Office 2016 Productivity Tips

This article provides Office 2016 tips and tricks to make your work life more productive.

Outlook 2016 Tips

1. Send a junk e-mail item and all subsequent items from a sender to the Deleted Items folder.

1. Highlight the offending e-mail and press Ctrl+Delete.
   
   
2. The Ignore Conversations box appears. Choose Ignore Conversation. This e-mail will be moved to the Deleted Items folder AND all subsequent e-mails will be moved automatically to this folder. Sweet!

2.  Use the signature tool to easily create templates.

If you need to send the same mail frequently, you can make a template. However, you can easily achieve the same thing using the signature tool.

1. Type the body of the message and copy it to the clipboard using Ctrl+C.
   
   
2. Click on Insert, Signature and then Signature again.
   
   
   
   
3. Save the text under a unique name such as "Time Sheets Due."
   
   
   
   
4. When you want to send that type of message, click on Signature and select it from the list.

3. Use Insert Online Pictures without having to download them first.

1. From the body of your e-mail, click on the Insert tab and click the Online Pictures button.
   
   
   
   
2. A new window opens, allowing you to search and insert a picture. Once the image has been added, you can easily manipulate its size and layout.

Excel 2016 Tips

1. Use CONCATENATE to join strings of text or numbers. In the example below, we will use CONCATENATE to join names in separate cells in two different ways.

1. For practice, open a spreadsheet and type first names in cells A1-A5. Next, type last names in cells B1-B5.
   
   
   
   
2. Place your cursor in cell D1 and type the formula below. (Be sure to put the 2 commas as shown below.)
   
   
3. 
   What you type between the quotation marks is what separates the first and last names. In this case, a space separates the names. The result is shown below.
   
   
   
   
4. To copy this formula to the cells below, use the fill handle by clicking in the bottom, right hand corner, holding and dragging straight down.
   
   
   
   
5. As you can see, all the other names have now been concatenated.
   
   
   
   
6. The formula can be changed to yield slightly different results as shown below. In this formula, a comma, then a space are placed between the quotation marks.
   
   

2. Use Flash Fill to pull data from concatenated cells.

Flash Fill allows you to pull needed pieces of information from a concatenated cell. Before this feature was added, you either had to type everything out manually or create a complicated workaround. Flash Fill automatically adds data, formatted the way you want, without using formulas. The best part is that it does this in one step!

1. Type the first name of the first person in the field immediately next to the one you're working on, and click Home > Fill > Flash Fill, and Excel will automatically extract the first name from the remaining people in your table.
   
   
   
   The outcome of the Flash Fill is as shown below.
   
   
   
   3. Use Transpose to quickly move row data to a column or vice-versa.

Sometimes you'll be working with data formatted in rows and you really need it to be in colums (or the other way around). In this example, we want to move the months from a row to a column.



To transpose the data, follow these steps:

1. Copy the row or column you'd like to transpose, then right click on the destination cell and select Paste Special.
   
   
   
   
2. A checkbox on the bottom of the resulting popup window is labeled Transpose. Check the box and click OK.
   
   
   
   
3. Here is the result. The row and column have changed places.