Do you use commands in Word that are usually buried inside a menu inside a menu inside a menu? I’m going to show you how to add these onto your Quick Access Toolbar, so you can get at them using a shortcut in just one click. And scroll to the bottom for a very quick way to do this …

The example I’m going to use is AutoCorrect Options. I have posted about how to find and work with AutoCorrect, but it is buried within some nested menus, which means you have to click and click and click whenever you want to add a new entry, wasting time to do something in order to save time. Now, I can access the menu I want with just one click!

So, first of all we need to go up to the Quick Access Toolbar, right at the top of your screen in Word 2007 and Word 2010 (in Word 2003, right click on the main toolbar and customise it). Note the down arrow to the right of your standard buttons, and click it:

You will notice an option to choose More Commands – this is how you add more buttons to the Quick Access Toolbar. Click on that, and you’ll get a screen which allows you to customize the Quick Access Toolbar:

Note at this point that you can access this menu via Word Options – Customize, too, if you want to.

We can now see a whole load of Popular Buttons you can add on to the Quick Access Toolbar – so you can pop them on there to get at them whenever you want to. These are a few buttons that appear at the top level when you click on any of the tabs on your main ribbon.

We’re going deeper, though, into buttons and commands which don’t appear on the top level of your tab menus. So click on the arrow next to Popular Commands and you’ll get a list of options:

You can choose All Commands, which will give you every command and button (with a hover-over tip to which menu they belong to so you can choose, for example, Spell Check from the Review tab rather than the Blog version, which won’t do much for you in a standard Word document. In this case, to add our deeply buried button, we want to choose Commands not on the Ribbon.

Now you have a list of every command and button that exists in Word. How handy that AutoCorrect begins with an A! Look for your button and highlight it, then click on Add >> to add it to the list on the right – which is the list of buttons that appear on your Quick Access Toolbar. At this point you can even choose when these buttons will appear, but I always leave it on All documents. When you’ve pressed Add, there it is, on the list:

Click on OK and it will magically appear on your Quick Access Toolbar:

Want to check it’s true? Click on the little icon, and there’s our familiar AutoCorrect menu.

What a time saver! I’ve added all my very commonly used buttons from different menus onto my Quick Access Toolbar, from Bold to Spellcheck and all sorts of other things in between …

Adding items quickly to the QAT

Edit to add: If you have the button you want to add to the QAT in front of you, simply right click on that button and you will get the option to add it to the quick access toolbar!

Magic! And it works however deeply buried the button is in your lists of commands – for example, you can choose something that appears in a menu within a menu:

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

This is not my current desk

Having inadvertently given my friends and family the impression I work all day and every day, I started to think about whether the cult of “Presenteeism” is as strong in the self-employed community as it is among employees. Surely it shouldn’t be … and if it is, what can we do about it?

What is presenteeism?

We’ve all heard of absenteeism, or the practice of regularly removing oneself from the working environment for no good reason. Presenteeism is the opposite. It’s in the Oxford Concise Dictionary, and here’s how they define it:

The practice of being present at work for longer than required, especially as a manifestation of insecurity about one’s job,

This manifests itself in that classic competition over who can stay latest in the office (or, more importantly, who can be seen to be staying latest in the office. Or being in earliest. Or both. We’ve all sent an email to the boss when we’ve got in particularly early, haven’t we?

Now, that’s all well and good when you have a boss to impress. But what if you work on your own?  And I’m admitting doing this myself, here – although inadvertently. It’s easy to send that Tweet or Facebook status at the end of a long day …

Phew – done 10 hours at the desk today – big project!!!!

but is it so easy to say

Good day, did a couple of hours of work, all caught up so I lay around reading for a few hours

Well, is it?

Why do we have to engage in presenteeism?

I’d be interested to work out why we do this. Are we so busy trying to combat that insidious view of freelancers as people who sit around in their pyjamas watching daytime telly? Surely our friends and family know we don’t do that by now?

If you work in an office, you will tend to have set start and finish times, a proper lunch break, and weekends off (or a set working pattern) and holidays. How many freelancers take the full holiday entitlement they would be given as an employee? I know I probably don’t.

So when it’s quiet, we’re up to date and we skip off merrily to the cafe, or the gym, or just lounge in the garden for an hour or so, is that really a crime?

And isn’t it better for our friends and family to know we’re happy. whole, balanced and relaxed than working every hour there is on a hideous treadmill of work? Didn’t at least some of us go freelance  to avoid that hideous treadmill of work?

