk about how to create custom Quick Parts that will appear in different galleries, like a custom header!

Follow the steps below to learn how:

The easiest way to create a custom header that will appear in your header gallery with the other sample headers is to first design your header as you normally would.

  1. Open the header and add any text or different elements of your choosing (i.e., spacing, page numbers, etc.) and be certain to set things such as Different First Page or Different Odd & Even Pages first thing.
  2. Now that you h ave your header created to your liking, select everything in your header by pressing CTRL + A while in your header area. You will know if everything has been selected if there is a gray shaded box around all the objects in your header.
  3. With all your objects selected, you can now create a custom Quick Part from your selected objects!
  4. With your objects selected go to Insert and click on Quick Parts, which will open options for you.

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  1. Click on Save Selection to Quick Party Gallery.
  2. Now, in the Create New Building Block window, key in the name of your Quick Part, the gallery where you would like to save it, a brief description, the template you would like the Quick Part saved to, etc.

create-new-building-block

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Once you have set all your options, click OK.
  2. You will now navigate to the Insert tab there you will click on Header, make sure  your custom header appears in the Header gallery.

As you can readily see, creating a custom Quick Part that will appear in a Word gallery, you will save loads of time  and keystrokes.  Go ahead and create at least one so you can see how easily this can be done!

 

Subscribers: Your AutoCorrect Options For Microsoft 365 Word and Outlook

Posted on by Posted in Subscribers Office 365

Some of you may already  be familiar with some of the AutoCorrect features. Some folks swear by them and others find them annoying. I love that I have AutoCorrect and I think the majority of folks do as well. Say you key in a word  and it has been misspelled, it will be automatically corrected for you.  Conversely, if you key in your surname and Word corrects it to something more common that does not happen to be your surname, that is a good example of Word not being helpful at all. Get the picture?

So regardless of whether you are being helped or hindered, this feature is used for automating commonly used words, names, and phrases.

Let’s start with AutoFormat as you type, which will correct something that you key in to something else that is programmed into this feature.  As I said above, this can be a help or a hindrance. to make it helpful, you will need to create anew AutoFormat as You Type entry. You can do this from any open document.

Follow the steps below to learn how:

Go to File | Options, which will open the Word Options window to the General tab.

Now click on Proofing in the left-hand corner.

proofing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You will see at the top of the Proofing screen an area labeled AutoCorrect.

Click on AutoCorrect Options, which will open the AutoCorrect tab.

auto-correct-tab

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look at the bottom of the AutoCorrect tab and you will see a checked option titled Replace text as you type.

Below that option is a large table. If you scroll through that list, you will find everything that Word has been preprogrammed to replace.

On the left you will find everything that is typed, followed by what will be its replacement.  Note that the very first option is an open parenthesis followed by the letter c, followed by closed parenthesis. If you key in that sequence, it will automatically be replaced with the copyright symbol.

But if you scroll down a bit you will find a very large list of frequently misspelled words.

misspelled-words

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we all know, misspelling and typos occur and so Microsoft has taken the most common misspellings and typos and placed them in a list to be corrected automatically. Pretty cool huh?  BUT, this is not foolproof. If there is a word you misspell frequently you may add it to this list. Simply key in the word that misspell into the Replace box and type its correction in the With box, and click Add.

Now I personally do not use this just for misspelled words or typos. No, I also use it for shorthand. If there is a certain name, list, phrase, or boilerplate verbiage that I use frequently, I will use this feature to reference a longer string of text.

Suppose I need to reference the names of all my subscribers. I could use this feature to quickly replace a string of letter with a list of those subscribers.  Using subs as my replacement text and then in the With box I key in all of my subscribers. I save it and now all I ever need to do to use this key in subs and I will get a list of all my subscribers.  Keying in four letters is certainly faster and less aggravating than keying in every subscriber name or even copying and pasting them right?

Go ahead and play around with it a bit.  I am certain that you will find many uses for this great feature.