These simple features in Excel will smarten up your spreadsheets in no time.

If you use Excel just to keep simple spreadsheets. you might as well be using a ledger and a quill pen. Well, okay, the ledger won't calculate totals for you. But really, there are tons of valuable tools just below the surface that will help you with a wide variety of tasks. Here are eight of our favorites.

We ran printers until they said it was time to change the cartridge, and found that some left more than 40 percent of their ink unused.

You've probably had this experience: Your printer tells you it's time to change the cartridge, but you dismiss the message and keep printing. Days or weeks later, the cartridge still works, and you're thinking that rumors of its death were greatly exaggerated.

Or perhaps your printer simply shuts down when it decides you've gone deep enough into its ink well, refusing to operate until you replace the cartridge.

Save time and energy by using these easy features in your Word documents.

Microsoft Word is full of tools that can help you work faster and smarter—but only if you know about them. Here's a list to remind you of just what Word can do for you. You're probably familiar with some of these. And your neighbor probably knows a few, too, but not the same few. Time to learn something new!

A variety of options let you use your Outlook2007 data—messages, calendar items, contacts, tasks, and soon—in multiple locations. These include synchronization tools such as TrueSync, which is available on your Yahoo! account. But Outlook itself will do the trick, demanding only a little ingenuity to make it happen. Here's how you can make Outlook receive your POP mail on several different machines, and keep all your records—sent mail, mail sub-folders, everything—current on multiple machines.