Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Tips and Tricks

No Longer Spellbound

jensenh — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 17:00:00 GMT

One last thought about spell checking.

I mentioned a few days ago how much I depend on red-squiggle on-the-fly spelling and grammar checking, especially in Word.

From time to time, though, I have to admit that I've typed a word I thought might be misspelled and then sat, waiting to see if the red squiggle was going to show up or not. Sometimes, I've even been known to type some garbage like "zyzxzzpz" to see if it gets squiggled, thus letting me know that the spell checker wasn't just still in the background doing its work.

Until I discovered the spelling icon in the Word status bar, that is.

One of the components of the on-the-fly spell checker is an icon in the Word status bar. This icon shows the status of the spelling and grammar checker: whether it is still working or not, and whether there are errors in the document or not. Think of it as a subtle "The spelling check is complete" dialog that doesn’t interrupt your work process.

Here's how it works. Look for the icon at the bottom of the Word window that looks kind of like a book. It will likely be in one of three states: an animated pencil drawing on it, a big red X over it, or a blue checkmark on it.

The pencil indicates that the spelling and grammar checker is still working, the red X means that there are errors in the document (click it to navigate between them), and the blue checkmark means that the check is complete and there are no errors.

Armed with this information, I know when I see the blue checkmark that I'm ready to print or send off my document. (Or publish this blog post--there it is. Go!)

Click and Type in Word

jensenh — Mon, 15 May 2006 17:00:00 GMT

One of the indispensable but esoteric features of the Word user interface is called "Click and Type."

Click and Type was a feature added to Word 2000 to help make it easier to position text at specific points on the page without needing to hit Enter and Tab a bunch of times to position the cursor manually.

Here's how it works. First, create a new blank document in Word 2000 or later.

Watch your cursor as you move it around the blank page. Depending on the part of the page you are hovering over, you will see a tiny little symbol for left-align, center, or right-align show as part of the cursor.

Whenever you see one of these special cursors, you can double-click to start typing exactly where the cursor is positioned. The miniature alignment icon indicates what kind of text alignment you will get when you start typing.

Generally, when you're near the center of the page, you get center alignment. When you're close to the right margin, you get right alignment. And pretty much everywhere else, you get left alignment.

One of the cool things about this feature is that you can use it to easily create left-aligned, centered, and right-aligned text even within the same line of the document. For example, if you're creating letterhead, you can use Click and Type to put your name in the middle, your phone number on the left side, and your e-mail address on the right side--all within the same line.

Office Online has the full write-up about Click and Type, including pictures of the other more advanced cursors.

The Secret of the Mysterious Buttons

jensenh — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:00:02 GMT

At the bottom of Word's vertical scroll bar sit three esoteric buttons: one with a picture of two up arrows on it, one with a picture of two down arrows on it, and one in-between them with a picture on it that looks a little like a planet.

Mysterious buttons

These buttons have existed since at least Word 97, yet most people never notice them.

What do these mysterious buttons do?

They're navigation controls. By default, the up arrow and down arrow buttons let you quickly go to the previous or next page of your document, respectively.

The behavior of the arrows can be modified by clicking the little circle button between them. A flyout menu appears which allows you to choose another way to navigate the document.

For instance, you could choose "Browse by Comment" to make the arrows take you between previous and next comments in the document. Or "Browse by Table" will empower the arrows to jump you between tables. You can also choose to navigate between footnotes, endnotes, graphics, sections, edits, and more.

Change the behavior of the navigation arrows

There's one other cool feature built in to these controls. Perform a find in your document (by pressing CTRL+F, or by choosing Find on the Edit menu.)

Now you can close the Find dialog and use the arrows to navigate you between previous and next search results within your document. Notice that the arrows "light up" to show that they're loaded with a search term.

In certain versions, you might even notice the Find dialog box animate up from these controls as it appears, trying to give you a clue that the two features are somehow related. As you close the Find dialog box, you might notice it "minimizing" down into the buttons for the same reason.

Now you know the hidden secret of the mysterious buttons. Franklin W. Dixon would be so proud!

Naming Your Outlook Quick Flags

jensenh — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:00:00 GMT

One of the features we built into the Outlook 2003 user interface is called Quick Flags.

You can single-click next to any mail item to color it so that you can find it again later. Or, you can right-click to apply one of six colors to help you categorize it further. Either way, all marked messages automatically and immediately appear in the For Follow Up search folder.

