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3 file extension tips every Microsoft Office user should know

Microsoft Office has long been the go-to program for office productivity, and there are plenty of popular tips to help you get the most out of MS Office 60 Essential Microsoft Office Keyboard Shortcuts for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 60 Microsoft Keyboard Shortcuts Office essentials for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Hundreds of keyboard shortcuts are available in Office, but these are the most important ones to know because they will save you a lot of time. Read more . As you soak them up, don't forget these three basic tips:

1. Open presentations as slideshows with PPS: PPS stands for PowerPoint Show and saving a presentation in this format allows you to open it as a slideshow directly by double-clicking the file. This works for .PPSX files as well.

You can switch between the PPS and PPT versions at any time by changing the file extension from .PPS to .PPT (or vice versa).

2. Compress Excel documents with XLSB: Saving a spreadsheet as XLSB, ie as an Excel Binary workbook reduces its size dramatically (by 50-75%).

This macro-enabled binary format also reduces file save and load times. It has some drawbacks, such as lack of compatibility with certain older versions of MS Office and third-party office suites.

For security reasons, we do not recommend opening binary files from unknown sources.

3. Increase the compatibility of Office files: Are you sharing an Office document with someone, but you're not sure if your version of Office supports Open XML files like DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, etc? Send them the file in the old (2007) default format (XLS, DOC, PPT) for maximum compatibility.

Do you have any lesser-known file extension tips to share with Microsoft Office users here at MakeUseOf? Feel free to do that in the comments!