The Tribe of Adminsa home for wayward admins

I’ve posted an Excel Wiki – I call them “faux-wikis” because you need to click contact or add a comment to edit or add to it, rather than editing directly as you would in a true wiki. It’s ready for your input!

So far, it’s connected to a page about reversing last name first lists and putting them into one column, and some posts about viewing Excel on dual monitors, solving the problem of all of your data pasting into a single cell, and counting multiple variables.

And here’s a silly little tip:

Check marks are useful little critters, and you can use them for counting, too. Many fonts use Alt (Option on Mac) V for a check, but many fonts – especially in Windows – don’t. That means you have to choose Insert>Symbol, find the check mark and insert it. Repeat every time you want it, or copy and paste. More trouble than it’s worth!

Easy fix: Insert a column for your check marks. If you have the font Marlett, change highlight the column and change it to that font. The letter “a” is a check in Marlett.

Now, to count:

Select a cell to enter your count in. Change it to a normal font or you’ll be very confused! Enter: 

=COUNTIF(C1:C3,”a”)

The C1 and C3 should be changed to the top cell of your check mark column and the bottom cell of that column.

Here’s how you get to that formula if you want to do it from scratch: Under the ∑ symbol on your tool bar, or Insert>Function, choose or search for COUNTIF. Once you’ve selected it, a box will open. Click in the first box then click into your column and drag from the top to the bottom, or select it in your favorite manner. Now click in the second box and type “a.” Hit enter.

That’s it!

Your executive asks you to print off that article on Golfing Underwater he saw on www.throwawaybigbucks.com. Piece of cake, right? You print from Explorer…and the right edge is cut off. Phooey.

You set your page to landscape. The right side is STILL cut off.

If you have Acrobat, so you try printing to PDF. No joy.

After you kick the printer a couple of times, you try to cut and paste the article into a Word doc. Either it’s protected and won’t let you, or you get all of the golf clubs and bubbles and Montblac ads on the page mixed into the article. You pick out the article sentence by sentence and paste it into a new doc, and print that.

Only 45 minutes later, and you’ve printed an article! You’re not embarrassed…much. Don’t let this happen to you!

Tell your IT department that it’s crucial for you to have Adobe Acrobat PRO, and that it needs to be set up so that you have its icon in Explorer. For reasons I don’t even want to contemplate, if you choose “convert web page to pdf” from this icon, it will create a perfect document, but if you choose File>Print and choose Adobe Acrobat as the printer it will make a PDF with a cut-off right edge. Obtain the icon, even if you have to bite ankles to do it.

UPDATE: MS Explorer 2007 claims to have solved this problem, so that’s another solution.