This feature has become quite popular and became the impetus for the redesigned categorization and time management system being introduced in Outlook 2007, in which the same colored categories work across all parts of Outlook.

Probably the single biggest feature request in this area has been to enable the naming of Quick Flag colors. This is totally built-in to Outlook 2007, but as you can't go purchase that just yet, I wanted to show you a cool trick which gives you something close in Outlook 2003.

The article describing the trick is in found on the Office Online web site: Name Your Colored Quick Flags.

It's not a complete panacea (it doesn't change the context menu, for instance) but it does provide a useful, interactive legend as to what each color represents.

This tip works only in Outlook 2003, because Quick Flags (and search folders, for that matter) didn't exist in previous versions.

The Keyboard At Your Command

jensenh — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:00:01 GMT

We've been working a lot lately on improving the Office 12 keyboard model, so my mind is trapped in a keyboard shortcut frame of mind. I don't have anything to share on this subject yet (we're still working on the design), and when I do I'll certainly post here. But thinking about this so much gave me the inspiration for today's post.

Whenever I write about keyboard access in Office, people send comments along the lines of "I wish it was easier to figure out what the keyboard shortcuts in Office were."

There are, as you might expect, a lot of web resources on the subject. But I recommend the great Office Online site, which has an incredible stash of information to help you use Office. Click the Assistance link on the left side to start digging in.

To save you time, I've compiled the list of guides to keyboard shortcuts for all of the Office programs. Don't miss the "Show All" link at the top of each page which formats the page in a way suitable for printing.

The Office assistance team has also created a number of other useful resources around using the keyboard with Office. Here are some of them:

These are just a few of the over 100 articles on using the keyboard in Office. You can view the full list here. And don't worry, the keyboard shortcuts will continue to work in Office 12.

Now you're ready to impress friends, family and co-workers with your mouseless command of Office.

The Second Time Is Always Better

jensenh — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:00:00 GMT

Speaking of options, did you know you can show two time zones at once in the Outlook calendar?

This tip works in all versions of Outlook.

Go into Tools.Options and click the Calendar Options button and then the Time Zone button. Alternatively, you right-click the time bar on the left side of the calendar and choose "Change Time Zone" (this is the best way in Outlook 97.)

Now you can turn on any second time zone you wish. You can label one or both of them to help you remember what they are.

A word of warning: use caution with the "Swap Time Zones" button. It does a little more than you might think--it promotes your secondary time zone to be your new Windows system time zone as well as making your old primary time zone secondary. This means that your system clock will change, meaning that you probably only want to do this when you're physically located in a secondary time zone and want to swap everything (Outlook and Windows.)

The good news is, if you swap by mistake, a simple press of the Swap button again will put you back.

You can read more about time management features in Outlook 12 here.

Control Your Text In Word

jensenh — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 18:00:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about holding down the Alt key while selecting text in Word to draw a box around it.

I received a lot of mail thanking me for the tip, which was nice. But three of the mails had something in common—they asked me to pass along to the Word team a specific related feature request: discontiguous text selection (the ability to select multiple independent ranges of text at once.)

Well, good news, faithful readers. Not only do I think that it's a good suggestion for a feature in Word, it's actually so good that it's already in the product! Today, it's all about the Control key.

Start by selecting some text in Word. Now, hold down the Control key while you select other ranges of text. Voila, discontiguous text selection at your disposal. Any formatting you apply will work on the entire selected range. This can be really helpful for a situation like formatting the first sentence of a number of paragraphs the same way.

You can select multiple ranges of text at the same time

Another less-known use of the Control key is to make a quick copy of the selected text.

Try this: make a document in Word and select some text. If you drag the selection and drop it somewhere else in the document, it will move the text to where you dropped it. So far so good.

Now, hold down Control and drag/drop the text to different location in the document. Notice that this time, Word makes a copy of the selected text and puts it in the target destination. You can use this trick to quickly make a lot of copies of selected text. I don't use this feature often, but a couple of times it has come in very handy.

For the most amazing trick of all: once again, select a range of text. This time, hold down both Shift and Control and drag the text to a new location. Notice that it inserts what looks like a copy of your text. Now, make a change to the original text you selected—the copied text mirrors the changes you made!

In fact, by holding down Shift and Control, you've created a link. Any change you make to the original text is automagically updated in the linked text. (You can even use this trick to link automatically updating text between two documents!)

