If your PowerPoint slides are packed with engaging ideas that no one reads because your audience gets lost in the sea of gray letters, there's a quick solution: Make them pop using SmartArt in PowerPoint 2007 and 2010. First, select your bulleted text...

If you've ever wished you could roll back or view an earlier draft of a work in progress, there is a tool in Office that can do just that: Manage Versions , accessible from the File tab in Office 2010: If you want to have more chances to catch content...

Even the most gifted performers need a little help from their friends sometimes—even the multi-talented Internet Explorer. After all, IE has to do a lot of things, do them well, and do them quickly—no matter how many tabs we're running. If I had to do...

If you want to record the time and date while working in Excel, you can use the =NOW() function. Just enter it into any cell: There's only one problem. As you work in Excel, the NOW function will continue to update. This would be great for keeping track...

If you create your own custom styles or just want a quick way to view and modify existing ones, you should turn on the style area pane in Microsoft Word. The option is tucked away: Go to File , Options , Advanced , and then scroll down to the Display...

You probably think of PowerPoint as simply a tool for presentations. But with its powerful layout and design capabilities, you could use it for a lot of different things - from wallpaper and Twitter backgrounds to holiday cards. Even if you have no design...

Clearing out cells of font mismatches, fill colors, hyperlinks, comments, and conditional formatting doesn't have to be tedious. There's a much easier way. First select the cells you want to clear. In Excel 2007, you need to go to the Edit menu and select...

It seems like only yesterday we explored ways to get things done more quickly despite desktop clutter. But there are those (are you reading this, Mom?) who say it's easier to avoid clutter in the first place. Windows 7 gives me the tools I always wanted...

We've discussed how to use Outlook OFT files for creating reusable mail templates when you, say, prepare a weekly newsletter to send to customers or deliver regular status reports to your extended team. They're equally useful when creating a mail for...

If you frequently save documents to a team SharePoint site, you may be able to add a shortcut to your Office 2010 desktop applications. To see if this feature is enabled, go to your SharePoint document library and click the Library tab: Now click the...

ou've probably seen books that started each chapter with a large letter. If you want that same effect for your work documents (say, an annual report or brochure), this is easy to accomplish in both Word 2007 and Word 2010. Simply select the paragraph...

If you've ever meant to send a file to someone only to receive a reply mail that you forgot to attach it (and haven't we all?), this tip may be just the thing for you. An enterprising add-in developer for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 has created the...

If you're printing a long spreadsheet in Excel and want to have the same header row across the top of each page, you're in luck. There's a little-known feature tucked away in Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 to do just that. If you're using Excel 2007, go to...

If you round decimal places away and want full control over which way they go (up or down), you should use the CEILING and FLOOR functions. Here you can see the first number 38.1 is rounded down to 38 while the second percentage 42.70% is rounded up to...

If you have an Access database sitting on your hard drive that you want to share with a larger team, one of the quickest and most flexible options is to publish it to a SharePoint site using Access Services. If you don't already have a database, you can...

If you've been using Excel for more than a little while, you've probably created task lists in it. You simply stretch a column as wide as you need to describe your To Do items and then type them in. This makes Excel a very flexible tool for planning,...

If you spend a lot of time removing the formatting from text that you copy into Office documents (say, text from emails or web pages into Microsoft Word), you should adjust your default paste options. The quickest way to do this in Office 2007 or Office...

Here's a classic tip you might have missed: Snoozing on the job can be career-limiting—but not for computers, who all want to win green computing awards. To save kilowatts and battery charges, Windows 7 offers three power-saving modes. Sleep mode shuts...

If you have documents that you want to mark as DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL before printing, you can quickly add a watermark in Word 2007 or Word 2010. Just go to the Page Layout tab and click the Watermark button: This offers an array of default choices such...

The latest version of Microsoft Office on the Macintosh just launched, and it is designed to help connect people using both Mac and Windows versions of Office. You can get Office for Mac 2011 now . Here are some of the new features: Improved launch speeds...