For reasons known only to themselves and perhaps Loki, Microsoft doesn’t easily give up the secret for tabbing within a cell in a Word table. If you hit tab, you move to the next cell. The solution is easy though, and surprisingly, consistent between Mac and Windows: hold the Control key and tab.
Now that I know to use the Windows key to lock my screen, I thought I should poke around and see what else it can do. The answer turns out to be “lots!”
Win – all by itself – brings up the “Start” menu.
My favorite: Win + P pops up a Projection window that makes it at least a little clearer what you’re choosing…you know the drill…hmmm, is it fn +F7 to see it on both computer and screen, or is it just F7 or is it fn +F8…I can never remember. This at least provides a little visual guidance, and “Win +P” is a little more in keeping with Mac philosophy of making something memorable about the letter choice. I can – probably – remember that “project” starts with “P.” I hope. Here’s how it looks:
Win + F opens Windows search (“Find”)
And of course we remember that Win+D displays the Desktop
Those are the ones that interest me. Some that may interest you:
Win + R is Run dialog box (I swear I don’t even know what this means)
Win + M is Minimize all
SHIFT + Win+M will undo minimize all
Win + TAB: Cycle through taskbar buttons
Win+F1 takes you to Help. They jumped the tracks here. Why not ” Win + H”?
Win + E takes you to that useless spot with the confusing name: Windows Explorer
CTRL + Win + TAB: Moves focus from Start, to the Quick Launch toolbar, to the system tray (at this point, I’m not even listening anymore)
Win + Break: System Properties dialog box
If you really want to get serious, Wikipedia has an exhaustive list here.
I don’t have time to save that much time.
Someone asked how to hide certain data in a Word table. Unfortunately, a Word table isn’t like Excel; you can’t choose “hide column” and be done with it. There are some workarounds, however.
1) Create your data in Excel and import it into your Word doc one of two ways:
A) Choose “Insert,” then choose “Object.” When the window comes up, scroll down to “Microsoft Excel Worksheet.” Click “OK.” This will open Excel. Anything that you do in Excel will show up in the Word doc, hidden columns and rows and all.
B) Create the worksheet in Excel, save it, the follow the steps above, but choose “From file” and choose your file. This will embed your worksheet in your Word document. When you want to hide columns or rows, double clicking will take you into Excel to make the changes, which will be reflected in the Word doc.
Don’t want to use Excel? There are other options:
2) You can format text as hidden. If you choose to hide the text in a column, the column will remain, but will be blank. If you do it on a row, the row will actually be hidden. How to do this:
Select the column or row. Select “Format” then “Text” (or the appropriate panes in 2007 or later). In the window that comes up you’ll see several checkboxes. The last one is “hidden.” Check it and click “OK.”
Keep in mind that unless you protect your document, there’s nothing to stop the person at the other end from unhiding that text, but the same is true of the Excel document.
3) You can make your font white (or whatever the background color is) and protect the document.
4) You can buy a redaction plug-in or use the highlighter tool set to black and pretend you’re a censor.
It’s very frustrating for those of us who use dual monitors to try to compare, copy and paste between two PowerPoint documents in Windows. Word, Visio and some other programs allow you to open two copies of the program at once so you can display one on each monitor, but PowerPoint has a “parent” function that sends you to your room when you try. Here’s a workaround:
Put PowerPoint on your left-hand monitor (optional, but easier).
Under “Window” in the tool bar, or the “View” pane in other versions, choose “Arrange All.” You’ll see your presentations side by side, like this:
Now grab the sizing control 
in the bottom right corner of your main PowerPoint Window – the “parent” window – and stretch the window across both monitors. Now just move to right-hand deck to the right-hand monitor and you can edit between the two easily.
Or, of course, you could just buy a Mac.
How to view Excel on dual monitors
We may as well suck it up and talk about Visio common problems. I don’t want to think about it either, but it has to be done. Get your rubber gloves and mask on and let’s get started.
First up: you select a Walt Worthy, Vice President of Well-Being and use your arrow key to nudge him across the page. That’s what this function is called, by the way – “nudge.” Spelled like what people call you, but that’s pronounced “noodge.”
Instead a frolicking swiftly and neatly across the page, Walt stays put and whole page moves. Huh?
It turns out to be quite simple: your scroll lock is on. You shouldn’t have rested your hand on it while you were doing your nails. If you’re like me, you never use scroll lock and don’t even know where it is. I can’t tell you exactly; it varies from keyboard to keyboard. Look for it somewhere that’s easy to hit while you’re manhandling 13 things at once. Mine is near the upper right and it looks like this:
Scroll lock position varies
You probably use personal files (PST files) to save and sort important emails. You’ve probably tried rules to file email as it arrives. The usual result is dozens of folders to check instead of just one, and the whole system lasts a week or less. I have a better way to use rules to tame your email. I create a new rule for each commonly used folder as follows:
Create a new rule “from people or distribution list” or “with a particular subject”— whatever you need. When you chose your action, instead of choosing “file in a particular folder,” choose “make a copy in a particular folder.” Now the email is automatically filed as it arrives, but still in your inbox where you can read it easily. Once you’ve acted on it, throw it away. This eliminates all the clicking and dragging you do to file your emails.
