The “Spike” takes its name from old-fashioned store receipts. When the cashier was done with a customer’s order, they’d slap it onto a metal spike to store the receipt until the end of the day. In Microsoft Word on a PC, the Spike is like the Clipboard, except it...
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How to Insert a Line in Word (4 Creative Ways)
For more helpful content like this sent directly to your inbox, sign up here. How to Insert a Line in Word One of my tricks that I teach in my Microsoft Office training with quite the “wow factor” is...
How to Create Placeholder Text in Word
If you're creating a newsletter, flyer, or some other document, and the text hasn't been written yet, insert placeholder text. This will allow you to work on the layout until the text is ready. Here's how you do it: Type =Rand(#,#) where you want to add the...
Paste Options: A Smarter Way to Paste in Microsoft Word
Problem: You copy and paste content into your document. Word maintains the original formatting and you have to manually reformat it to match your document. Solution: Use Paste Options to bring in just the content, and leave the formatting behind. Here are four options...
3 Microsoft Word Selection Techniques You Should Be Using
Have you ever tried to highlight text by dragging, and your document starts running across your screen? Never again! Dragging across text to select it for formatting is just one of the possibilities. Here are 3 Microsoft Word selection techniques you should be using...
Alicia on Teaching Microsoft Office in San Francisco
I just had the most amazing week at CreativeLive teaching a live, 3-day webinar on Microsoft Office for Creative Pros. I had viewers from around the world join me to learn Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Office for iPad. I started with the...
Word and PowerPoint Power Shortcuts at Lynda.com
Alicia's latest two lynda.com courses for PC have been released! One is for Microsoft Word 2010 Power Shortcuts, and the other is for MS PowerPoint 2010 Power Shortcuts. Both provide dozens of tips and tricks to save a lot of time, and work a little magic. Each lesson...
Use Page Break Before to Start a New Page Automatically
At the end of a page, Microsoft Word wraps the content to the next page automatically. While most of the time that’s great, sometimes you want certain content to always start on a new page. For example, wouldn't it be great if every Chapter started on a new page,...
How to Use AutoCorrect to Replace Frequently Used Text
If you're creating a new document in Microsoft Word and you know you'll use some words frequently, use AutoCorrect to save time. This is a great time saver for frequently-used text snippets, like your name, address, and phone number. AutoCorrect allows you to create...
Set Your Default File Save Location
When you save a file for the first time, Word wants to put it in your Documents folder. That’s a good start, but when you’re working on a project that will have several files in the same folder, you can save time by telling Word to go straight to your project folder...