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.
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.
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
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!
Formatting in Word and PowerPoint can be really frustrating. The number one cause of baldness in admins is Word. One of the most frenzy-inducing features is the bulleted list. The short answer is that the arrows on your ruler should look like this:
Not this:
If you can’t see the ruler, choose “View” in the menu bar or panel and “Show Ruler.”
For more a more in-depth coif-saving explanation of aligning bulleted lists in PowerPoint and Word, click here. You’ll see the full page explanation located in the Word Wiki.
A really annoying feature of many email programs – notably Outlook and Apple Mail – is that when you paste text from another program – say, Word – it shows up double spaced. No amount of reformatting fixes it. Here’s the very easy, quick solution:
eMail programs have a choice of format: HTML (shows all formatting, including web items), Plain Text (looks like it came from a Blackberry) and Rich Text (shows all the formatting but isn’t written in the computer language used for web posting).
All you have to do is change the format from HTML or Rich Text to Plain Text. Now change it back. The double spacing will disappear, but your formatting will remain.
The format choices are available somewhere in almost every program. In Outlook 2007 and 2010, it’s in the “Options” Tab:
Outlook 2003 and before, it’s here:
In Apple Mail, look under the “Format” menu, at the bottom:
the choice changes:
Most programs have this option – if yours isn’t here, poke around…it’s there somewhere!
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:
Required fields are marked *.
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.
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!
Social Widgets powered by AB-WebLog.com.
