Philip Su: Top 10 most useful secret ninja moves in Office

Philip Su is a principal software engineer at Microsoft. He has also been a developer in Office, MSN, Windows, and Live Search. In his copious free time, Philip co-authored Building Tablet PC Applications, taught classes at the University of Washington, and managed to almost get fired twice. For more random wackiness about Philip, read his blog .

Office is a treasure trove of hidden features that make everyday life easier. Although each version of Office has made improvements in helping users discover the available features, I find that some of my favorite features are still not well-known amongst friends and family.

Here are my top 10 most useful secret ninja moves to increase your productivity and win friends and lovers.

#1: Format painter (Office)

The Format Painter tool replicates the formatting from one part of a document to another. So instead of manually redoing all the formatting yourself, you can use the Format Painter. First, select the text whose formatting you want to replicate. Then, click the Format Painter toolbar button. Finally, select the text you want to imbue with the format. For bonus points, you can double-click the Format Painter button to replicate the formatting to multiple areas of the document!

#2: Paragraph in/out/up/down (Office)

You can easily move a paragraph in four directions by pressing Alt+Shift+[Arrow]. To increase or decrease the indentation level of a paragraph or bullet point, press Alt+Shift+Right and Alt+Shift+Left respectively. To move a paragraph up or down, press Alt+Shift+Up or Alt+Shift+Down. This works especially well in PowerPoint, where it's common to reorder bullet points or change indentation levels.

#3: Increase or decrease font size (Office)

To quickly increase the font size of selected text, press Ctrl+Shift+>. To decrease the size, press Ctrl+Shift+<. I find it easy to remember these keyboard shortcuts because the one with the greater-than symbol increases the font size while the less-than symbol decreases it.

#4: Quick Access Toolbar (Office)

Office 2007 has a Quick Access Toolbar that can be customized to include buttons for your favorite commands. The Quick Access Toolbar is in the top left corner of many Office applications. You customize it by clicking on the drop-arrow on its right.

#5: Fill handle (Excel)

Excel can auto-fill cells in eerily smart ways. Instead of manually typing a sequence in cells, you can simply type the first few values of the sequence and drag the fill handle to auto-fill the rest of the cells. The fill handle is the little black square at the lower right corner of a selected cell's border. Drag it to automatically fill adjacent cells.

If you drag the fill handle with only one cell selected, it will repeat that cell's value into adjacent cells. However, if you drag the fill handle with multiple cells selected, Excel is smart enough to figure out the series. For instance, in the following example, Excel will fill subsequent cells with the increasing series of odd numbers. This even works for other types of series, like dates and percentages.

#6: Moving and copying cells by dragging selection borders (Excel)

Quite possibly the most useful yet completely undiscoverable feature in Excel is the ability to move and copy cells by dragging selection borders.

For instance, to move row four between rows one and two, select row four and drag the selection border while holding down the Shift key in order to insert it in its new position. If you drag the border without holding down the Shift key, the selected cells will instead replace the cells you drop them on. Conversely, if you hold down Ctrl while dragging a selection border, the selected cells are copied to their new location.

#7: Status bar statistics (Excel)

The status bar in Excel shows handy statistics when multiple cells are selected. In Excel 2007, the status bar shows the selected cells' average, count, and sum. This is an easy way to quickly analyze data without authoring formulas.

#8: Clear formatting (Word and PowerPoint)

To remove formatting from selected text, press Ctrl+Spacebar.

#9: Advanced field search (Outlook)

In Outlook, you can quickly search through a mail folder by using the Instant Search box. In addition to searching for keywords, you can do a fielded search by prefixing your search text with a variety of field names.

For instance, the above example searches for all mail from people named "jimmy" sent in May with attachments that have "jpg" in the filename. I most often use this feature for two things: to easily find email from a specific person, and to find specific attachments.

#10: Presenter view (PowerPoint)

PowerPoint has for many years had a great feature called Presenter View, which allows you as the presenter to see a different view of the presentation from your audience. In Presenter View, your monitor shows not only the slides, but also your notes as well as the current elapsed time in the presentation. This makes giving a presentation far easier. To enable Presenter view, go to the Slide Show ribbon and check Use Presenter View. In that same section, you can also change the monitor which the presentation is shown on. One note: the Use Presenter View checkbox can only be checked if you already have a second monitor connected and enabled.

Final words

Impress friends, family, and hot dates with your newly acquired Secret Ninja Skills! But please help me spread the word so that they don't stay secret any longer. After all, everyone should benefit from these great tools and shortcuts.

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 20, 2009
  The Office Ninja returns! Many readers enjoyed the Top 10 most useful secret ninja moves article, so