Tips for MS Office 2010, Word & Excel from PC Magazine

There is a ton of good (and free) stuff on the Internet, along with megatons of junk. One of our goals with this blog is to help you sort through the junk to find the good stuff. Recently PC Magazine posted a series of slide shows by containing tips for Microsoft Office 2010, particularly Word and Excel. Here are the links: MS Office 2010 Tips Slide Show MS Word 2010 Tips Slide Show MS Excel 2010 Tips Slide Show Having reviewed these tips, I found much useful information. One of my favorites is the 5th slide of the MS Office 2o1o show. It tells you how to configure Word 2010 to open files created in older versions of Word. Many law firms have a collection of forms or documents created in early versions of Word or Excel that more recent versions of MS Office refuse to open because they may pose a security risk. Assuming you have solid antivirus and antimalware protection, this security feature may not be necessary. In order to allow Word or Excel 2010 to open these old files, go to File, Options, Trust Center, click Trust Center Settings, then select File Block Settings, and remove the checkmarks from the older Office files that you want Office 2010 to open. The 8th slide in the Word show is also a great tip. Many lawyers, when doing research and drafting briefs or other documents, need to use text from emails, PDF's, and other documents that may be badly formatted for word processing purposes. The text may contain hard returns at the end of each line, for example. The AutoFormat feature in Word does a decent job of cleaning up these formatting problems. Earlier versions of Word had the AutoFormat command on the toolbar. With the switch to the Ribbon interface in Office 2007 and 2010, that command disappeared. But you can add it to the Quick Access Toolbar that appears above the Ribbon's tabs by clicking on the down arrow at the right-hand end of the Quick Access Toolbar, and then clicking on More Commands. In the dropdown menu under "Choose commands from," select Commands Not In the Ribbon. From the list that appears, click on Autoformat, the Add button, and then OK.