Normally, you will customise your using the menu options Tools | Customize or View | Toolbars | Customize from the menu bar or by right-clicking on a toolbar and choosing Customize from the resulting shortcut menu.  With the Customize dialog box open, you can move buttons by dragging them to new locations on a toolbar or you can remove them by dragging buttons off the toolbar.

A picture tells a thousand words.  When your document contains a number of drawing objects, you can align them easily with each other using the Align menu option on the Drawing toolbar.

Use the menu option View | Toolbars to ensure that the drawing bar is displayed.  Then choose Draw | Align Or Distribute from the Drawing toolbar and make sure that the Relative To Page option is not active.

To align two or more objects with each other, hold down the [Shift] key, and click on each object you want to align.  Choose Draw | Align Or Distribute from the Drawing toolbar. The Align options located on the resulting submenu enable you to align the selected objects relative to each other.  For example, choosing Align Left aligns the selected objects' left edges with the left edge of the leftmost object.

Applying automatic numbering to paragraphs is easy using the Bullets And Numbering feature on the Format menu or the Numbering button on the Formatting toolbar. Usually, this way of creating paragraph-based automatic numbering meets your needs.

However, Word is much more awkward when you need to apply automatic numbering to items within a paragraph, rather than to the paragraph itself.  This style of text-numbering is often used in legal documents.

You can use a ListNum field to apply in-text numbering so that the numbering adjusts automatically as you add or delete paragraphs leaving your in-text numbering consistent and consecutive.

To insert a ListNum field, place the insertion point where the number is to appear, and press [Ctrl] [Alt] L.  Right-click on the ListNum Field to promote or demote the numbering level and choose Increase Indent or Decrease Indent from the shortcut menu.  Another way is to select the field and click the Increase Indent or Decrease Indent button on the Formatting toolbar.

Quite often you want the AutoShapes and text boxes in a document to use the same formatting without having to apply the same formatting to each object yourself. Instead, you can simply set custom AutoShape defaults.

You start by inserting a text box or any AutoShape in your document.  Apply the desired formatting features such as colour, line, margin, 3-D, and shadow.  Next, click on the object to select it, and choose Draw | Set AutoShape Defaults from the Drawing toolbar.  The next AutoShape or text box you add to your document will use automatically the default formatting specifications you applied to the original.

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If you use custom character or paragraph styles in your documents regularly, you will know that scrolling through the Style dropdown menu (found on the Formatting toolbar), is pretty tedious

An alternative is to use the Style dialog box, which you can access by selecting Format | Style from the menu bar.  However, using the Style dialog box to apply a style does not really improve the process.

The best way of applying a style is to assign shortcut keys to your most frequently used styles.  Start by opening a document or template that contains the style you want to assign to a shortcut key.  Next, select Format | Style from the menu bar to open the Style dialog box. Select the style from the Styles list box and click Modify.  In the Modify Style dialog box, click Shortcut Key.  Make sure the insertion point is in the Press New Shortcut Key text box and press the shortcut key you want to use.

If the key is already assigned to another command, Word will tell you beneath the Press New Shortcut Key text box. If the style has already been assigned a shortcut key, Word lists it in the Current Keys list box.

To save the shortcut key you chosen, select the document or template in which you want to save the shortcut key from the Save Changes dropdown list and click Assign. Close the Customize Keyboard, Modify Style and Style dialog boxes.

You can adjust a table's cell margins to create some “white-space” between cell borders and cell contents adding paragraph spacing to a cell's contents.

To add space at the top or bottom of a cell, select the first or last line in the cell choose the menu option Format | Paragraph. In the Spacing panel on the Indents And Spacing sheet, enter the amount of space you want to add in the Before or After text box (as applicable). When you have finished, click OK.

Word has a design feature that automatically applies hyperlinks to recognizable email addresses when you type them in your documents.  When you click on a hyperlinked email address, your default email program opens and addresses a new message to the hyperlinked address.

