Make Office Better Top tips for MS Office & LibreOffice
Issue 630 • 27 April – 10 May 2022 4747LIBREOFFICE WRITER &
MICROSOFT WORD
Overline text in documents
One thing Writer
makes it easier to
do than Word is
‘overline’ text, which can be a
stylish way of marking chapter
headings or points of interest.
Open a document in Writer,
highlight the text and click Format
at the top, then click Text followed
by Overline (^1 in our screenshot
below). You’ll see a horizontal line
appear along the top of the text^2.
There are several ways of doing this in
Word, all of them a little trickier – though
you can add colour and make them as
long as you like. The simplest method is
to click Insert, Shapes, then click the
diagonal line in the Lines section. You can
then draw the line, making it as long as
you like, and changing its colour in the
Shape Styles section at the top.
ONLYOFFICE
Protect your spreadsheets
with a password
OnlyOffice makes its debut on
this page with the password-
protection option for spreadsheets,
added to version 7.0 released in January.
When you’ve finished a spreadsheet
that’s intended for your eyes only, click
the Protection tab at the top (^1 in our
screenshot above), then click the Encrypticon^2 and type your password^3. Click
OK to save it. Make sure it’s a memorable
password because you won’t be able to
recover it should you forget it.
To password-protect an Excel
spreadsheet, click File at the top left,
then Info (again at the top left). Now
click Protect Workbook in the centre,
followed by ‘Encrypt with Password’,
then type your password. As with
OnlyOffice, you can’t recover your
password, so choose it carefully.MICROSOFT EXCEL
Alphabetise a row of text
It takes only a few clicks to
alphabetise a column in a
spreadsheet: just click the
column’s header, then Data at the top,
and select A to Z. Alphabetising text across
a row, however, requires an extra step.
Select the text, then click Data followed
by Sort. In the box that appears click
Options, then ‘Sort left to right’ (^1 in our
screenshot below) and click OK.
Back in the Sort box click the ‘Sort by’
dropdown menu and select the row you
want to alphabetise^2. Finally, click the
Order dropdown menu on the right,
select ‘A to Z’, then click OK.Centre your text in tables
It’s easy to reposition words so they’re centred
horizontally in each box in a Word table. Simply
select the text – by pressing Ctrl+A or dragging
your cursor over it – then click the Home tab and click
the Center option in the Paragraph section at the top.
The text will move left or right to the middle.
It’s a little harder to centre text so it’s exactly in the
middle of each box – ie, centred horizontally and
vertically. We recommend selecting the text by dragging
to make the Table Tools section appear at the top (^1 in our
screenshot) – it will disappear if you click outside the
table. Now, click Layout^2 in this section, then the Align
Center option^3 in the Alignment section, and your
selected text will move to the centre of each box^4.MICROSOFT WORD3
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