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Wealth gap widening
Canadian Honda EV plant 
Leafs even series
Cristall gets pro look
Warriors even series in OT
Swift breaks Spotify record
Cudi Coachella set cut short
Bon Jovi 'hasn't been a saint'
Office 2016 is awesome. And confusing
You do not have to live with Office the way it comes out of the box.
Okay, no one buys Office in a box anymore. Correct to say, these days you don’t have to live with Office the way it comes out of the Downloads folder. A few quick customizations, and it’s yours.
Fluff up your Office
Office 2013 was a major upgrade from Office 2010, and included a dramatic change in appearance. Once we all learned how to navigate the programs again, we began to complain about how they looked, which is to say, they all looked alike. I do a lot of work in Word, and a fair amount in Excel, and while I like my screen uncluttered, I don’t necessarily want to be bored to death.
Word 2013 introduced Office Backgrounds. Selecting a background places a design at the top of your Word Document, Excel Spreadsheet, Outlook, and any Office program. To do this:
Open an Office program, for instance Word
Open a document or spreadsheet (new or existing)
Click on File | Options | General | Office Background
Use the dropdown menu to select the background you want, or select No Background
Click on OK
Office programs before Office 2013 were different colours. Word was blue, Excel was green. Office 2013 made them all the same.
There are many things Microsoft could have done to improve Office 2013 when Office 2016 was released. What they chose to improve was the colour scheme. Now Word is blue again, and Excel is green when you choose the Colourful office theme.
Actually, it’s nice, and not boring. Check out all the choices:
Open an Office program, for instance Word
Open a document or spreadsheet (new or existing)
Click on File | Options | General | Office Theme
Use the dropdown menu to select the theme you like
Click on OK
If you hate those colours, choose the Dark Grey theme. It’s less fun, but less distracting, too.
Get just the text you want
When I’m editing a Word document, I usually want to control the text I select. By default, Word thinks I mean to highlight an entire word. Maybe that’s true, but more often I really mean to highlight just part of a word. This can be frustrating.
There’s a way to turn off that irritating behaviour:
Open a Word document (new or existing)
Click on File | Options | Advanced
Scroll to Editing Options and find the entry called When selecting, automatically select entire word and clear the check box
Click on OK
Experiment with this setting and see if you like it. You can easily reverse it by putting the check mark back in that box.
Hide or reveal formatting
I get lots of questions about this, and there is no middle ground. Half the people want to know how to turn on formatting marks. The other half turned them on by accident and now want turn them off.
You can toggle them off and on by clicking on the paragraph symbol in the Paragraph section of the Ribbon’s Home tab. It looks like a backwards P. In general, people want to be free of the distractions of those marks. But turning them on can help you figure out why your document doesn’t look the way you want it to. You can solve that problem, then toggle the formatting off again.
Some people, however, want to see the formatting all the time. If that’s you:
Open a Word document (new or existing)
Click on File | Options | Display
In the section called Always show these formatting marks on the screen place a check in the boxes you want
Click OK
Those marks won’t print. They’re just on the screen while you edit.
Get more Help
The built-in Help (“Tell me what you want to do”) in Office 2016 is very useful. If you want more or more organized help, check out the Office Support website.
If you’re using a Mac, your guides are here.
The Office Training Cente provides even more information.
What confuses you about Office 2016? What quirky issue have you solved? Let me know! We’ve already solved the “bypass the stupid templates screen” problem in Just stop it. Send email to [email protected] and we’ll tackle this together.
Links
Quick Start Office Guides for Mac
This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
