Tips For Making Text Selections In Microsoft Word
Before you can edit or format a block of text in Microsoft Word 2007, you need to select it. Selecting the text is a way of telling Word that you want to work with a certain piece of text. (Selecting is also referred to as Highlighting.)
The most straightforward way of highlighting text is to position the cursor where you want to start highlighting, click and hold the mouse button down and drag to the position where you want the highlight to end. It is not essential to drag across every single line that you want to highlight. It’s sufficient to move the mouse in a straight line from the start to the finish. To deselect your text and get rid of the highlight, click anywhere in the text. The blinking cursor will then reappear.
Highlighting entire lines
Another way of highlighting text is to click multiple times. To highlight a word, double-click on the word. To highlight an entire paragraph, click three times on the paragraph. To highlight the entire document, click three times in the left margin.
Highlighting complete lines of text
As well as highlighting characters by dragging across them, Word also allows you to select lines of text. To do this, position the cursor in the left margin and you’ll notice that the cursor changes to an arrow pointing to the right. Once the cursor has changed, you can simply click to select a single line or click, hold down the mouse button and drag to select several lines.
Multiple clicks
Another simple way of highlighting text is to select the entire document. This is done with the Select All command. In Microsoft Word 2007 the Select All command is found in the Editing group of the Home Tab of the Ribbon. Click to obtain the drop-down menu; click on Select and then choose Select All. The Select All command is found in lots of programs and lots of environments. It can also be accessed via the keyboard using Control-a: that is to say, hold down the Control key while typing the letter “a”.
The author is a training consultant with a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Word 2007 training courses, as well as Word VBA training in London and throughout the UK.
Excel In-house Training Should Be Customized To Meet Your Specific Requirements
One of the pivotal components of the Microsoft Office 2007, Excel is a uniquely powerful spreadsheet. If you bought this sophisticated piece of software, it makes sense to ensure that your staff members know how to use it effectively. Having allowed them a week or two to get used to the new environment and go through some online tutorials, you will probably want to get them properly trained. Tutor-led software training has the benefit that delegates are able to ask questions as they learn and have complex concepts explained and demonstrated to them until they fully understand them.
Booking your staff on a public Excel course is of course one possibility. However, increasingly companies are demanding to have this training customised to meet their specific demands. Microsoft Excel can be used for a variety of data analysis and storage tasks: not everyone uses it in the same way. Perhaps you will be using it for complex business modelling. Or, you may be using it to create interactive forms and reports complete with complex calculations. Maybe your staff will be using the program in a database role recording information under column headings. Booking a customised course will ensure that you only pay for instruction which is relevant to your requirements and reflects the way in which you will be using Microsoft Excel.
Before you start contacting Excel training companies, it would be a good idea to ensure that you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve by using Excel and that your expectations are realistic. When you approach training companies, you should make it clear that you do not simply want them to deliver their standard Excel courses but that you require a customised programme of training. Between you, a schedule of topics to be covered should then be drawn up and the duration of the program decided.
The customisation process may also involve identifying different requirements within your own organisation. Different people may need to do different tasks with the program and therefore need different skills. For example, some of your users will be primarily interested in using Excel for business analysis and projection. Their primary areas of interest will be the “What if” analysis tool like goal seek, scenarios and pivot tables. On the other hand, you may have people who are interested in create charts and reports either for printing or for use in PowerPoint presentations.
Most training companies offering customised Excel courses should be willing to accommodate the specific needs of your organisation and the different profiles of the staff members: accounts, sales and marketing, etc. Between you, you can then create a program of study which satisfies the needs of all users. Perhaps this may mean, having different courses for users with different profiles or perhaps the best approach will be a modular one whereby some modules are taken by everyone while others are only attended by certain user groups.
The author is a training consultant with On-SiteTrainingCourses.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel Classes in London and throughout the UK.
Excel 2007 Navigation Techniques
Each Excel document is called a workbook and each workbook can contain up to 255 worksheets. To navigate to a particular worksheet, click on one of the tabs displayed at the bottom of your screen.
To the left of the tabs will find four navigation buttons. These are useful where you have a workbook that either contains lots of worksheets or has worksheets with very long names. The very first one makes the name of the first worksheet visible; the very last one makes the name of the last worksheet visible. The left pointing arrow makes the name of the previous worksheet visible and of course the right pointing arrow makes the name of the next worksheet visible. These icons don’t actually activate a worksheet; they simply make its name tab visible. To activate a sheet, you still have to click on that particular tab.
Worksheets can also be activated from the keyboard. To activate the next worksheet to the right, hold down the Control key and press Page Down. This moves you forward through your worksheets are naturally holding the Control key and pressing Page Up moves you back to the left.
