The Tribe of Adminsa home for wayward admins

You set up your PowerPoint show to run automatically…but how will your speaker know how long s/he can rattle on before the show leaves town without him? There are a couple of ways you can help:

1) When you choose “rehearse timing,” PowerPoint will ask you if you want to view timings in Slide Sorter view. Say yes. This is what you’ll see:

If I create your show, you’d better talk fast!

You can do a screen print or use your Snag-it to provide an overview of the timing for the show.

2) As you set the timings, or using the above print out as your cheat sheet, enter the timings into the Notes View for each slide. Each slide will appear on a page, looking something like this:

In newer version of PowerPoint, you can split the presentation so that the speaker sees the notes version and the audience sees the notes version.

Really, though, I think clicking for each change is safer. Imbedded movies are the only time you should need to do this.

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Silly Excel trick:

I want to know how many days there are between 10/1/09 and 8/1/2010

I enter the following formula:

=(DAYS360(B1,C1,TRUE))

B1 is the name of a cell. You can put either date there- Excel has no sense of time and doesn’t care.

In cell C1, put the other date.

If you happen to enter your dates in some other cell, like Y2 and Z3, change the formula to match: =(DAYS360(Y2,Z3,TRUE))

That’s it! Hit enter and you’ll see your answer.

Here’s how it looks with the original formula:

Formulas are so terrifying! Now as to why you might want to count days…

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Sometimes you open Excel to find that it’s bigger than your screen and you can’t move your document to correct the problem. Your scroll bars are missing, your menu is floating somewhere in the the stratosphere. Now what? Here are some solutions:

1)If you can see the expand/collapse buttons – on a Mac they are red, yellow and green dots in the upper left, and and in Windows, on the right: .

Click the middle button in Windows or the green one on Mac. This will – counterintuitively – shrink the window to fit inside a frame.

2) If that doesn’t work, try changing the screen resolution. You can do that by choose Start, Control Panel, then Display. (Mac: System Preferences under the apple, then Display). The higher the resolution, the smaller the Excel window. Close and reopen Excel.

3) If none of those work and you’re in Windows, try this tip from Seeing Excel’s Program Window (Microsoft Excel):

Reset the window size with command keys:

Press Alt+Spacebar. This displays the Control menu (even if you cannot see it).

Press the letter R; the Excel window is restored to its “in between” size.

Press Alt+Spacebar to again display the Control menu.

Press the letter X; the Excel window is maximized.

If you would rather use the mouse than the keyboard, you can follow these steps:

Right-click on Excel in the task bar

Choose Restore from the menu that pops up. The Excel window returns its “in between” size.

Again right-click on Excel in the task bar.

Choose Maximize from the menu that pops up

I’m afraid I have no idea how to do this on a Mac. If you know, write in here or enter a comment:

Related Posts:

• New Excel Wiki and Counting Check Marks
• Randomizing a List of Words or Names
• LauraJ’s Weblog : Excel tip: Split first name and last name into separate cells
• How to Count the Number of Days between Two Dates
• Lots of New Stuff
• Counting Multiple Variables in Excel
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• Accepting a Previously Declined Invitation
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You want to have a drawing, or you’ve created a word list for a party and want to mix them up and don’t want to have to go through the process of pulling them out of someone’s greasy fedora. Here’s how to do it in about 15 seconds:

in Column A, list your names.
in Column B, enter the following: =RAND()*300
What that will do is enter a random number between 1-300 into Column B. If you choose 1000, it will enter a number between 1-1000. Go wild.

Drag to copy the formula down the whole column. You’ll see something like this:

See the random number in column B? Now sort by Column B. Be sure to choose “no header.” The results are confusing to look at, because Column B has an imperative to randomize and will do so again immediately, but now look at Column A:

Voila! Random!
You can throw away Column B – you don’t need it anymore.

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• Excel Window is Too Big
• LauraJ’s Weblog : Excel tip: Split first name and last name into separate cells
• New Excel Wiki and Counting Check Marks
• How to Count the Number of Days between Two Dates
• Counting Multiple Variables in Excel
• A New Webhost and Winning an iPad
• Accepting a Previously Declined Invitation
• Picture Doesn’t Show in Word
• Can I Create a PDF without Adobe Acrobat?
• Not Seeing Your Outlook Question? Try This!

Sometimes someone else says it so well, there’s no point in repeating it. I stumbled across this tip in LauraJ’s Weblog the other day. It’s yet another tool to use in our unending quest to split up first and last names (or any text) in an Excel column. Here’s the link:  LauraJ’s Weblog

I’d quote her, but she uses pictures – bless her – and those wouldn’t carry over. Take a little side trip over to her site and then come on back for more about Excel. Thanks, LauraJ!

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• New Excel Wiki and Counting Check Marks
• How to Count the Number of Days between Two Dates
• Counting Multiple Variables in Excel
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• Accepting a Previously Declined Invitation
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• Not Seeing Your Outlook Question? Try This!

A lot of people are asking how do I decline a meeting without having the meeting notice disappear? I changed my mind later and the invitation was GONE! The answer is here:
Outlook FAQ Item 9…but I won’t make you click again!

