Work Smarter With Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office offers a fantastic suite of tools to help you with your day to day tasks. Are you really getting all you can from your investment in this software? The following tip tips will help help you make the most out of your Microsoft Office

1. Clean up your Outlook inbox. With more and more e-mail popping up in your inbox every day, you can very quickly find yourself buried in e-mail. To help combat this, you should create folders to categorize your mail, and move it out of the inbox into it's appropriate folder one you have dealt with it. That way you know that the only e-mails in your inbox are ones that you have still to 'action'

2. Take out the trash. Did you know that when you delete e-mail, it's not really gone. Instead, Outlook moves it to a folder called Deleted Items. To regain some disk space and get rid of old messages once and for all, choose Tools, Empty Deleted Items every month or so.

3. Turn on AutoRecover. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will automatically save your documents while you work at an interval you specify. To set this interval, choose Tools, Options, and click the Save tab. Check the option called "Save AutoRecover info every" and type a frequency in the "minutes" text box. If that's still not enough - and you 'get that feelin' that your computer is about to crash when you have multiple Word documents open, , hold down the Shift key while you drop down the File menu. The Save command changes to Save All, which will save all open documents.

4. Check the Microsoft Web site Office updates. Microsoft offers a handy way to check your Office installation to see if you need a security update. When you visit the Office Downloads page you have the option of letting the site take a peek at your Office installation and alert you to any important security updates that are available.

5. Detect and repair. If your Office installation somehow goes horribly wrong, you might be able to fix the problem without reinstalling Office. The Help menu has a command called "Detect and Repair" that you should call upon when you have a serious problem. Microsoft claims that Detect and Repair can resolve registry problems, restore missing system files, and reset your Office defaults. To run the utility, have your Office XP installation CDs ready, and choose Help, Detect and Repair.

6. Back up, back up, back up. This is one of the most important, yet also one of the most neglected areas of computing. It's like flossing your teeth - very easy to neglect, but you will one day regret it!!! Backing up your data should be at the top of your computer maintenance list, right next to Virus Protection (see below). Without data backup or virus protection, you are running the risk of losing your data. And it will happen, don't think that you don't have to worry about it. Your back-up requirements will depend on the size of your company, how critical the information is, and how difficult it will be to replace. But you should definitely have a system in place, and stick to it!

7. Update your anti virus software. Threats are on the increase, and they are constantly evolving. Hundreds of viruses are discovered each month. To make sure that you are protected against the newest breed of threats, you'll want to update your anti-virus software frequently. Thankfully, most anti virus software programs nowadays come with an automated updated feature, where the program will go out onto the internet and get the latest updates for you. If your anti virus has this option - use it!