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 a high speed internet connection, than I strongly suggest you use an online backup service to back your files up to "the cloud". I know that some of you might be thinking "But what if the folks at Google/Amazon/whatever lose my files?". Seriously, I think there's a higher chance of fire destroying your storage location for your backup files (your in-laws place?) than there is of Google going down the drain.

Anyway, I use, and heartily endorse Jungle Disk, which is a very friendly front-end for the Amazon Simple Storage Service (sometimes called S3). I back up all the data on three different computers for less than $10.00/month. And the really great - and not common - thing is I can get any one of my files back in seconds, if I need to. I can also restore all of them of course.