Tips

These are tips for users of varying skill levels. Of course, they are offered without warranty or guarantee.

Word

When working in a complex document (multiple styles, outline numbering, headers & footers) don't copy text straight from the internet or other unknown/questionable sources straight into your Word document. Use Edit>Paste>Special>Unformatted Text, or, in Word 2003, you can click on the small lightning icon which appears after you paste and select "Keep Text Only". This will keep potentially corrupting code out of your document.

When using outline numbering, affiliate the numbering system with a style, preferably Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on. Then, always apply the style to get the numbering you want. This will keep the binary portion of the Word file cleaner and better organized, which make for a more stable document.

When possible, use Word tables instead of tabs. Just set the tables borders (Format>Borders and Shading) to "none". If you must use tabs, drop your own tabs into the paragraphs - don't use the default tabs. The default tabs will come back and screw up your formatting if you do any font modification later.

If you're doing large and/or complex documents, learn how to use Styles. It's worth it.

Excel

When linking to external data sources, insert any additional columns (for calculations, text concatenation, etc.) into the returned data and set the Data Range Properties to "Fill down formulas in columns adjacent to data". Then, whenever you refresh the data, the formulas in the additional columns will propagate.

Want some Excel data shown in a Word document as a graphic? In Excel, if you select your cells and then press the shift key before going to Edit>Copy, you will get a "Copy Picture" dialogue box. This allows you to "pick up" the Excel cells as either a Picture or a Bitmap. Then paste them into Word as a graphic.

Backups

If you have more than 1 hard drive at your disposal (2 HDs in your computer, or 2 computers networked together) you can do backups quick and easy: Just back your "primary" hard drive up to a named directory on the other hard drive. At home, I have 2 computers networked to each other. I have a backup utility program (I use FreeByte backup - you can go to their site from my "Links" page) on each. When I want to do a backup, I just run my backup utility, which I have pre-configured to back up my data to the opposite computer. An incremental backup takes less than 60 seconds. NOTE: This tip will NOT protect you against major disaster, like fire. Always have some sort of off-site backup as well.