M$ Office
I’m a bit of an Office junkie, I think. It often seems that my life revolves around Outlook, Excel, Word and PowerPoint. So here are a few of the things that I’ve picked up over the years.
Version: Office comes in several flavors. If you’re looking to save a couple of bucks, get the Student-Teacher Edition. You won’t get Access and you won’t be able to upgrade to 2007 when it hits the shelves in a month or so, but you can install it on multiple computers and the licensing terms are so easy that I think you only need to know someone who’s a student or teacher, not actually be one.
Installing: don’t be a wuss. Install EVERYTHING. In today’s computing environment, a couple of hundred extra megs of hard drive space should not be an issue. If they are, you’ve got bigger problems and Office is the least of them. And whatever you do, DO NOT let Office delete the installation files. Otherwise you’ll be hunting for your CD every time that Microsoft releases a patch (about once or twice per month). Anyway, there is nothing more frustrating than selecting a menu option only to be asked for the installation CD because it’s one of those “install on first use” things. Screw it — take the custom install and put everything on your hard drive. There may be a ton of features that you never even touch, but at least they’ll be there if you ever decide to use them.
Customize: Office customizations are stored as part of your user profile, so they are unique to you and not to everyone who uses the computer. Take advantage of them. Take the time to set your defaults the way that YOU want them. I promise that you’ll be saving time in the long run. After you have things working the way you want, don’t forget to backup your settings. Click Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft Office -> Microsoft Office Tools -> Save My Settings Wizard. You’ll be prompted to create a backup of all of your preferences and defaults. Put a copy somewhere on your system where you can find it, email a copy to yourself and stash it in one of your online folders, send a copy to your best friend… It doesn’t matter where you stash it as long as it’s someplace where you can find it again easily. If you ever have to reinstall Office, you can run the wizard to restore those settings and save yourself a few hours of reconfiguring.
Keyboard Shortcuts in Word: I’m a keyboarder. I admit it and revel in it. Mice can certainly make life easier, but when you grow up with typewriters instead of computers, mice usually just get in the way. For a complete list of keyboard shortcuts in Word (and there are simply too many to list here), press F1 (Help) and type “keyboard shortcuts” in the “Search For” box.
Normal.dot: This is a definite love-hate relationship. I like for documents to start with default formatting different from Microsoft’s (I really did think that Times New Roman was a cool font at one time - mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa). Anyway, I can’t count the times that I’ve made some sort of a change in a document and then been prompted to save changes to Normal.dot when I try to close the file. My initial solution was to create a template file called junk.dot and then overwrite that one when prompted to save changes. Now I’ve decided on a simpler method - make a backup of Normal.dot when I have all of my defaults set the way I want them and simply copy it back when the original gets hozed by something or other. Normal.dot is stored in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates. If it ever gets hozed (in addition to PEBMAC errors [Problem Exists Between Monitor And Chair] there are a few viruses that like to modify this file). You can always delete it and Word will recreate it the next time you launch. But it will come back with Microsoft’s defaults, not yours.
Line breaks in pasted text: God, how I hate this one and it’s especially annoying when you’re copying some text from a .pdf file. When you paste, it comes in with a ton of hard returns, and they’re always in the most inconvenient places. To get rid of them, use the Find/Replace options on the “Edit” menu. A hard return (Enter) is a ^p (that’s a caret [Shift+6] and a lower-case P) and a line-break (Shift+Enter) is ^l (that’s a caret and a lower-case L). If you turn on the “Show Formatting” button on the toolbar, a hard return looks like a paragraph mark and a line-break looks like the bent arrow on your Enter key. Put one of those in the “Find” box, put a space in the “Replace With” box and click “Replace All”. Be careful, though, that you’re only replacing in the text area you just pasted. Otherwise you’ll destroy all of the spacing and formatting in your document (which are stored in those little paragraph marks, by the way).
Excel Keyboard Shortcuts: For a complete list of keyboard shortcuts in Excel, press F1 (Help) and type “keyboard shortcuts” in the “Search For” box.
