Some Office 2013 Annoyances – How To Get Rid Of Them ?

Whenever changes occur in Microsoft Office suite, there is always some rumbling about it. Office 2013 which was released in January, had significant improvements than its older versions of 2010 and 2007. Some Office 2013 changes are however annoying like starting, opening and saving documents in Word 2013, all CAPS look for menus, licensing annoyances etc.

Related : Office 2010 SP2 Update – A Typical Solution for Error Code KB2687455

In this article, we are going to see how to soften these pesky challenges and make our Windows life more beautiful.

Office 2013 Licensing Annoyances

If you are a PC owner like me, the Office 2013 licensing is not much to be adored.

The MS Office 2013 “Full Packaged Product” can only be installed on one computer or device.  No ifs, ands, or buts.  You can sell your computer but the license will go with it.

If your computer dies, the official LEGAL policy is that your Office 2013 license also dies.  You can throw yourself on the mercy of the Product Support center, who say they will take it on a case by case basis.

The only chance of recuperating from this kind of annoyance is wait for Microsoft to re-evaluate their licensing structure. Basically this kind of licensing formula is enforced by Microsoft in order to push it’s customers to the subscription-based model.

So as a solution to the above problem, you can shift to Office 365 Home Premium which costs $99.99 per year or $9.99 per month. The relief in this plan is that you can use this Office Suite for 5 PCs or Macs  and select mobile devices.

How To Remove ALL-CAPS Look in Office 2013?

The new Office comes with all it’s tab (or menus) interface in ALL-CAPS labels. Probably, Microsoft wanted to make their Office 2013 more touch and tablet friendly! But in that case, shouldn’t they have applied the same strategy to File Explorer in Windows 8, IE 10 or the new Paint ?

The solution to the above problem is simple.

• Right-Click any tab name like “INSERT” and choose Customize the Ribbon…

• Then Excel-Options window will pop-up. In that window, on the left hand side, Customize Ribbon is already selected. If not, you need to select that option. Then on the right hand side, you need to select the Label (or Tab) you want to change.

• Then right-click and select “Rename“. A small text-box will pop-up with the label or tab name. Enter the text to which you want to rename the tab and click on OK. That’s it. Your Tab name is changed.

Note : However for eg. if you try to change “HOME” to “Home”, Office 2013 will revert back to CAPS. To avoid re-capping to the old interface, you need to type the text-value with a space or an underline or some other character. You can use for eg. ”   Home” or “_Home” or “$Home” etc. This will make the changes permanent.

The final look will be somewhat like this depending upon your changes …

The Annoying Office 2013 Start Screen, Open and Save Dialogs!

Whenever you launch Office 2013 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote etc a Start Screen appears. Also, whenever you try to open and save a file, a re-designed full-screen dialog appears. To bypass both these problems, here is a solution using settings and keyboard shortcuts.

When you launch Word 2013 for the first time with default settings, the opening Start Screen will look like this.

Then, you need to click on “Blank document“ , to start a new simple document. But if you want to skip this Start Screen and directly open a blank document, you need to un-check the follow setting.

• Go To File > Options  in any of the Office 2013 app.
• In the General pop-window that opens, un-tick or deselect the option that says “Show the Start screen when this application starts” that is generally end of the screen. You can have a screenshot look at this option in Word 2013.

The next time you open a blank document, it will open directly, instead of the Start Screen and will save a few clicks. It’s a program by program setting, so if you want to this to happen for Excel, OneNote, Publisher, PowerPoint etc, you need to change for each program individually.

Earlier in Office 2010, by typing Ctrl+O, you could easily open a File Open dialog in the current directory. Similarly, Ctrl+S was used to save a newly created file. But with the latest 2013 version, these keyboard shortcuts work the same fashion, but you will land on a pop-up screen and need some extra mouse clicks or key-strokes, to actually get to the dialog showing the current directory.

The solution to this problem is to use the keyboard shortcut F12. By pressing F12, it will open the “Save As” dialog using the current directory instead of the annoying splash screen. Similarly, pressing Ctrl + F12 will produce the same results to open a file.

Conclusion :

As you can understand from the above discussion, Office 2013 is not without hiccups. The only alternate path is to find workarounds, that can remove these annoyances and make your “Office life” more smooth. By implementing the above solutions, you will come more closer to liking the product as I’ve experienced.

If you still find better suggestions or solutions to the above type of annoyances in Office 2013, please represent them in the disqus comments below! I’m always ready to help my readers in my free time in their problems and grievances!