Top ten ways in which MS Excel can really help

Posted by andre – December 24, 2009

The Microsoft Office Fluent user interface in Office Excel 2007 assists in locating the best tools as per your requirements

Now you can find the most important tools without searching too much, thanks to the Office Fluent user interface. So, whatever you want to do in Office Excel 2007, you’ll get the right commands right away.

Now, it’s a breeze to import, then organize & explore tons of data in wider spreadsheets

It’s no longer tough to work with immense quantities of data. Office Excel 2007 offers support for spreadsheets, up to 1 million rows by 16 thousand columns. Excel 2007 also offers support for multicore processor platforms which allows for speedier calculations of spreadsheets that are saturated with formulae.

The Office Excel 2007’s all-new charting engine helps you to put forth your data analysis in the form of charts that look professional and smart

An excellent thing about the Office Excel 2007 charting engine is that it’s consistent across both MS Office Word 2007 and MS Office PowerPoint 2007. This means, creating charts that look snazzy and professional at the same time are just a few clicks away. The redesigned Office Excel 2007 charting engine helps you to apply effects like 3D, transparency, etc. to your otherwise drab charts.

Office Excel 2007 now provides way better support when it comes to tables

It’s even easier than before, working with tables, now that Office Excel 2007 provides much better support for this. This translates into better views of larger tables, which makes working with tables in Office Excel 2007 simpler

It’s really easy to make and work with interactive PivotTable views in Office Excel 2007

When you’re answering lots of questions, the PivotTable views allow for speedy reorientation of your data. PivotTable views also lets you drag fields and position them as you want them to be seen.

Excel Services and Office Excel 2007 allow for a more secure sharing of spreadsheets

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007’s Excel Services, you can allow third-parties to access information in your spreadsheets over an internet connection, by rendering them dynamically as HTML. What’s great about Excel Services is, all those who use it can work on, modify or share the rendered spreadsheets with others.

Office Excel 2007 sees to it that both, you as well as your organization have access to continually updated business info

Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Excel 2007, you can guard against the out-of-date or multiple copies of a spreadsheet doing the rounds of your organization. With Office Excel 2007’s permission-based access, you get to exercise complete control over who gets to view and work on or modify your spreadsheets

Minimize spreadsheet size and boost the recovery of damaged files simultaneously

File sizes can be greatly reduced, thanks to the new MS Excel XML Format. It has been constructed so as to offer improved data recovery for files that are damaged. So, you not only allow the IT department to focus on other important matters, but you also save a lot on bandwidth and storage.

Office Excel 2007 provides complete support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services. What this means for you is, extending your business intelligence investments is a breeze

Newly added cube functions in Office Excel 2007 allow you to create custom reports from OLAP databases. The Data Connection Library helps you connect to outside data sources faster, which makes the going easy for you.

Top 9 benefits of using MS Office Word 2007:

Posted by andre – December 15, 2009

Greater focus on writing as compared to formatting.

Now you can format your documents sooner than before. Thanks to the Office Fluent user interface, you can get the appropriate tools as and when you need them. You can also change the appearance of text, graphics and tables throughout the whole document by using Document Themes and Quick Styles.

SmartArt diagrams plus new charting tools help in making your communication more effective.

With these new tools, you can now make content that looks great: 3-D shapes, drop shadows and transparency are just some of the many effects!

Building Blocks helps in speedy assembly of documents.

You can use this tool for assembling documents at a greater speed from pull quotes, disclaimer text, cover pages, sidebars etc. This tool also helps make sure you don’t unnecessarily have to recreate content or copy and paste continuously.

Save your files as XPS or PDF directly from Office Word 2007.

With Office Word 2007, you get to convert .doc or .rtf documents to .pdf or .xml directly, without having to add any third-party tools.

Blog from Office Word 2007.

Office Word 2007 allows you to publish and maintain blogs by simply linking Word to your blog site. Utilize Office Word 2007 to upload text, images, and advanced formatting directly to your blog.

Improve document review processes through Office Word 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Thanks to the newly built-in workflow option in Office SharePoint Server 2007, initiating and tracking document review & approval processes from within Office Word 2007 is a breeze!