If you have a newer version of Outlook, the invitation is in your Outlook trash folder and you can retrieve it. If you have an older version, however, it’s just gone. You’ll need to ask the host to send you a new copy of the invitation, or ask someone to forward* it to you. The way to avoid this in the future is to open the calendar, open or right click on the meeting, and decline from there. The invitation will remain in your inbox where you can accept it again, thereby putting it back into the calendar.

If you want to the invitation to remain on the calendar but not show as busy, you’ll need to “reply to” the originator saying that you won’t be able to attend, then change the “show time as” option to “free.” If you choose “decline” it will be removed from the calendar.

Tip: I like to make a personal folder for declined invitations so that I can quickly review what I’ve turned down if the conflict changes.

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• Excel Window is Too Big
• Randomizing a List of Words or Names
• LauraJ’s Weblog : Excel tip: Split first name and last name into separate cells

Aren’t admins busy enough?!?

The short answer is yes, you must.

Your boss may just be discovering social media – and you may be, too. You must get ahead of that curve! An old-school admin will soon find herself in a new-fangled unemployment line – online.

What happens when your manager wants you to maintain the website and tweet regularly? Are you ready? You may be in the position of advisor. If that happens, you need to figure out whether or not Twitter is an appropriate means for your business to promote itself. Tweeting about caulking every five minutes isn’t going to win your company love or dollars.

If you think Twitter is all there is to it, you need to put down the quill pen and start start surfing. You might check out JK Virtual Office Blog. She’s a VA who has specialized in social media and she has some useful insights to share. Another one is the My Twitter VA blog. She’s taken a certification in social media marketing. We might not all want to become marketers, but if you don’t know the basics and it doesn’t come easily to you, find a course, online or otherwise.

And what about that website? The theory is that “all” you have to do is post the updates. The words “all” and “website” should never be used in the same sentence. You’ll need to learn more about it, and what you need to learn depends on what kind of website your company has. Something that definitely falls in the “can’t hurt” category is learning a little HTML. I know….it sounds like “ewwwww…programming,” but it’s really more like pig Latin. Once you get the gist, you can navigate reasonably without being fluent. I found this free online tutorial at W3 Schools fun and illuminating.

Leave the “I don’t need to know that” mentality to those who can afford it – admins need to adaptive learners. That’s the long answer.

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You’ve done everything right – you’ve chosen “Insert” from the menu bar or the picture icon from a tool bar or pane, you’ve chosen “picture from file,” and you’ve said OK. A nice box appears but no picture! You try different formats, you try this, you try that. You print the picture out of another program and it’s fine! What gives?? What gives is that Word thinks your picture is behind some text, even if you have none. What can I tell you? Word is occasionally delusional.

Get to “Format Picture” by your preferred method – I right click on the picture.

Now choose “Layout” from the list of choices. In the Mac 2008 version it looks like this – yours may differ, but the same choices will be there:

Now click on “In front of text,” which shows the dog in front of the lines:

Your picture appears like a rabbit in freshly planted lettuce patch.

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Check the Outlook FAQ! You can find answers to:

• How do I send something from my computer “from” my manager?
• Why does the email say it’s from me even though I was in his inbox when I started a new email?
•  How do I keep my manager’s mailbox from being deluged with responses to big meetings?
• Why does my executive’s inbox keeps getting overloaded even though s/he is using personal folders?
• Sometimes I open a distribution list or copy a long list of names into the “To” box. When I hit “Send,” Outlook checks the addresses against my company directory and gives me the opportunity to choose a name if it can’t identify it. If the name isn’t there, I have to close out of the window, take the name out of the “To” box and start all over! Is there a way to avoid this?
• Why is an appointment suddenly appearing as nonsense text (“Greek” or gibberish)?
• When I try to accept a meeting, it says ”The function cannot before performed because the message has been changed.”
• When I try to save changes to a meeting I created in my manager’s calendar, it says something along the lines of “The item cannot before saved because the item has been changed. Would you like to save to the default folder?”
• How do I decline a meeting without having the meeting notice disappear? I changed my mind later and the invitation was GONE!

Find those answers or submit your own questions here.

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• Randomizing a List of Words or Names
• LauraJ’s Weblog : Excel tip: Split first name and last name into separate cells

Someone asked, “How do I decline a meeting without having the meeting notice disappear? I changed my mind later and the invitation was GONE!’

If you have a newer version of Outlook, the invitation is in your trash and you can retrieve it. If you have an older version, however, it’s just gone. The way to avoid this is to open the calendar, open or right click on the meeting, and decline from there. The invitation will remain in your inbox where you can accept it again, thereby putting it back into the calendar.

If you want to the invitation to remain on the calendar but not show as busy, you’ll need to “reply to” the originator saying that you won’t be able to attend, then change the “show time as” option to “free.” If you choose “decline” it will be removed from the calendar.

Tip: I like to make a personal folder for declined invitations so that I can quickly review what I’ve turned down if the conflict changes.

Want to find this information later? Bookmark out the FAQ section of the Outlook Wiki

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• Not Seeing Your Outlook Question? Try This!
• Outlook FAQ Has Updated
• Drunken Time Zones in Outlook
• About that double-booked room…
• The Outlook FAQ
• Managing Time Zones in Outlook
• Mangled Meeting Title?