From time to time you need to change a computer or laptop no matter what, e.g., a breakdown or upgrade. To keep the habitual work environment, you need to backup and restore personal ribbon customizations.

When you work with numbers and amounts in Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, you can have some issues with decimal symbol or digit grouping symbol. Both symbols can be changed in the settings of the Windows system.

For some charts, diagrams and presentations, you need to create a regular polygon – equiangular (all angles are equal) or equilateral (all sides have the same length). E.g., equilateral triangle, regular square, etc.

Manual data entry into spreadsheets and especially entering data into text cells leads to many errors. Excel data validation tools allow you to reduce the inaccuracy of Excel data entry by restricting the set of possible values to a pre-defined list. Users can select the item from a drop-down list with few choices, instead of typing text into the data entry form template.

When you import data into Excel spreadsheets from Internet pages or CSV files, Excel fails to recognize some numbers and converts them to the default text type. Temporarily changing Excel settings helps to reduce the amount of manual work and the number of errors on replacing comma to point, dot to comma, semicolon to comma, etc. Also, you need to change decimal delimiter settings for printing or exporting data for international users.

Excel pie charts are useful to display fractions of a whole by splitting a circle into sections. Each section looks like a slice of a pie and represents a category. Such layout makes it easy to observe relationships between parts, but the smaller becomes the slice (less than 10%) – the harder becomes to estimate it visually.

After creating and sending a meeting request by email, the organizer needs to know the status of responses, and the total number of people accepted, declined, or stated their tentative status for the meeting. You can quickly check these numbers in the Calendar view.

After recent updates, the ribbon in Microsoft Outlook can take up to 1/3 of the available screen space. Microsoft Office help tells that you can hide or unhide your ribbon, but you cannot reduce the size of your ribbon, or size of the text or the icons. False! You can change the mode and remove unnecessary white space around buttons, and, thus, reduce the ribbon size.

If Outlook does not open your data file, or you can not find some items in your inbox, contacts or calendar, then your PST is apparently corrupted. At this moment, thought about backup comes to your mind, but it is too late to muse about a backup. You need to backup your Outlook data in advance. Otherwise, you will need a repair tool.

When you create a presentation for a graduate thesis or dissertation, often, you need to insert Greek letters into the slide. Mathematical symbols and Greek letters are pervasive today and used everywhere, from physics to social science. You may use the equation block for inserting those symbols, but this block will have different format settings than the rest of your text, and you will not be able to edit it in older versions of Microsoft Office. If you need to insert just a symbol, use the Symbol dialog box or Alt+code shortcuts.

After recent updates, the ribbon in Microsoft PowerPoint can take up to 1/3 of the available screen space. Microsoft Office help tells that you can hide or unhide your ribbon, but you cannot reduce the size of your ribbon, or size of the text or the icons. False! You can change the mode and remove unnecessary white space around buttons, and, thus, reduce the ribbon size.

When you prepare your presentation, you should adapt it to the device which will be used for projecting it. Some devices or even laptops can have different sizes, so you can need to change the sizes of your presentation.

Page orientation defines the direction for printing or displaying the document in Word. Sometimes the page orientation for a particular page has to be different from the rest of the material. E.g., usually, the whole article, paper, or report is printed in the Portrait mode, but for a page with the big table, it is more convenient to use the Landscape mode.

No matter what you are writing, a fictional book, a story for kids, a user manual, or a technical report, jumping between the text and ribbon buttons for formatting distracts from the work. Shortcut Keys or Hotkeys for changing the paragraph alignment, style, etc. without mouse movements come to rescue.

The organizational chart, or organigram, is a diagram of the structure and relationships of the company or other organization. If you have Visio, you can build a huge organization histogram up to 1000 shapes with a very complex structure. SmartArt diagrams are much simple and recommended for smaller organizations, but you can add many visual effects and use Office theming for your organization diagrams. Using Microsoft Word built-in tools, you can easily create and share functional, divisional, or matrix org charts. A killer feature of SmartArt graphics templates is that you simply type and paste the text and the template positions and re-arranges the blocks automatically.