MS Office Helpful Stuff: Keyboard Shortcuts and Undo

My job? Trying to find ways to make your job easier for you. Since I can't really know what will help you until I actually sit and talk with you I'm going to share two little things that have helped me in big ways.

#1 Keyboard Shortcuts:

There are SO many keyboard shortcuts in MS Office that it would be a super-human endeavour to try to remember even half of them. If you prefer to keep your hands on the keyboard, you may try some of these on for size. What I have found in talking to people is that when people look through the list of keyboard shortcuts they find a few they can use, and then never forget them! Most involve the CTRL key, but there are also some that don't. Fortunately, many are the same throughout the entire suite. Some of my all time favorites are: CTRL + Z (Undo), CTRL + P (Print), CTRL + N (New Document or Spreadsheet or Presentation) and of course CTRL + X, CTRL + C, CTRL + V (Cut, Copy, Paste)
Most of the shortcuts linked below will work in most versions of Office.
Keyboard Shortcuts for Excel
Keyboard shortcuts for Word
Keyboard shortcuts for creating a presentation in PowerPoint
Keyboard shortcuts for delivering a presentation in PowerPoint

#2 Undo:

DON'T SKIP THIS PART BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU KNOW UNDO!
Since I just mentioned shortcuts... CTRL + Z is my absolute favorite shortcut ever. Here is why. We are all aware of how the Undo command works in general. It takes away the last thing we did. It works similarly in all the MS Office products as in many other applications. BUT... Did you know it will also undo things the computer does automatically? For example. Let's say you type an email address in Excel. When you press the ENTER key, it will turn that email address into a clickable hyperlink. Well, what if you don't want a hyperlink? You have the option of turning that autoformatting function off altogether, but what if you don't want to do that because it can be very useful? The answer is CTRL + Z or the Undo button. Press or click one time. The auto-formatting action that MS Excel takes is considered a separate step and therefore can simply be undone without undoing your typing. Pretty clever right? Try it in Word, when it corrects something you didn't want to correct, or in PowerPoint when it capitalizes something you want in lower case.