Celebrate balance, not overwork

I’m not suggesting we stop working when we need to be working. Everyone has to pull one of those 11 hour shifts sometimes. But let’s all be honest about how we live, celebrate the downtime as well as the busy times, and acknowledge that, yes, we do do this in order to have balance and flexibility in our lives, and we do have work patterns which are different, but balanced over the grand scheme of things.

I’m going to talk about this in public – I dare you to too!

Inspiration for this post came from one I published on my other blog about what I do all day. I have tried, since publishing that, to note when I have some time off …

Many people I know who are self-employed or run small businesses submit their tax returns – and find out what they owe – AND pay what they owe – at the end of January each year.

I have just done mine this morning. Not to be smug, I promise, although I am feeling a little smug about it right now, but because a) I have all the information ready, and b) I want to know what I owe the taxman, especially as this is the year I will have to start paying my tax on account (AKA “The double tax year”). You can read all about that in my guest post with Emily Coltman.

And, I am pleased to say, I had a nice surprise. I went a bit wrong and wildly overestimated when I worked out what I thought I was going to owe. But even if it had been a nasty surprise, I’d still rather know what was going on and what I owed: wouldn’t you?

What did I do wrong when working out my tax?

I really thought that, given the Payment on Account thing, I was going to give back around 65% of my income from Libro. This was based on the following fallacies:

1. I thought I’d earned my personal allowance at my library job and that was that – actually I overpaid tax on that job, and I thought it would be refunded to me personally, whereas actually it just (sensibly)   came off the total tax amount I owed
2. You know when you are employed and the general rule is that if you knock 25% off your gross pay you’ll pretty well come up with what you’ll end up with after tax? Well I was working on that assumption, forgetting that includes National Insurance payments that I don’t pay now (don’t worry: I do pay others!)
3. I thought that NIC 4 National Insurance payments, which I have to pay now I’m earning a certain amount, a) were 12% and b) applied to my full profit. Actually they are a) 9% and b) apply to all profit over a certain threshold

Basically, I have ended up needing to give the tax man about 49% of my Libro income, rather than 65%. Which is quite a difference.

Why do my tax return in April?

So I can put aside my tax and know I’ve got it there when I need to pay it. As I said, the main reason is that I want to know what I owe and make sure I put it aside. I’m not going to PAY it until it’s due (in January 2012 and July 2013), but it’s put safely aside, as of this morning, in an account that pays interest.

To release funds to live on. I could also do with some more money to live on for the year. Now I know what the tax bill is, I can happily withdraw the rest of the money in my Libro account to my personal account (NOTE: this is because I’m a Sole Trader: it’s a bit different if you’re a Limited Company), and I now know what I’ve got to live on until next April. Sure, I could take money out as I go along, and lots of people do that, but personally I like to know exactly what I can take – especially in this slightly confusing double tax year.

Because I could. I’m lucky in that I have a simple business model and I do my accounts as I go along, and I’m not VAT registered. So I could finalise my end of year accounts quite easily, and just had to wait for my statements of interest from my banks to come through (you have to state all interest earned from bank accounts on your tax return, even though they are already taxed. The HMRC takes this into account when it tots it all up). Other years, I’ve had to wait for my P60 to come from the library, but this time I had a nice P45 from December and copied the numbers from that. Next year, I won’t even have to worry about that!

How the Payment on Account has worked out

I was really pleased and relieved to have a screen come up at the end of submitting the figures, which states very clearly:

• my tax burden for 2011-12 and how much I have to pay by 31 Jan 2013
• the half of my Payment On Account amount for 2012-13 that is also due by 31 Jan 2013
• the half of my Payment On Account amount for 2012-13 that is due by 31 Jul 2013

It’s all very clearly set out, which was something I was wondering about.

So that’s it: done. Minimal fuss.

My suggestions for you

If you run your own business (and surely you won’t have read this far if you don’t??!!), I strongly suggest you …

1. Register to complete your self-assessment online if you haven’t done so already
2. Finalise your 2011-2012 accounts
3. Order your Statements of Interest from your banks (some will print these off, some need to send one for each account through the post) and get together any other documentation you need
4. When you’ve received your letter confirming your online registration, complete your self assessment online
5. Set aside the amount of tax you now know you will need to pay
6. Relax, knowing what you’ve earned and what you owe
7. Avoid the frenzy in January 2013 because YOU’VE ALREADY DONE IT!

Note: I am not your tax advisor. I am not an accountant. This information is for personal illustrative purposes only. Please consult an accountant or tax advisor or the HMRC if you have any questions, worries, queries or complications. I am not responsible for anything you do with your tax return or tax affairs.