It's nice to have a new laptop, but it's amazing how many options and settings need to be adjusted. For example, on my other machines I've changed the settings so those annoying Paste Options and AutoFill Options buttons don't appear. Now it's time to fix them on the new laptop. Does anyone actually use those buttons?
I'm also testing the latest version of Camtasia Studio, and it has some settings that I need to adjust too. Here's a video I created while changing the Paste/AutoFill options.
To turn off the buttons in Excel 2007:
- Click the Office Button, then click Excel Options
- Click Advanced, and in the Cut, Copy and Paste section, remove the check marks from 'Show Paste Options buttons' and 'Show Insert Options buttons'.
- Click OK
To turn off the buttons in Excel 2003 and earlier:
- On the Tools menu, click Options
- On the Edit tab, remove the check marks from 'Show Paste Options buttons' and 'Show Insert Options buttons'.
- Click OK
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Hi Debra,
The little "box" is called a smart tag IIRC
"Does anyone actually use those buttons?" I do! I used to think they were silly but I use them all the time, mostly in Word and Outlook, and mostly using the "text only" or "destination formatting" options.
Thanks Jan Karel and Doug. Glad to know that those smart tags are helping someone!
I use them many times a day. Now if I could set the default behavior BEFORE I turned them off I'd do that instead. I hate the way the autofill assumes you want to increment dates and words that happen to end in a number. I'd also love to default the paste in Outlook to paste unformatted text.
If you press the Ctrl key while dragging the fill handle, the dates and numbers won't be incremented.
Or for dates, press the right mouse button when dragging, and then select a fill option from the shortcut menu.
Ctrl+fill handle does not work when you double click the fill-handle. Still need the smart tag. Especially since the smart tag appears just above the status bar when auto filling with the fill handle below the "fold." No scrolling with the fill handle drag option to find the bottom of a tens of thousands long data block. Oh, but I'm still using 2003. Maybe Ctrl+[double click fill handle] works after 2003.....
Good point Dave. I usually use the double-click to fill down, followed by Ctrl+D, to change all the selected cells to the value in the first cell.
Thank you, thank you – I am so tired of this "helpful" garbage in new Office versions. I found Paste Options didn't actually let me paste anything but just interfered with my attempts to copy something and paste it into multiple cells. Yet another in an endless list of "timesaving features" Microsoft somehow vomited up which need to be suppressed, shut off or eliminated in any way possible.