There is a reason I said “commonly used folder.” If you give Outlook too much to think about, it has a hissy and breaks all the rules. I run 10-12 rules without a problem; that covers the things I file most often, and the remaining “keepers” I file manually by sorting by name or title and dragging the whole group into the folder. This has drastically cut down the time I spend managing my inbox, and I love it, because I hate to file!
Are you worried that all those duplicates will bloat your inbox? They won’t, for two reasons:
1) You’ve set up an autoarchive that dumps your trash on a regular basis (haven’t you?).
2) You’ve set up your personal files so they aren’t eating up space in your inbox.
You haven’t? Well, now that you have all this free time, get to it.
Or you could just let the cat take care of it...
Photo courtesy of icanhascheezeburger.com
You used to right click an application in the tray and cascade all the open windows in an application. Very useful if you’re like me and end up with 20 or so messages open and want to move through them quickly. Along came Windows 7 and …whaaaattt??? No cascade??? Seriously???
What you’ve been seeing are these cute little thumbnails you can click on:
Hovering over the Outlook icon brings up a thumbnail view of every open window
Those are great fun until you have to start panning across the screen to about the 5th window. 30 open messages=zero fun.
Enter Shift + Ctrl + Right Click. Shift + Ctrl + Right Click on the program icon (in this case, Outlook) and you’ll see a window with the old options:
You can still cascade, stack, show windows side by side, minimize, restore or close all windows
Say yea.
I’m discovering some of the basic functions in Windows 7 that I had thought we had lost forever. I’m constantly failing to lock my computer now. Years and years of Ctrl+Alt+K the Ctrl+K suddenly results in…nothing at all. If you hit your old combo and skip off, you’re liable to return to a nastygram from IS or a mass of responses to “your” money giveaway or your declaration of your love for Hello Kitty. I thought you had to remember to click the “Lock This Computer” command, but no…it’s one stop shopping now: Windows key +L does it in one stroke!
Use the Windows key +L to lock your computer
And the desktop! Where the heck did the desktop shortcut go?? For months now, I’ve been minimizing every window (and sometimes it’s 40 of them) to see the desktop. Well, reading the directions sometimes helps. It’s here, one click on that little blue rectangle at the end of your tray:
Blue Rectangle is the Desktop Shortcut Key
UPDATE: Per helpful comment from Charles (below): you can also reveal the desktop by using the Windows key +D. Thanks, Charles!
I recently solved a problem that had been plaguing me for months. I inherited an email schedule that had been created for a client, laid out like this:
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3
Tier1 Name 1 Tier1 Name 2 Tier1 Name 3
Tier2 Name 1 Tier2 Name 2 Tier2 Name 3
Tier3 Name 1 Tier 3 Name 2 Tier 3 Name 3
Looks like one of those puzzles in the Sunday Times, doesn’t it? Here’s the thing: Tier 1 folks got contacted every 2 months. Tier 2 every 4 and Tier 3 every 6. So here’s this beautiful schedule, which, when it comes to the end of the names, repeats. Well, it didn’t take me too long, as measured by average ape mentation rates, to figure out that when we repeated the first tier 1 contact it wasn’t going to be time yet to contact the Tiers 2 and 3 people listed for the same week. What’s really embarrassing is how long it took me to solve it. When I’m embarrassed, I try to advertise how stupid I am so everyone else can be embarrassed for me. I think it’s a well thought out psychological strategy. But seriously, this problem had clearly also happened to the person who preceded me, and something similar may have happened to you.
I searched the web for templates or solutions. I consulted Excel experts and tried out their arcane and extremely labor intensive formulas. I squinted and scribbled and searched for different software. I cursed.
Sometimes you just need to look at data in a different direction. If you can’t make a spreadsheet work horizontally, try it vertically. Everything may look different to you. If you want to see my—really very simple—solution to this particular little hell, the details are on this page. If you’re struggling with one of your own, try turning your monitor sideways.
When you create a large document, you are likely to have a table of contents. Traditionally, this is numbered in Roman numerals and the rest of your document is numbered in Arabic numerals. You probably see where to change the style, but it doesn’t work properly. You need to make separate sections, and the trick with Word and sections is to do everything in the right order.
Click here to view a little movie of how to do it. This is a flash movie (meaning you have to have Flash installed), so in case you can’t see it, here are the instructions via the “slow boat”:
You probably already formatted your page numbers, like this:
This window came up, and you clicked on “Format”:
You chose the lower case Roman numerals…
then “Start at ‘i’” and clicked “OK”:
Good so far? Good. Now your whole document has lower case Roman numeral page numbers in the bottom right corner, including the first page. But wait!!! You only want the Roman numerals for the index…starting on the third page you’re out of the index and into the document proper and you want Arabic numerals. No prob!
Put your cursor at the bottom of Page ii. On the page below, for example, I would insert it after the colon after “steps.”
Choose the “Insert” menu item again, then choose “Break” and “Section Break (Next Page):
This will not only make the section break, it will move your cursor to the next page (surprise!). Now that you’re there, just insert page numbers again:
and format again:
Only this time, you’ll format this new section to show up in Arabic numerals, starting at “1″:
Shazaam! Your index page numbers are now formatted in lower case Roman numerals and the rest of your document has Arabic numerals for the page numbers. You’re brilliant!
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