Once you’ve navigated to a particular worksheet, you will need to go to a particular cell or a particular section of that worksheet. Naturally, you can use the scrollbars to make different parts of the worksheet visible. You can also move around the worksheet using the arrows on your keyboard: down, right, up and left.
Excel also contains useful keyboard shortcuts for moving to the edges of a given body of data. To get to the right-most cell of the current range, hold down Control and press the right arrow and of course to get to the bottom cell, hold down Control and press the down arrow.
It is also possible to do exactly the same thing with the mouse. Position the cursor on one of the edges of the selection rectangle (that bold highlight which is displayed around the currently active cell) and then you simply double-click. Double-clicking on the right hand edge of the selection rectangle takes you to the extreme right of the current range. Double-clicking on the bottom edge jumps to the bottom of the range, and so forth.
There are two final navigation keyboard shortcuts which should be mentioned: Control-Home and Control-End. Hold down the Control key and press End to move to the bottom right of the current range. Hold down Control and press Home to move to the top left of the current range.
As well as navigating through worksheets, most Excel users make frequent use of the Ribbon. Excel offers a series of handy keyboard shortcuts when working with the Ribbon.
To access the ribbon keyboard shortcuts simply press the Alt key once on your keyboard. A series of letters and numbers is then displayed which represent the shortcuts that you should type to activate that part of the Ribbon. For example, “W” is the shortcut for accessing the View Tab.
When you press “W”, the View Tab is activated and another series of badges is displayed on each of the commands within the View Tab. For example, the “Arrange All” command uses “A” as its keyboard shortcut, so simply typing “A” is equivalent to clicking the Arrange All button.
Once you have typed a letter to execute a command, the Ribbon loses focus and the shortcut letters and numbers disappear. To access Ribbon commands via the keyboard again, just press the Alt Key and the badges will reappear. This means that you never have to worry about learning keyboard shortcuts. All you have to remember is to press the Alt key on your keyboard and Excel will prompt you from then on.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 training courses at their central London training centre.
Microsoft Word Keyboard Shortcuts For Highlighting Text
As well as using the mouse, Microsoft Word 2007 contains a number of useful options for selecting text via the keyboard. Most of these options involve using the Shift key in conjunction with other keys. However, there are also some techniques which rely entirely on the keyboard.
Shift-click
One little-known highlighting technique definitely worth mentioning is the use of the Control key in conjunction with the mouse. This enables you to make discontiguous selections: in other words, selection that have gaps. For example if we want to select just the headings in a particular document, you can drag across the first heading to select it; hold down the Control key and drag across each of the other headings. You will notice that the headings will be selected while the text between them is not. You can then change the format of your headings and none of the other text will affected.
Shift-click
Shift can also be used in conjunction with the cursor keys to highlight characters, words, lines or paragraph. To use these techniques, begin by using the cursor keys on your keyboard to position the cursor where you want your highlighting the start. To highlight character by character press the right or left arrow depending on the direction that you want to move in. To select line by line pressed the down arrow or up arrow depending on the required direction. To deselect some of the highlighted text, move the cursor in the opposite direction. To remove the highlight completely, press any cursor key without the Shift key held down.
Using Shift and Control
As well as using the cursor keys you can also use Home and End. For example, if the cursor is positioned in the middle of a line, pressing Shift and Home will select from the cursor position to the start of the line; while pressing Shift and End will select from the cursor position to the end of the line.
As well as using Shift, you can use Control-Shift. Control-Shift Home will select from the cursor position to the start of the document. Control-Shift end will select from the cursor position to the end of the document.
Making discontiguous selections
One little-known highlighting technique definitely worth mentioning is the use of the Control key in conjunction with the mouse. This enables you to make discontiguous selections: in other words, selection that have gaps. For example if we want to select just the headings in a particular document, you can drag across the first heading to select it; hold down the Control key and drag across each of the other headings. You will notice that the headings will be selected while the text between them is not. You can then change the format of your headings and none of the other text will affected.
Shift and click
One final highlighting technique definitely worth mentioning is the use of the Control key in conjunction with the mouse. This enables you to make discontiguous selections: in other words, selection that have gaps. For example if we want to select just the headings in a particular document, you can drag across the first heading to select it; hold down the Control key and drag across each of the other headings. You will notice that the headings will be selected while the text between them is not. You can then change the format of your headings and none of the other text will affected.
Author is a developer and trainer with an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Word 2007 training courses, as well as Word VBA training in London and throughout the UK.
The Benefits Of Microsoft Word 2007’s Show/Hide Feature
Sometimes, when you look at a document which was created by someone else, you are at a loss as to which characters they have used to format the document. If they are not experienced in using programs like Microsoft Word, they may be prone to common errors; things like using the space bar instead of the tab key and entering two spaces after a full stop. Microsoft Word’s Show/Hide feature displays symbols representing these invisible characters. This can help you both to find out what characters someone else has used within a document and to spot errors in your own work.