You can improve on this feature by having Word add a default subject line to the new message it  creates in your default email program.  To do so, right-click on the  hyperlinked email address that appears in your document and choose Edit Hyperlink. In the dialog box that now appears, enter your desired text in the Subject text box and click OK.

Word's AutoCorrect feature recognises commonly misspelled words and corrects them for you automatically. You can add new entries to the default AutoCorrect list in the AutoCorrect dialog box, which you can find by selecting the menu options Tools | AutoCorrect.  However, if you have Word's automatic spell checker turned on, you can create new AutoCorrect entries quickly as you type.

Start by making sure the automatic spell checker are turned on by selecting the menu choices Tools | Options from the menu bar.  Click on the Spelling & Grammar tab, select the Check Spelling As You Type check box and click OK.

Make sure that Word's AutoCorrect feature is turned on by selecting the menu options Tools | AutoCorrect, select the Replace Text As You Type check box and click OK.

As you will probably know, Word's automatic spell checker marks unrecognised words in your document with a wavy red underline. To add an unrecognised word and its correct spelling to the AutoCorrect list, right-click on the word. If the spell checker is able to suggest alternative spellings for the unrecognised word, AutoCorrect appears on the resulting shortcut menu. Select AutoCorrect and choose the word you want to replace it with from the submenu.  Word adds the unrecognised word and its replacement to the AutoCorrect list.

The next time you type the misspelled word, Word will replace it automatically with the word you specified.

MS EXCEL TIPS

If you want to add space between your data and a cell's borders, it’s best use an indented text format to the cell rather using leading space characters.  

Sometimes, your worksheet layouts would benefit from having text displayed vertically instead of horizontally, for example the headings of columns of numbers in a complex reference table.  You can save make the table easier to read by merging the label cells into one narrow, tall cell and displaying the caption text vertically.

You will often have formatted Excel data by applying bold, underline or colour formatting to worksheet cells but you may not have realised that you can also apply formatting to just certain text within a cell. For example, you may want to emphasize a particular word or phrase within a long string of text.

When you create a table of numerical data, it is good practice to sum both the rows and columns of the table.  The cell at the intersection point of the total row and column traditionally contains a grand total of all the calculated sums. However, creating the grand total using just the column or row sums does not uncover errors that may be caused by an incorrect subtotal. To be sure that the grand total is correct, you need to be verify that the sum of the row subtotals equals the sum of the column subtotals.

To ensure that the totals match, you can use a custom formula to calculate the grand total instead of just a traditional SUM formula. One way to flag totalling errors is to use a formula in the form of

=IF(SUM(range1)=SUM(range2),SUM(range1),"message")

When you include page numbers in a worksheet's header or footer, you may want to start numbering pages from a number other than the default value of 1. For example, say you need to print a worksheet that's part of a larger report and the sheet should begin numbering as page 10.

To achieve this effect, choose the menu options View | Header And Footer.  Click the Custom Header or Custom Footer button, then click the Page Number button in the centre of the dialog box.  Excel will insert the following:

&[Page]

After the page number code, add one number lower than the page number you want to start with, so that the code looks like:

&[Page]+9

When you want to view different parts of a worksheet at the same time. you can split your worksheet view into separate scrollable panes.

To create a horizontal split, drag the split box, ie the small rectangle found directly above the vertical scroll bar, to the position on the worksheet where you want to make the split.

To create a vertical split, drag the split box that you can find to the right of the horizontal scroll bar.

Quite often you will need to create column or row labels based on months of the year or days of the week.

You can easily do so using Excel’s in-built Custom List feature. Start by entering the starting label, such as January or Monday, into the first cell. Next, select the cell and drag the fill handle, i.e. the small black box on the cell selector's lower-right corner, down or to the left. As you drag the fill handle, Excel populates each adjacent cell with the next logical item in the series. The technique even works with many standard month or day abbreviations. In addition, the technique can be used to create quarterly series labels or ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, and so on).