Have you given up on the April Fools’ Day premise because it’s too hard to come up with something that will baffle people? The information age gives you so many possibilities to embrace the spirit of the day with renewed passion.
If you can distract others from their computers while they’re still online, you can have a fun day out.
First, discover the AutoCorrect Options. In Office 2007, click the Office button, go to the Word Options button at the bottom (or whatever program you’re in followed by options). Choose Proofing on the left and you will see the AutoCorrect Options button. Here you can replace one word with another. Replace “the” with “April Fool” or any word of your choosing. Repeat this for other choice words like your name or company name (in Office 2003 or earlier, click Tools and then AutoCorrect Options to get the same dialog).
The View menu (Tools, Options, View in version 2003) Allows you to change the appearance of things. You can turn gridlines on and off in both Word and Excel, change the background color, and show and hide things like the ruler or row and column headers.
In version 2003 or earlier, you can right-click any toolbar and choose Customize. From there you can right click on any button like or save and choose to change the button image. You can also right click again to rename the new icon to “April Fool”.
PowerPoint allows you to edit all the slides in a presentation by going to the View menu and selecting “Slide Master.” Change the font to a symbol font or another language. You can also add a footer here that appears on all slides, “April Fool” might be a good option. You can also select all slides (Control A) from Slide Sorter view (where all slides are in the window at once). ) and go to the Animations tab. Click “Advance slide… automatically after [a specified number of] Seconds. “This will automate the presentation even when they try to control it with the mouse.
A quick and easy trick in Excel is to hide all sheet tabs in a workbook. To do this, just grab the vertical bar to the right of the sheet tabs and drag it to the left as far as it will go. Worksheets will not be displayed; there will only be one long scroll bar. You can even go to the Window menu and hide an entire workbook. While on the Window menu, click in the middle of the worksheet and then click Freeze Panes. Now the rows above where you clicked will not move; they will only be able to scroll below the frozen row.
Another fun Excel trick is to activate the Speak on Enter function. From the Office Button, choose Excel Options, Customize; in the dropdown menu at the top, choose All Commands. Scroll down until you find Speak On Enter and click Add to put it on the Quick Access Toolbar. Click the New button once, and every time you press Enter from a cell, Excel will happily talk. This is accessed in Office 2003 through Tools, Speech. Nonsense aside, the Speech in Excel feature is handy for proofreading, and it’s a good idea to customize your toolbar to suit your personal work style.
Enjoy these quick and easy pranks, but use discretion. Oh, and keep track of what you’ve done: you’ll have to reverse steps to undo; there is a fine line between foolishness and frustration.
Access a longer article with step-by-step instructions, trickier pranks, detailed undo explanations, and a complete printable cheat sheet of valuable and useful Office shortcuts on the New Voice Training website.