The Show/Hide button is located in the Paragraph group of the Home tab of the Microsoft Word Ribbon. It is a toggle or switch: click to show invisible characters and click again to hide them.
The most common symbol which is encountered when invisible characters are being shown is the dot. This represents a space. A tab is represented by an arrow which is obtained by pressing the Tab key on the keyboard. Then we have a paragraph symbol represents the end of each paragraph. This is obtained by pressing carriage return. Many people insert two returns at to end each paragraph which tends to create too much space. Word’s Show/Hide feature will confirm where this has been done.
A curved arrow represents a line break (as opposed to a paragraph break) which can be obtained by holding down the Shift key while pressing return. Line breaks can also be generated automatically when a piece of text is passed repeatedly from one environment to another; for example, when an e-mail is forwarded from person to person.
Whenever non-printing characters are being displayed, any page breaks, column breaks and section breaks are also indicated. A page break is indicated by the words “Page Break” preceded and followed by a dotted line and section and column breaks are indicated in a similar way.
The Show/Hide facility will not do anything to clean up documents but it’s a very useful starting point to tell you what’s wrong with a document that does not look right or prints in a strange way. Using this facility you can deduce what needs to be changed. To actually clean up a document that has errors, you normally use the Replace command which is found in the Editing section of the Home tab of the Word Ribbon.
Author is a developer and trainer with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Word 2007 Classes at their central London training centre.
Microsoft Excel 2007 Advanced Print Options
This article describes two features which are very useful when printing worksheets in Microsoft Excel: Set Print Area and Print Titles.
Print Titles
Each time you print a worksheet, Excel normally prints all the data that it contains. However, there are times when you only want to print a selection of your data. Although you can achieve this by hiding rows and columns, Excel offers a simpler solution.
For example, if you have a worksheet with only five average-sized columns but several hundred rows, although the header and footer appear on every page, only page 1 will have column headings. This means that it becomes difficult to know what the figures on the other pages relate to. We can use Excel’s Print Titles feature to print the column headings on every page. Print Titles are in the Page Setup section of the Page Layout tab; simply click on the button and Excel displays the Page Setup dialog box with the Sheet tab activated. In our five column worksheet example, we would only need to specify the number of rows that we would like to repeat at the top of every page. In our example, it would be only the first row. Having clicked to specify row one, we can click Print Preview to see the result and we would see that the headings are repeated at the top of each page.
Set Print Area
When you print a worksheet, Excel will usually print all the data that it contains. However, there are times when you only want to print a selection of your data. Although you can achieve this by hiding rows and columns, Excel offers a simpler solution.
In the Page Layout tab of the Excel ribbon, you will find the Set Print Area drop-down menu. When you click on it, it offers two options: Set Print Area and Clear Print Area. The Set Print Area command allows you to highlight a range of data and specify that this is the only part of the worksheet that will be printed whenever you use the print command. Having chosen the Set Print Area command, Excel displays a dotted lined border around the area that has been set, in much the same way as it normally displays the page boundaries after the print command has been used.
Only one print area can be specified at a time. The Clear Print Area command restores normal behaviour; so that, when you print, the entire worksheet will be printed.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with On-SiteTrainingCourses.Com, a UK IT training company offering XML and XSLT Classes in London and throughout the UK.
Embedding Charts in Excel 2007 Worksheet
Before you can create a chart in Microsoft Excel, you must highlight the data that you want to plot. Your selection should also include any relevant headings. Excel allows you to create charts on chart sheets independent of the worksheet containing the data or to embed the chart on the worksheet alongside the data.
To create a chart which is embedded in the worksheet itself, having selected the range of data that you wish to plot, click on the Insert tab of the Excel ribbon and, in the chart section, you will find a series of drop-down menus offering each of the main chart types. Each drop-down reveals a gallery of customised chart types.
Additionally, we can click on the launch button in the bottom right of the Charts group to bring up the Insert Chart dialog box. Here, we are given access to the full range of chart types that Excel has to offer. You will also notice that there is a button which says Set as Default Chart. If you use a particular type more than any other, you can choose that type and click this button so that the next time you create a standalone chart, by right-clicking on a worksheet tab and choosing Insert, the new default chart will be used as the chart type.
When you choose an option from one of the drop-down menus in the Charts group of the Insert tab, Excel creates the embedded chart. The chart is placed on the draw layer of Excel which is different from the worksheet layer. When you click on a worksheet cell, you are working on the worksheet layer and the chart becomes inactive. When you click on the chart, it is highlighted and you will then be working on the draw layer.