Congratulations, you're now an official expert in the ins and outs of Word text selection.

Selecting With the Magic Box

jensenh — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 18:00:20 GMT

Here's a handy trick to kick off your weekend.

You've got a few columns of text in a Word document, separated by tabs. They're not in a table.

Now, you want to format just one of the columns without impacting the text in any of the other ones. Think you have to manually select and format every word in the column manually? Not so!

Simply hold down the Alt key and drag a box around the text you want to format. Let go of the Alt key and all of the text within the box is selected! Apply formatting until your heart is content. Or, perhaps click Copy to put the selected text on the clipboard.

Use ALT+Drag to select a box of text in Word

The same trick works in the Visual Studio text editor as well... on a monospaced file it can sometimes work miracles! You'll find that this works in all modern versions of Word.

By the way, the selected text is blue instead of black in the picture above because I used Word 12 to grab the screenshot. Unlike previous versions of Word which used a simple inversion of the background and text colors to show selection, Word 12 uses a lightened version of the Windows selection color.

Know Your ABC's (Office 12 Coolness, Part 3)

jensenh — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 18:00:00 GMT

One of the features I always wished Word had was the ability to alphabetize a list of words. I always copied my words into Excel, fixed them up one per row, sorted them there, and then pasted back into Word. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Word has had this feature since version 2.0!

Formerly a hidden gem on the Table menu, most people think of the Sort command to sort rows or columns within Word tables. The secret is that, despite being on the Table menu, the Sort command works just fine without a table.

In Office 12, we've added this feature to the Paragraph chunk on the Write tab--and you can use it to sort part of your document very quickly.

The "Sort" command in the Word 12 "Write" tab

By default, the Sort feature sorts by "paragraph," although this isn't as limiting as it sounds. If you type a list of words and press Enter after each one, every word is its own "paragraph." Similarly, a bulleted or numbered list has each item stored as a separate paragraph, so Sort does exactly what you'd expect here as well.

To use the feature, simply select the text you want to sort, click the Sort button, and voila, alphabetized text. You can also sort by number or date if that is more useful for what you're doing.

This is an example of how a simple reorganization of feature placement makes all the difference; I never thought about using Sort in Word because I thought it was for tables only. Now, we've moved it to a more logical, discoverable position in the Office 12 Ribbon, and we've started to receive a lot of nice mail from people just discovering it for the first time. (They usually think it's a new feature!)

No need to copy your text into Excel anymore for simple sorting--you can do it right from within Word. No table required. Office 12 makes it easy.

The Best Outlook Feature Ever

jensenh — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:00:00 GMT

Here's an Outlook party trick suitable for cruise ships, family reunions, and kids birthday parties.

Up until now this secret trick has been known only to Outlook insiders--a kind of "secret handshake" passed through the generations of Outlook team members. Every few years ago someone files a bug on it and it is quickly closed by an elder.

Today, I pass it along to you to enjoy. I believe it works in all versions of Outlook. Do all of these steps in a row; don't ever click away from the sticky note once you do the first step or it won't work.

Create a new sticky note (File | New | Note or Ctrl+Shift+N will do the trick.)
Type some text in the note (anything will do, it doesn't have to be long.)
Drag the note around the screen for a while (you can move it via the title bar just like a normal window.)
Now, for the big trick: Press CTRL+Z.
Sit back and enjoy the show.
You can keep pressing CTRL+Z again and again to reverse the process.

For extra bonus points, along with moving the window around, try resizing it and (in Outlook 2003 and earlier) changing its color via the icon in the upper-left hand corner.

(The good news is that all the memory used is reclaimed when you close the sticky note.)

Thanks be to that ancient developer who, in his wisdom, persisted every change of position, size, and color in the undo stack. Many hours of fun have resulted from his work.

Super extra bonus points: Write your name on the screen using the sticky note. Hint: you need to drag it over the Outlook window.

A Clipboard for Formatting

jensenh — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 01:02:00 GMT

OK, here's what happened: The article I intended to post today, I couldn't. And now the day's almost done (except, of course, here on the left coast of the US where it's still mid-afternoon and in Australia, where it's already tomorrow.)

So instead of posting a full article, I'll devote this space today to an underrated Office command that I'm still learning to appreciate myself: the Format Painter.

