PowerPoint: Stop Text From Automatically Resizing

Want your text to stop automatically resizing itself in your PowerPoint slides? You can turn that behaviour off in your AutoCorrect options. Click the Microsoft Office button, and choose 'PowerPoint Options'. On the lefthand side of the box that comes up, click 'Proofing'. At the top, click the 'AutoCorrect Options...' button. Click the 'AutoFormat As You Type' tab, and uncheck 'AutoFit title text to placeholder' and/or 'AutoFit body text to placeholder' (choose title or body text as needed). It will now stop changing your font sizes to fit to their placeholders.
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PowerPoint: Arranging Items with Gridlines and Guides

Good news! If you're trying to arrange pictures and other objects in PowerPoint, you can activate gridlines and/or guides to help you out.

Make sure you have a picture or clipart image or other object selected, then click on the 'Format' tab under 'Picture Tools' or 'Drawing Tools' on your ribbon. Next, click the 'Align' button in the 'Arrange' group. From here, you can choose 'View Gridlines' to make gridlines appear on your screen, or you can choose 'Grid Settings...'. A dialog box will pop up, allowing you to check off 'Display grid on screen' and/or 'Display drawing guides on screen'. Here, you can also change the size of the grid, by changing the number for 'Spacing' under 'Grid Settings'. Change the settings as you desire, click 'OK' when you're finished, and tada! Now you can arrange your objects easier.
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Hyperlinks in Excel

There's a hyperlink function in Excel that allows you to specify the link location as well as the text that displays for you to click. Here's how to set it up:

=HYPERLINK(link_location,friendly_name)

The first section is where you put the address for your hyperlink. The second part, after the comma, is where you put in what text will display. For example:

=HYPERLINK("http://www.stacydubois.com","Stacy's Notes")
will look like this: Stacy's Notes

You can also use it for linking to files on your computer. For example:

=HYPERLINK("C:\Users\Stacy\Documents","Documents")

The "friendly_name" can also be a reference to another cell.
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PowerPoint: Hiding/Showing Slides

If you have a presentation ready in PowerPoint and want to run it, but don't want one or more slides to show up - you can hide them. It's a good idea if you plan on using those hidden slides eventually, and don't want to delete them entirely - you just want them to be tucked away for a little while. Here's how to do that.

On the left-hand side of your screen, where you can see all of your slides - select the slide(s) you want hidden. To select more than one, you can click the first, hold down Ctrl, and then click each other one you'd like. You can also select slides that follow eachother by clicking the first, holding Shift, and clicking the last. Now, right-click the slide(s) and click 'Hide Slide'.

If you do those same actions again on hidden slides, you will unhide them.
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Gridlines in Word

Did you know that Word has gridlines? You can turn them on by going to the 'View' tab on the ribbon, and checking off the 'Gridlines' box (it's in the 'Show/Hide' group, to the left-hand side of the ribbon).

This can be really handy if you're dealing with a lot of different objects and want to arrange them better on your page. And don't worry, even though you can see them on your screen - these gridlines won't print. And turning them off again is as easy as unchecking that same box again.
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Cheers,

Stacy
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