Tip #36: [Word, Excel, Powerpoint] Resize pictures while maintaining proportion

        what do these icons mean?

You draw a square in Word, and you resize it by dragging the dots in the corners, but alas, it becomes a rectangle! What do you do?

Tip #25 [Word, Excel]: Undo and clear formatting styles

what do these icons mean?

While working in Office, some people might
get a bit too colourful or creative...

You just changed every single word in your Word document to a different font and size. Or you made a rainbow table in Excel while typing in your daily accounts. Now how do you reset your entire document, or spreadsheet, or part of either one, to the original font, size, style, color and everything?

In Word and Excel, there is a Clear Formatting tool which can turn everything back to boring, black-and-white, standard size 12 or 10, Times New Roman (in Word) or Arial (in Excel) or Calibri. Using the tool is a piece-of-cake: just select the text or cell(s) which you want to clear away all formatting, then click on the Clear Formatting icon or option in the menus.

Where can you find the Clear Formatting tool in Word and Excel?

Tip #24 [Word, Excel, Powerpoint]: Copy text formatting using Format Painter

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The mysterious paintbrush tool, which seems to
have done nothing so far to ease our Office tasks...

Perhaps like me, you have been wondering what that paintbrush icon in Microsoft Office is used for. I actually didn't know either, until quite recently (a few years back actually). The paintbrush tool, named the Format Painter, is used to copy and paste text formatting in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

Take note: the Format Painter lets you copy and paste (or paint/apply) formatting from one selected text to another, meaning font, size, color, background, line spacing, etc. It is different from the usual copy and paste procedure, which you will end up with a duplicate of the copied text.

How can we make use of the Format Painter to make our lives easier? Here's an example in Word.

Tip #14 [Word]: Use page breaks to paginate your document

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Word files can contain more than one page, everyone knows that. When your text is too long to fit on one page, Word will automatically continue on a second page. But how do you force Word to start at a new page? You would probably want to do this when you are preparing a report with multiple sections, and you want each section to start on a new page of its own.

I have seen my friends press the Enter key (or Return key on Macs), until they reach the end of the current page, so that Word will move on to a new page and they continue typing there. Although this gets the job done, it is not a wise solution because whenever content in the previous page change, the alignment of content in the following pages will shift either upwards or downwards. To see this in action, try typing a few lines on the first page, then press Enter/Return until you reach the second page, and type a few more lines there. Now, select the text on the first page, and change the font size to 30. Can you see the lines on page 2 shift downwards? (click on the animation to enlarge)

Tip #13: [Word] Word it like in the papers

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Today's tip will be the first ever tip for a Microsoft Office application, that is, Microsoft Word to be exact. I will mostly cover Office 2007 for Windows, however when possible, I will try to provide alternative steps for Office 2003 for Windows as well as Office 2008 for Mac. To eliminate the need of explaining which versions of Office a tip applies to, I will place icons of the relevant versions of Office applications. In the case of today's tip, it applies to Word in Office 2003 for Windows, Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for Mac.

Today, I will show you how to position text in your Word documents like columns in newspapers. Before that, type your whole text or news article, since it's easier to select and format text, rather than typing with formatting.