Absolute vs. Relative Cell References: Most people have to learn this the hard way, but I’ll try to make your life easier. When you copy a forumla that uses cell references, Excel does not copy the result of that formula, but the formula itself. So if you have a formula in cell A5 that says =SUM(A1:A4), you think it means “Add A1 through A4″. Excel thinks it means “Add the four cells directly above this one”. So when you copy that formula to cell C5, you get the sum of cells C1 through C4.. To get the results you want, you have to change the formula so that it uses absolute cell references and you do this by adding dollar-signs ($) to the cell references. If you really want A5 to equal the sum of cells A1 through A4, the formula should read =SUM($A$1:$A$4). Now, no matter where you copy it, the formula will always equal the sum of those cells.
Apostrophes in Excel: Microsoft, in its infinite desire to be loved and appreciated, tries so hard to be helpful, even to the point of assuming that you are the most clueless doofus to ever come down the pike. Any series of three two-digit numbers separated by hyphens or forward slashes are automatically changed to dates. So 09-28-15 (which might be your lucky lotto numbers or a product number) becomes Sep. 28, 1915. And it also assumes that any leading zeroes really don’t need to be there (you’re a doofus, remember?). The solution (which you shouldn’t have to implement, but we’re all doofuses in Microsoft’s eyes) is to put an apostrophe as the first character in the cell. This tells Excel that anything following should be treated as text, not as numbers. Some fractions (5/16, for example) will convert to dates no matter what you do, so the best solution I’ve found is to simply tell Excel that the cell will contain a fraction BEFORE you put anything in the cell. And let us all hope and pray that Microsoft will either change its attitude or that its customers will stop allowing themselves to be patronized.
But I Wanted to Go THAT Way: When you press Enter in Excel, it drops you down one cell in the same column. If you’d like to have it move in a different direction, click Tools -> Options -> Edit and change the selection in the drop-down box next to Move selection after Enter. If you’d rather just stay where you are, simply uncheck the box or get used to pressing CTRL+Enter. Also, be aware that Shift+Enter DOES NOT insert a line-break in the text of a cell. Instead, it moves you in the opposite direction of where you go when you press Enter, just like Shift+Tab moves you one column to the left while Tab moves you one column to the right. If you need to put a line-break in a cell, use ALT+Enter.
How Many Worksheets?: Excel’s default is three blank worksheets when you open a new file. If you’d like more or less, click Tools -> Options -> General and set the number of sheets you’d like.
Keboard Shortcuts in PowerPoint: For a complete list of keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint, press F1 (Help) and type “keyboard shortcuts” in the “Search For” box.
Objects, Objects Everywhere: The biggest problem encountered by people who are new to PowerPoint has more to do with their way of thinking than with the program itself. Just remember: EVERYTHING is an Object. Text boxes? They’re just one kind of object. Backgrounds are another kind of object. Pictures are another. If you can get your head around the fact that everything is an object and that all objects can be manipulated, using PowerPoint is going to be about as difficult as brushing your teeth.
Selecting Objects: One of the hardest things to do is to select very tiny objects and move them around. That’s because most people want to use the mouse to click on the object. Resist the urge. Press ESC to make sure that you don’t have anything selected and then use Tab (repeatedly) until the object that you want is selected. Now you can use your arrow keys to move the object until it’s in a position where you can grab it with the mouse or until it’s in the general area where you need it to be. Once it’s there, you can nudge it into position using CTRL and your arrow keys.
Moving Objects: Whether using your mouse or using the arrow keys to move an object, it always wants to move by specific increments (about 0.08 inches at a time). To move it more precisely, hold down the ALT key while dragging. By the same token, ALT+F9 will toggle the guidelines on and off and you can move those 0.01 inches at a time by holding ALT while you move them.
Feel Free To Mess Things Up: Everyone probably knows that CTRL+Z lets you undo your last action in almost every application. PowerPoint’s default is to let you undo your last 20 actions (or back to when you opened the file, whichever comes first). But if you really want to screw things up (just to see “what if” - I know you’d never do it maliciously and for keepsies) you can raise the number of undos as high as 150. Click Tools -> Options -> Edit and set the number anywhere from 3 to 150. Be advised, however, that the higher the number of changes you want to be able to undo and the higher the number of changes you want to track, the more memory PowerPoint is going to eat up. If you’re running on a budget system with minimal RAM, you’d probably be better off staying near the default and using “Save As…” as a cheap versioning tool instead.