My partner, IT Manager for an insurance company, told me that the best Office tip she ever heard was to use “the paintbrush” or, to give it its proper name: Format Painter. When I asked around, I found that many people, even senior IT people who use Excel and Word all day, had never heard of it. It works in nearly all Office applications.
Say you have an area of text or some cells in Excel for instance formatted just the way you want: the right font, the right size, right background colour, alignment, spacing…. everything to to with how it looks on the page.
Simply select that area, click the Format Painter icon (the little yellow paintbrush) and select another area of the document you want to look the same. Easy.
You should save a lot of time and produce neater looking Office documents. If you want to find out more, here’s Microsoft’s online help about Format Painter but really that’s all there is to it.