Microsoft Office Teenage Champions Share Their Best Tricks
Every year, hundreds of thousands of American teens compete to be the best in Word, Excel and PowerPoint and win up to $ 3,000 in the US National Championship for Microsoft Office Professionals . It is hosted by Certiport, a testing company that offers certifications for software such as MS Office, AutoCAD, and Adobe Creative Suite. We asked this year’s winners for the best Office tips.
MS Excel: Conditional Formatting
Excel 2016 Champion John Dumoulin and Excel 2013 Champion Anirud Narayanan recommend conditional formatting, which visualizes data characteristics using fill colors, text colors, and mini-charts. According to Dumoulin, “it can make your data very improved and attractive.
“For example, if you have a table that displays a company’s sales for each month, you can apply conditional formatting to show the highest-selling months in green, the lowest-selling months in red, and the average sales months in yellow. … “
“Instead of using one of the predefined options, click New Rule,” says Narayanan. “If you don’t know which of the options provided suits your needs, creating a new rule will be easier to customize.”
Conditional formatting is found on the Home tab under Styles. Learn more at the Microsoft Office support site .
MS Word: text selection and quick access
Word 2013 champion Forrest Liu has a selection shortcut that, frankly, needs to be system-wide: To select multiple chunks of text, hold down the Ctrl key while highlighting the text you want.
Word 2016 Champion Joshua Garrelts recommends customizing the Quick Access Toolbar in the upper left corner of the app. It includes buttons for checking spelling and emailing the document. “The spell checker is useful to me because I always forget the keyboard shortcut to do a quick spell check.”
MS PowerPoint: built-in fonts and show-no-tell
PowerPoint 2016 champion Deyi Madhani has a few tricks:
- Sometimes you might want to share your deck with someone who doesn’t have all the fonts you use. Click File> Options, go to the Save menu, and select the Embed Fonts In File check box.
- Select multiple items using the selection area in the Arrange drop-down menu. “This is used when many objects are behind each other and it is difficult to select all of them,” says Madhani.
- Create a presentation from an existing document by clicking Home> Slides> Slides From Outline.
PowerPoint 2013 champion Dominic Allen has a stylistic suggestion: “Change slides and try to show information, not tell it. A diagram or picture will say a lot more than another marker. “
Using these techniques, MOS competitors had to copy elaborate documents into the appropriate application in as little as 50 minutes, which was much more difficult than a standard certification test. Not knowing what would happen on this test, competitors had to learn everything they could about the software, ready to use any incomprehensible function. Madhani practiced taking the PowerPoint 2016 certification test over and over again during lunch with her teacher Ms. Rael, and then gave presentations during the summer break.
For the Word test, Garrelts and Liu had to create their own macros via the developer tab. “The competition itself made me a little nervous,” says Liu, “but I was so familiar with Word that it took me only half out of 50 minutes to complete the assignments. At that moment, I really just hoped that I hadn’t made any reckless mistakes. “
These national champions travel to the MOS World Championships in Anaheim, California, which, according to a Certiport commercial, will resemble a Spring Awakening number .