See more "innovation" pictures at office.com/imagesSome things we just can't do without in life: love, friendship, a bathroom door that locks. With Office, the same is true: Some features should not be overlooked. Today I'll list five features that I think should come as second nature to you to use. Friday I'll give you five more.

Today:

  • Bcc box
  • Revision marks
  • AutoCorrect
  • AutoArchive
  • Security

#1: Say it, don't spray it: the Bcc box

Bcc is an abbreviation for blind carbon copy. If you add a recipient's name to this box in an email, a copy of the message is sent to that recipient, and the recipient's name is not visible to other recipients of the message. Consider using the Bcc box when:

  • You want your mailing list to remain private.
  • You want to protect your recipients from getting on a spammer's list. Consider this: If you send a message to 10 people (and you don't put their email addresses in the Bcc box), and each of these 10 people forwards it to 10 other people, and each of these 100 people forwards it to 10 more people, your original 10 email addresses are now available to 10,000 strangers. (This is how a version of that "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" game gets started.) Chances are pretty good that one of those 10,000 recipients is a spammer or even a distributor of a computer worm or virus.

Of course, there are other reasons you may use the Bcc box (like helping to curb an out-of-control conversation that includes people who don't need to be included), but I'll leave you and your sneaky mind to come up with those.

#2: I came, I saw, I wrote: Rev marks

Writers and editors have to work together; it's a law of nature, like gravity or feeling territorial about a parking space. Using revision marks in Word or other Office programs is one way to keep track of all the changes—agreed upon or otherwise—that you, as a writer or a reviewer, can talk about as a document is written. Using Word's built-in reviewing tools, such as comments or tracked changes, is a lot easier than getting out the red pen or using strikethrough formatting (or whatever). Make use of this handy feature; it really facilitates the reviewing process.

#3: I know what I mean: AutoCorrect

This is one handy feature that I use a lot, and I use it in two ways:

  1. I type "Crabby Office Lady" a lot, but since I've created an AutoCorrect entry for it, all I have to type is "COL" and my Office program detects what I really mean and fills in the full phrase for me.
  2. I can also use AutoCorrect to automatically detect and correct typos, misspelled words, grammatical errors, and incorrect capitalization. See, I tend to type fast and quite erroneously. I often type "teh" instead of "the" and "nac" instead of "can." Since I've set up the AutoCorrect to note that, it changes the words back to what they should be. Does this make me lazy? Perhaps. But it saves me time, too.

#4: Help me, I'm drowning: AutoArchive

Your mailbox is growing and growing...and growing. You need a place to store all those items that you can't delete but don't need on a daily basis, and you need a way to do it automatically. AutoArchive in Outlook is the way to handle it. It's on by default and runs automatically at scheduled intervals, clearing out old and expired items from folders. Old items are those that reach the archiving age you specify. Expired items are mail and meeting items whose content is no longer valid after a certain date, such as a meeting you had four months ago that still appears on your calendar. I like to think of it as spring cleaning, but it's easier and can happen more frequently, at any interval you desire.

#5 Get some insurance: Protect your work with Office security features

Security is a big word these days, and you'd be wise to pay attention. There are many aspects to computer security, and being who I am, I'm here to encourage you to make your Office documents as secure as you can. Some of the ways you can do this are to password-protect your documents, presentations, and spreadsheets; lock your shapes in Visio and prevent changes to files; protect your InfoPath form designs.

I'm not going to say that security is a simple, straightforward topic; it isn't. But if you read the information we have out there and follow some of our guidelines, you can rest assured that your Office documents will be a lot more secure—from prying eyes, from spammers, from viruses—than if you just close your eyes and hope for the best.

Some of these you may already know about, but one can always go deeper, learn more, and show off to friends and coworkers. See you Friday.

— Crabby