The idea behind Format Painter is simple: it lets you copy the formatting from one object and apply it to another object. The "objects" can be words, paragraphs, shapes, pictures, tables, text boxes, or just about anything else in Office. Format Painter copies the entire formatting of the source object, including borders, fills, shadows, text styles, etc.

You'll find the "Format Painter" button in Office 2003 right next to the Paste button on the Formatting toolbar. (It looks kind of like a hand broom to me.)

Here's how to use it:

First, select the object which has the formatting you wish to copy. Then, click the Format Painter button. The mouse cursor changes to show that you have "picked up" the formatting. Now, you're ready to paint with it: simply click wherever you want to apply the formatting. (To apply formatting to a range of text, just select the text you want to paint while the mouse cursor is in "paint" mode.)

If you want to paint multiple objects at once to make them match, follow the same procedure, except this time double-click the Format Painter button. Now, your cursor will remain in "paint" mode indefinitely so that you can paint lots of objects at once. When you're done painting, just press "Escape" on the keyboard.

That's all there is to it! Long live Format Painter: underappreciated time-saver, and one of the coolest features in Office.

Decoding Office Build Numbers

jensenh — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 18:00:00 GMT

Open the About dialog box in any Office program. Near the top, you'll find the build number of the program you're using.

If you are using Office 2003, you'll probably see something like 11.5608.5606. If you are using Office 12, you might see something like 12.0.3417.1005. In earlier versions, you'll see something similar.

While these numbers may look like unintelligible garbage, in reality they can be used to tell interesting information about the version of Office you're using.

Numbers...

In Office 2003, the "11" that precedes the build number is simply to denote that Office 2003 was version 11 of Office. Similarly, the 12 in Office "12" means... well, you get it. Office XP was version 10, Office 2000 was version 9, Office 97 was version 8. You get the idea.

The most interesting thing to watch for is the first 4-digit number you encounter. In the examples above, 5608 and 3417. These are what we refer to as the "build number." Every few days during the development cycle, we compile all of the code in Office and turn it into a "build": essentially an installable version of all the work everyone's done up until that point. Eventually, a build becomes "final" and that is the one that ends up on CDs and in the store.

The 4-digit build number is actually an encoded date which allows you tell when a build was born. The algorithm works like this:

Take the year in which a project started. For Office "12", that was 2003.
Call January of that year "Month 1."
The first two digits of the build number are the number of months since "Month 1."
The last two digits are the day of that month.

So, if you have build 3417, you would do the following math: "Month 1" was January 2003. "Month 13" was January 2004. "Month 25" was January 2005. Therefore, "Month 34" would be October 2005.

3417 = October 17, 2005, which was the date on which Office 12 build 3417 started.

For Office 2003 and XP both, "Month 1" was January 2000. So, the final build of Office 2003, 5608, was made on August 8, 2003.

If you look at Office 2003 build numbers, you will see two four-digit numbers, separated by a period. The first of the two numbers represents the build number for the program you're using (such as Outlook.) The second of the two numbers represents the build number for the core Office shared library (called MSO), which is shared by all programs.

The Office 12 dialog boxes actually show the application and MSO build numbers separately--they're both even labeled so that it's easy to tell them apart. The Office 12-style build numbers (12.0.3417.1005) reveal another internal artifact of the way we do builds--something we call "dot builds."

Sometimes it's necessary to have two kinds of builds going on at once within the Office team. Recently, our build lab has been making both "Beta 1" builds and "Beta 2" builds. In order to ship a stable Beta 1, we have slowed the rate of code changes dramatically and concentrated on just crucial bug fixes. At the same time, we need a place to check in all of the other work people are doing for Beta 2--but we can't have those changes coming in and wrecking the stability of Beta 1 at the last minute.

The solution? The build lab makes two kinds of builds at once. A specific build number is chosen, and that build "becomes" Beta 1. In this case, 3417. That doesn't mean that Beta 1 is done however. As bug fixes are checked in, we make new versions of the 3417 build, each one with an increasing number as a suffix, separated by a period. (A so-called "dot" build.) So there would be a 3417.1, 3417.2, 3417.3, and so on until Beta 1 is ready to ship. Subtract 1000 from the second 4-digit number in the About box to find the "dot build" number. In the above example, 3417.1005 is the 5th "dot" build of our Beta 1 branch.

At the same time, the build lab continues to churn out Beta 2 builds on the normal daily schedule: 3423, 3425, etc. So, internally, we can tell which build is which kind by the number it has.

