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Showing posts from June, 2008

Format Painter tool

Copy the formatting (attributes) of one or more cells and apply them to another cell or range Once you learn to use the Format Painter tool (which looks like a little yellow paintbrush on the Standard toolbar), you’ll wonder how you ever got by without it. To format a cell (or cells), select a cell (or cells) that are formatted the way you like and click Format Painter. Then, click and drag to apply that formatting to another cell (or range of cells). Here’s an example to illustrate how Format Painter works. Start by manually formatting cell A1 as Times New Roman 9, bold, and underlined and then use the Fill Color tool to make the background of the cell yellow. With cell A1 selected, click Format Painter. You’ll notice that Excel displays a paintbrush next to the cursor. While that paintbrush is visible, all you have to do is click (and/or drag) to apply all of the attributes from cell A1 to any other cells. This shortcut saves time because you don’t have to manually reapply the font a

Modify the scope of your Calendar work week

By default, the Work Week calendar view displays the five days of the traditional business week, Monday through Friday. To include Saturday and Sunday in that view, choose Options from the Tools menu. In the resulting Options dialog box, click Calendar Options in the Calendar section. In the Calendar Options dialog box, check Sat and Sun in the Calendar Work Week section. Then, click OK twice to return to the Calendar. You don't have to view a seven- or traditional five-day work week. Check the days of the week that apply to you for a custom work week view. For example, if you work Wednesday through Sunday, you can make those selections to build a view that reflects your schedule.

Create a Flags toolbar

Quick Flags help you categorize your messages, usually by some level of importance or by task. For instance, you might use a red flag to mark messages that need a quick response and a blue flag to mark messages on which you've acted and are waiting for a response. The problem with Quick Flags is that there's no way to customize their descriptions. Outlook identifies them only by color. You can't change the name of Red Flag to Critical. Remembering what each color represents can become burdensome. An easy way to remember what each flag represents is to create a custom toolbar that displays each flag with text that means something to you. Fortunately, the process is easy: 1. From the Tools menu, choose Customize. 2. On the Toolbars tab, click New and name the new toolbar appropriately (for instance, you might name it "Flags") and click OK. 3. In the Customize dialog box, click the Commands tab. 4. Select Actions from the Categories list box. 5. Next, drag the approp

Store sent mail efficiently

When you reply to an e-mail, Outlook stores a copy of that message in the Sent folder. If you're like me, your Sent folder has thousands of messages. If you need to find a specific message later, you must sort through all those messages, and that takes time. Instead, store your replies with the original message. For instance, suppose you automatically route all your messages from your boss into a folder named, appropriately enough, MyBoss. If you want Outlook to store your replies in MyBoss with the original messages, do the following: 1. From the Tools menu, choose Options. 2. On the Preferences tab (which should be selected by default), click E-mail Options in the E-mail section. 3. Click Advanced E-mail Options at the bottom of the Message Handling section. 4. In the Save Messages section, select the In Folders Other Than The Inbox, Save Replies With The Original Message check box and then click OK three times to return to Outlook. Outlook will apply this setting to all of your