In this topic, we’ll discuss menus, toolbars, tools, and settings that are specific to Word, to Excel, and to PowerPoint.
Word 2008 for Mac provides a specific set of tools designed to simplify the process of creating excellent documents. You can organize information on the page by using tables, tabs, and columns, and add a variety of professional formatting and visual content. On-screen rulers help you lay out information precisely and consistently. To enhance the review and collaboration processes, you can track changes made to a document, insert comments, and compare and merge two documents. You can also use the handy wizards that guide you through the process of creating form letters, envelopes, labels, and letters.
The Word menu bar includes the common menus discussed in "Menus and the Menu Bar" earlier in this chapter, each of which hosts commands tailored for document creation and management. In addition, you can access specialized tools and commands from these three menus:
Font. You can ensure that your document visually supports your intended message by formatting text with any of the more than 100 fonts in this list. Each font name on the menu is shown in that font face (although you can turn this off and view them all as plain text if you prefer). If you know the general characteristics you want in a font, you can quickly find one that represents those characteristics by browsing preselected font collections.
Table. You can organize information (or an entire page) in a clean, structured format by presenting it in a table. You can create a table from scratch or convert existing text to a tabular format, and then manage the appearance of the table content, by using the commands on this menu. Word unfortunately does not support the latest breed of table formats that is available in PowerPoint 2008 for Mac and throughout the 2007 Office system for Windows. It does still support the table formats of previous versions of Word, including simple, classic, colorful, contemporary, and other table formats.
Work. You can add current documents in progress or files you frequently access to the Work menu so that you have immediate access to all of them from one location. If you store documents in different folders on your computer, the Work menu provides a convenient central directory, and you don’t have to navigate through the file storage structure (or even remember where you’ve stored a file) to open the document you want. That being said, it’s very difficult to remove a document from the Work menu when you no longer want to have it there. Dozens of blog posts and articles exist that give instructions for programmatically invoking the removal of items from the Work menu, but you might not want to get caught up in such a complex process.
The Word document–specific commands and tools are also available from an extensive collection of toolbars. This program has 10 specialized toolbars in addition to the Standard and Formatting toolbars discussed in "Toolbars" earlier in this chapter:
Three docking toolbars (Contact, Reviewing, and Tables And Borders) display commands and tools that you might want to access frequently.
Seven floating toolbars (AutoText, Background, Database, Drawing, Forms, Movie, and Speech) display commands that you will need only when working with those program functions.
In addition to the standard Preferences pages described in "Personalize Program Functionality" later in this chapter, the Word Preferences dialog box includes these seven pages on which you can tweak settings specific to Word:
Spelling And Grammar
Print
Track Changes
Audio Notes
User Information
Security
File Locations
In Word and PowerPoint, the AutoCorrect group on the Preferences page also provides access to the AutoFormat As You Type settings. This feature controls the automatic application of certain types of text and paragraph formatting.
In Word only, the AutoCorrect group provides access to the AutoText settings. With this feature, you can enter a word or phrase without typing the entire entry. You store the text you want to enter as AutoText, and select the Show AutoComplete Tip check box.
Take advantage of the AutoText function to simplify the entry of words and phrases you frequently employ.
When you type the beginning of the stored text in a document, the suggested completion appears in a ScreenTip above the insertion point. To enter the stored text, simply press the Return key.
Excel 2008 for Mac incorporates a specific set of tools you can use to track, calculate, and present data. Most of the workbook- and worksheet-specific commands in Excel fit neatly into the structure provided by the common menus discussed in "Menus and the Menu Bar" earlier in this chapter. Excel incorporates only one additional menu, the Data menu, which hosts commands and tools specific to working with numeric data and text stored in an Excel workbook or in an external data source.
Excel-specific commands are grouped on nine floating toolbars (Border Drawing, Chart, External Data, Forms, Formula Auditing, List, Movie, PivotTable, and Reviewing) that appear automatically when relevant information is selected; for example, the PivotTable toolbar appears when you click a cell in a PivotTable.
In addition to the standard Preferences pages described in "Personalize Program Functionality" later in this chapter, the Excel Preferences dialog box includes these seven pages on which you can adjust settings specific to Excel:
Chart. For the chart, you can specify how Excel plots empty and hidden cells. For charts in general, you can choose whether ScreenTips appear when you point to chart names and data markers.
Color. You can modify the set of colors (40 in all) available in the program.
Calculation. You can specify whether calculated fields update automatically as source data changes, and specify the maximum iterations used for goal seeking and for resolving circular references. For the active workbook only, you can choose to have Excel format all values with a specific number of decimal places, the system starting date from which Excel calculates values (the Macintosh and Windows systems vary in this respect), and whether Excel saves values of linked data sources with the worksheet.
Error Checking. You can specify the types of errors Excel flags for review. To avoid irritating false errors, adjust the Error Checking preferences to match the way you work.
Custom Lists. You can create custom data sets for use when filling cells and sorting data.
AutoComplete. You can choose when and for what types of data the AutoComplete list appears, and how it functions.
Security. You can protect a worksheet or workbook from changes by unauthorized people, automatically remove personal information from the file when you save it, and display a warning when opening a file that contains macros.
PowerPoint 2008 for Mac provides a specific set of tools that control the creation of professional presentations from beginning to end and cover a variety of delivery methods, including live presentation, Web presentation, electronic transmission, and print. PowerPoint presentations are intended to deliver information in a more visual than text-based fashion, so this program includes tools centered around creating snazzy graphics, incorporating interactive content, animating slide content, and transitioning effectively between slides—in other words, features that help to attract and keep a viewer’s attention.
PowerPoint incorporates only one menu other than the standard menus described in "Menus and the Menu Bar" earlier in this chapter. The Slide Show menu hosts commands and tools specific to the process of preparing a presentation to be shown as a slide show. Three specialized docking toolbars (Outlining, Reviewing, and Tables And Borders) display commands and tools that you might want to access frequently.
In addition to the standard Preferences pages described in the next topic, "Personalize Program Functionality," the PowerPoint Preferences dialog box includes these two pages on which you can control settings specific to PowerPoint:
Spelling. Although not as extensive as the Spelling And Grammar utility in Word, PowerPoint does offer a basic spell-checking utility.
Advanced. On the Advanced page, you can set the default location in which PowerPoint looks for files, and you can update the limited user information required by PowerPoint.