You will notice that whenever the chart is highlighted, Excel displays three contextual tabs called Design, Layout and Format. They contain a series of options specifically related to charts.
The Design tab contains the Location Group which contains The Move Chart button. Clicking on this button gives us the option to move the chart to a separate sheet. If you choose the option, Excel creates a new chart sheet and places the chart on it. We can also do the reverse. If you click the Move Chart button again and click on “Object In…”, we can now choose the worksheet that we want to transfer the chart to. When we click OK, Excel embeds the chart in that worksheet and deletes the empty chart sheet.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with TrainingCompany.Com, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007training courses in London and throughout the UK.
Customizing Page Views In Microsoft Word 2007
Microsoft Word contains a number of features for zooming in and out of your work and also the moving from one part of your document to another. Let’s begin by looking at zooming. In the bottom right of your screen on the taskbar, you will find some controls for zooming which offer several different functions. Firstly, you can click on the “Zoom Out” and “Zoom In” buttons and you’ll notice that the zoom level increases or decreases in steps of 10%.
An alternative to the “Zoom Out” and “Zoom In” buttons is to drag the “Zoom” slider left to zoom in or right to zoom out. Another way of moving the slider is simply to click anywhere on the zoom scale. The slider will then jump to that exact point and you page will be displayed at that exact zoom level.
It is also possible to click on the percentage displayed next to the slider to display the zoom dialog box. Here, you can either choose a preset zoom level or you can type any percentage between 10 and 500. You can also choose to display the entire width of the page or simply the entire width of the text ignoring any margins. Similarly, you can display the entire page or several pages at once.
The View tab of the Word Ribbon also has a zoom section. On the left, the zoom button offers another way of accessing the zoom dialog box. On the right, there is the option to display one page, two pages or the page width. Finally, clicking on the button marked 100% returns the view to actual size.
Yet another way of zooming in and out is to use a combination of the mouse and the keyboard. If the Control key is held down, you can use the scroll button on your mouse to zoom out or zoom in.
While on the subject of the scroll button, let’s now look at techniques for navigation. If the Control key is not held down, the scroll button naturally allows you to scroll up and down. You can also use the scroll bar: click on the scroll arrows to scroll up or down one line at a time or drag the scroll box. When you do so, you’ll notice that the current page number is displayed as you drag.
Below the scroll bar, are the Browse Controls which, by default, allow you to move one page forward or back. However, the behaviour of these arrows can be customised by clicking on the Select Browse Object button between the two arrows. This displays a pop-up menu where you can choose between several different objects within Word such as headings or images. Whichever object is selected will determine how Word jumps through the document when the controls are clicked. As well as using these controls, you can use the keyboard equivalents: Control-Page-down or Control-Page-up to move up and down according to the currently selected browse object.
The writer’s company runs ASP.NET training courses in London and throughout the UK.
Customising Your Excel 2007 Reports With Footers and Headers
Headers and footers are especially useful for documents that require several pages to print. The header is information displayed at the top of each page; the footer at the bottom of each page. There are two ways of working with headers and footers in Excel. Both are found in the Page Layout Tab Of the Excel Ribbon. When working in Normal mode, you can access the headers and footers by clicking on the Launch button in the Page Setup section. Here, in the Header/Footer tab, you have access to all of Excel features relating to headers and footers.
As you work with these options, you can click on the Print Preview button then to return to Headers/Footers, click on Page Setup. This method of editing headers and footers is particularly useful if you’re using a fairly small screen.
The second method requires you to be in Page Layout mode: to switch to Page Layout mode, simply click on the Page Layout icon on the right of the Status Bar. You can now gain direct access to the header and footer areas of the page. Simply follow the prompt that reads “Click to Add Header”. As soon as you activate the header or footer area, “Header & Footer Tools” appears on your ribbon. This consists of the context sensitive “Design” Tab. (A context sensitive Tab is one which only appears in certain contexts.)
Apart from their position on the page, Excel treats headers and footers as identical. Each consists of three sections: left, centre and right. In each of these sections, you can insert a wide range of information. This is done by clicking on the buttons in the “Header And Footer Elements” section of the “Design” Tab. For example, at the bottom of the page, you might want to insert the date, the page number, “Page 1 of 4″, etc. To do this, you would simply activate the footer area, type the word “Page” followed by a space, then click on the page number icon which will generate the page number. Then type ” of ” and finally click on the “Number Of Pages” button.
Other items which can be inserted automatically include “File Path”, as in “c:\Excel Work\myfile.xlsx”; “File Name”, as in “myfile.xlsx”; and images, for example, your company logo. To insert an image, click on the picture button and then double click on the image to insert it, just as you would in any other region of the page. You can then resize the image as necessary or increase/decrease the space available for the header/footer.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with TrainingCompany.Com, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel Classes at their central London training centre.