Modern office software suites can be unnervingly complicated. Like most of its alternatives, the free and open-source LibreOffice sticks its often-used controls above the content area in various menus. But most of the available tools are actually hidden by default—you’ll have to manually add the ones that aren’t visible out of the box. Here’s how.
How to Dock and Undock Toolbars In LibreOffice
Modern office software suites can be unnervingly complicated. Like most of its alternatives, the free and open-source LibreOffice sticks its often-used controls above the content area in various menus. But most of the available tools are actually hidden by default—you’ll have to manually add the ones that aren’t visible out of the box. Here’s how.
LibreOffice Writer bundles in a free auto-complete system, similar to the one you’re probably familiar with on your smartphone’s keyboard. But LibreOffice’s is a lot more powerful, and a lot more customizable—you can more or less tell it exactly which words you want to auto-complete, and which ones you don’t.
The Windows version of Microsoft Office has always been the gold standard for office suites, as far as features are concerned. Office exists on other platforms too, like the Mac—but those versions are missing some products and features.
Templates let you configure all the relevant settings you want pre-applied to documents—font settings, margins and tabs, boilerplate text, and so on. You just open the template and save it under a new name to get a jump start on a new document.
Sideheads (where a document’s subheads appear out to the side of the text) and pull quotes are really just two specific uses for text boxes in Microsoft Word. Here’s how to set them up.
If you’re on a collaborative team of workers, or you’re simply dealing with several revisions of your own work, it’s important to be able to track incremental changes. In Microsoft Word, the ability to compare every difference in two nearly-identical documents is built in to the Compare tool. Here’s how to use it.
Word’s rulers let you control the margins of your page and the indentation of paragraphs. They’re great for precisely lining up images, text, and other elements. If you’re printing a document, the rulers can help ensure that what you see on your screen translates into what you’ll get on the printed page.
Microsoft Word will mark contractions like “I’m”, “don’t”, and “doesn’t”, as grammatical errors, showing that dashed line under them. For more casual documents, this can be annoying.
When you paste text from a web page into OneNote, it won’t just paste the text. You’ll also get a link to the web page you got it from. You can disable this feature if you like, forcing OneNote to only paste the text you actually copied.
Microsoft offers several different ways to run the various Office programs—as desktop apps, as mobile apps for Android or iPhone/iPad, and online in a web browser. As you might imagine, the online and mobile app versions aren’t as robust as the desktop version, but you might still find them useful. And for some of you, they might be all you need. Here’s the breakdown.
Since the beginning of the computer age, people have always enjoyed making computers talk to them. These days, that functionality is built right into Windows and you can easily use it to have your PC read documents to you.
When you email someone a copy of your Word document or PowerPoint presentation and they don’t have a font installed, Microsoft Office shows that document with the default font instead. This can mess up the whole layout and make the document look completely different, but you can fix this by embedding fonts into your documents.
Microsoft has been pushing Office 365, the $100-per-year Microsoft Office subscription, for years now. But the Windows Fall Creators update goes further. For the first time, non-Office Windows features will live behind the Office 365 paywall.
Adobe’s PDF standard is handy whenever you need to distribute some information and be sure that it’s seen the same way by all recipients. But PDF files are also infamously tough to edit.
Since the majority of written words are now produced in one digital form or another, fonts and typefaces have become much more important than they used to be. And to the chagrin of graphic designers and generally nerdy people everywhere, those terms are often used interchangeably.
Microsoft Office applications have a built-in Safe Mode feature. This helps when you can’t use Office normally. Perhaps Word crashes every time you open it, or maybe Excel crashes when you open a single file. You can start the application in Safe Mode and there’s a good chance it will work normally.
If you’re new to the Amazon Echo, you probably know most of the basic actions and commands that you can tell Alexa, like playing music, setting timers, and getting weather updates. However, here are some tricks that you may not have known about, all of which will take your Echo game to the next level.
Microsoft will end support for the Windows Essentials 2012 suite on January 10, 2017. If you use any of the suite’s component apps—Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, OneDrive, Family Safety, Mail, or Live Writer—here’s what you need to know.
If you are working on a large spreadsheet, it can be useful to “freeze” certain rows or columns so that they stay on screen while you scroll through the rest of the sheet.
If you’re lucky enough to have a modern Chromebook that can run Android apps, you should definitely be taking advantage of this awesome new feature. And if you’re in the market for a new Chromebook, make sure you get one that can run Android apps out of the box. Here are the apps that make it worthwhile.
Cloud storage is the dream of the post-PC, mobile-focused tech world…but we’re not quite there yet. There’s a limit to what you can get for free, especially if you go with one of the major services. Here’s an exhaustive list of all the cloud storage and photo services we could find across the web that have at least some free storage options. Use them all at once to save a million Steam games, or just find the best one with the biggest bucket for your most important files.
The CC and BCC fields when sending email work similarly. CC stands for “carbon copy,” while BCC stands for “blind carbon copy.” Though these terms may have been immediately obvious when email was invented, they’re antiquated today.
You can always look up user accounts on a Windows system using the settings interface, but if you want to save a nice, printer-friendly file with that info, it’s easiest to turn to the Command Prompt.
There’s no faster way to navigate your computer than with keyboard shortcuts, and Windows continues to add more with each new version. Everything begins on the taskbar and Start menu, though, so it’s really handy to use them without ever clicking your mouse. Here are some useful keyboard shortcuts for working with the Windows taskbar.
DON’T YOU HATE IT WHEN YOU ACCIDENTALLY HIT CAPS LOCK?