Last point: once a product ships, the rules for build numbers become even more complicated and different. So, if you have Service Pack 2 for Office 2003, you might see a nonsensical number like 6552 or something. Don't worry about it, it's not tied directly to a date in the same way anymore.

Armed with this knowledge, you're ready to amaze the world with your secret ability to decode Office build numbers.

Excel Can Be 'Rand'om Too

jensenh — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 17:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I showed you a neat trick that you can use in Word to quickly fill up a document with sample text.

Not to be outdone by its sibling, Excel also features a few ways to swiftly fill up a worksheet with sample data. We use these functions extensively in order to help test Excel, but people have reported finding them useful from time to time for their own uses.

The simplest way to fill a cell with a random value is to select the cell and type:

=rand()

Voila, the cell is populated with a random number between 0 and 1. From now on, every time Excel recalculates the sheet, a different number between 0 and 1 will appear in this cell.

To fill an entire range of cells at once with random values, start by dragging out the rectangle of cells you want to fill. Now, type:

=rand()

And then press CTRL+ENTER. Excel fills all of the selected cells with different random numbers between 0 and 1.

Now, let's get a little fancier. Excel also includes a function RANDBETWEEN which allows you to specify a lower bound and an upper bound for the random integer Excel puts in a cell.

Try this: select a range of cells. Then type:

=randbetween(50, 700)

And then press CTRL+ENTER. Excel fills all of the selected cells with different random numbers between 50 and 700. As with RAND, the numbers change whenever Excel does recalc (you can force this by pressing F9.)

Note: If you try RANDBETWEEN but get an #NAME error instead of the random numbers, you don't have the Analysis ToolPak running. Click Tools.Add-Ins and check the box next to "Analysis ToolPak" to enable it. Then press F2 to cause Excel to regenerate all formulas.

Finally, if you want the random values to stay as they are (and not change every time Excel does recalc), you need to convert the functions to values. One easy way to do this:

Select the range of cells you want to fill up
Click Edit.Copy to copy the cells to the clipboard
Click Edit.Paste Special
Select "Values" in the dialog box, click OK.

Ta-da, the random numbers are now locked in place and won't change anymore. (By the way, doing this same operation in Excel 12 takes 3 clicks instead of 6!)

So, as you can see, Excel has 'rand'om functionality of its own which you can use to quickly fill up a spreadsheet with random numbers.

Warning: Not recommended for SEC disclosures or during financial audits.

A 'Rand'om Word Trick For You

jensenh — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:00:00 GMT

Here's a Word trick you can use to entertain and amuse your family and friends. OK, I'm overstating a bit; unless your family and friends are exceeding geeky, they're not going to be impressed. But if you haven't seen it before, it might just surprise you.

Open Word. It doesn't have to be the most recent version; I think this works all the way back to Word 97. Got it open?

Now make a new blank document and type: =rand() and press Enter. You should see a few paragraphs of filler text appear in your document. In the US version of Word 2003, the text is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." This is an example of a "pangram"--a sentence or phrase that contains all the letters of the alphabet. The preferred version actually ends "over a lazy dog" because it's shorter and therefore more impressive.

The shortest pangram I'm aware of in English that doesn't use a proper name is "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow." (29 letters.) A few perfect, 26-letter pangrams exist, but they use dubious acronyms and proper names, such as "Glum Schwartzkopf vex'd by NJ IQ."

Different languages of Word use different text for rand(). I seem to recall one of the European languages includes a fairy tale, and a few versions use the historic but meaningless "lorem ipsum" text.

Word 12 responds to rand() with a long treatise on the AutoFormat feature from versions past. I'm not sure why that change was made--probably because the new text is much longer and therefore more varied than repeating "quick brown fox" over and over again.

But wait, there's more. You can use the advanced rand() syntax to control the length of the text. Try: =rand(10,8) [enter].

Word inserts 10 paragraphs of 8 sentences each. You can set the two numbers inside the parentheses to whatever values you like (up to 200.)

So why does this feature exist? We use it extensively internally for testing purposes--it allows us to fill up a lot of pages quickly to try out various features to see how they're working. Outside of Microsoft, teachers who train other people to use Word find it useful for the same reason, so we've left it in the product.

Believe it or not, this whole feature is documented in a Microsoft Knowledge Base article.