dialog box

When you have a picture selected, you can use buttons on the Picture toolbar to change it from color to black and white and adjust the contrast and brightness. Click the Image Control button and choose Grayscale, Black ... (view more)

When you've inserted a picture in MS Word, the first thing you notice is where it's located and how large it is. You can modify the picture to fit your needs. Some of the ways you can change a picture include those outlined below: Size the picture ... (larger or smaller). Crop, or trim off, one or more edges. Change it to black and white or grayscale (shades of gray) instead of color. Increase or reduce contrast and brightness, just like a television screen. The first step in modifying is to click the picture to select it. When you do this, sizing handles appear at each corner and edge of the ... (view more)

While you are building an Excel worksheet, it is held in a temporary memory within your computer (called "RAM", or random access memory). Unlike human memory, the computer won't remember anything unless you save your work. If you turn off the ... computer or if the power goes out, all your work disappears. To store your work permanently, you must save it on a disk. The First Time You Save You can save a spreadsheet by using any of these methods: Choose File | Save. Click the Save button on the toolbar. Use the shortcut key Ctrl+S. The first time you save, the Save As dialog box appears ... (view more)

Sometimes you may want MS Word to place a tab character in your footnotes -- for example: between the actual footnote reference number and the text of the footnote. Unfortunately, Word doesn't allow you to do this automatically. In fact, Word ... doesn't even allow you to specify what character should appear between the footnote reference number and the footnote text, as you can with numbered lists. Instead, Word places a space between the footnote reference and you text. There are a number of ways you can go about making sure that the footnote includes a tab separator. Please note though that ... (view more)

In your documents, sometimes you have to include symbols other than the standard letters, numbers and characters that appear on the keyboard. MS Word has many interesting symbols for you to use: everyday items such as the degree symbol (98.6°),  ...Greek letters (ΦΒΚ or ψ), letters needed in foreign words (such as résumé or Senõr), and even cute little pictures (such as  and §). You must use these symbols when they're needed in the text, but the pictures, sometimes called "dingbats," can be used for decoration. To begin, click to the insertion point where you ...view more)

When you are creating small worksheets, you don't think about changing the direction of the page, but some worksheets and charts require the page to be wider than it is tall. Similar to landscape paintings that typically are wider than they are ... tall, landscape page orientation enables you to fit wider items on the page. A page that is taller than it is wide has what is called portrait orientation, like portraits of people. Scaling lets you specify a certain percent to reduce or enlarge your worksheet. The Fit to Page feature allows you to force the worksheet to print on a specific number of ... (view more)

In Print Preview, you might notice that a single column of your worksheet flows onto a second page. Although you can scrunch it in by reducing the scaling percent or by turning the orientation to landscape, sometimes all you have to do is adjust the ... margins (I.E.: the distance between the edge of the paper and the printed information). On the other hand: in Print Preview Mode, you might notice that a small worksheet looks awkward in the top-left corner of the page because the rest of the page is empty. You can center the small worksheet to the page without having to adjust the margins. You ... (view more)

Although it's very easy to apply the previous font formats by clicking items on the Formatting toolbar in MS Word, many other options are available in the Font dialog box. Here you can change characters to superscript, subscript, outline, or ... embosses, choose from a variety of underlining styles, et cetera. Other tabs of the dialog box allow you to control the spacing of letters -- either squeezed together or stretched out -- as well as to add special effects such as a sparkle. These formatting options are used much less often, so they don't need to be placed on the toolbar. Nevertheless, you ... (view more)

As documents grow longer and extend past one page, MS Word automatically calculates how much room is available and starts a new page when needed (keeping widows, orphans, and other text flow options in mind). MS Word also allows you to specify where ... to begin a new page by inserting a hard page break where you want one. Sometimes you only need a short page, such as a cover page, or perhaps you want to start a new part of the text on a new page. You wouldn't want to have to press Enter repeatedly, just to force Word to insert a page break. Instead, you want to control where page breaks occur. ... (view more)

The blank area around the edges of a page is the margin, and you can control how much or how little space you leave there. Of course, you can't run the text all the way from edge to edge on the page, although it would certainly save paper. Imagine ... reading a novel with no margin: even if it cost less, it wouldn't be worth the eye strain. Setting generous margins is a great way to make a document easy on the eyes when reading. Typical business letters allow for at least an inch on all sides, and newsletters require as little as 0.25 inch because they divide the page into smaller elements. In ... (view more)