Delete comments, tracked changes and hidden text from your documents.

Using the Document Inspector in Office Word 2007, you can delete any undesired content from your documents, such as hidden text, comments or any sort of personal information.

Compare and combine documents with the tri-pane review panel.

With Office Word 2007, finding out changes made to any document is child’s play. With the new tri-pane review panel, you can now see both the versions of your document with all the changes you’ve ever made to them

Improve recovery of corrupt files and reduce your file sizes.

With the Ecma Office Open XML Formats, you can greatly reduce the size of your file and also have improved recovery of files that have been damaged. This not only allows you to save on storage and bandwidth, but it also helps your IT team to relax a bit, and focus on more important matters

PowerPoint Tips For The Beginner

Posted by andre – December 4, 2009

That Microsoft Office PowerPoint is a really useful bit of software, everyone knows. There are those moments in everyone’s lives, when they wish, really wish they knew how to create a slick PowerPoint presentation that they could use to get their ideas across, bulleted text transitioning across the projection screen. Well, here’s a neat little guide that’ll help you learn the basics of and some simple ‘how to’s’ in MS PowerPoint.

Let’s begin with something fairly basic. Here’s how you can mate a graphics item or text in a PowerPoint presentation to an email address. First, you select the graphic/text you want to link to the email address. Secondly, you need to right-click your selection and select ‘Action Settings’ from the menu. Now, click ‘Hyperlink to:’ and choose the URL from the list that’s dropped down. Key in the email address you want into the text box as follows: mailto: emailaddress@domainname.com. Clicking the OK button twice will close the window.

Moving on, let’s find out how we can change the default file location of MS PowerPoint. What you have to do is, select ‘Options’ from the ‘Tools’ menu and click ‘Save’. Look for the Default file location box and specify the drive and the folder path of your preferred storage location. Remember, this won’t work unless you’ve already created the folder that you’ve specified as the new file location. Hit OK.

If you want to control the placement of a certain graphic item such as clip art or a photograph or a stats chart, you’ll need to first select it. Then hit Ctrl and hold it down while using the arrow keys on your keyboard to position the graphic. This also works for text.

This one might seem a little complicated, but it actually isn’t. Embedding TrueType fonts is actually quite simple. Once your presentation is ready, go to ‘File’ and click ‘Save As’. Once the ‘Save As’ box has opened, click ‘Tools’ in the drop down menu and choose ‘Save Options’. Look for the ‘Embed TrueType Fonts’ command in the ‘Save Options’ box and hit OK. And voila.

Now let’s get to something a lot of people wish they could do. After reading this, you’ll be amongst those who can! This tip will let you know how you can erase the previously rehearsed recorded timings and begin from scratch. This, too, isn’t complicated at all. All you need to do is this. First you have to select to the ‘Slide Sorter’ view. Then comes ‘Ctrl+A’ which, of course, selects all your slides. Now go to the ‘Slide Show’ drop down menu and click on ‘Slide Transition’. Once you’ve done this, set ‘Automatically After’ – which is in ‘Advance’ – to the value of ‘0’ (zero) . Finally, ‘Apply to All’ will clear the slate and all timings will be removed from all the slides in your presentation!

In conclusion, let’s discuss how to jump to a specified slide in a PowerPoint presentation, during a slide show.

This might come at the end, but it’s pretty much the simplest of all the tips so far. What you have to do is, key in the number of the slide, and hit ‘Enter’. Alternatively, you could place your cursor at any point on the screen and perform a Right-click. Once you’ve done this, point the cursor to ‘Go’, then to ‘By Title’ and finally, single click the Title text of the desired slide. That’s it!

So you see how simple and easy to use Microsoft PowerPoint really is?

Microsoft Word and its accessibility

Posted by andre – November 22, 2009

When you think ‘word processor’, you think ‘MS Word’. Come on, admit it. Despite the availability of so many word processing software, a lot of it freeware, MS Word retains its position as the best known word processor one can get. It’s no surprise, owing to its popularity, it has monopolized the text document format – the standard format for most documents is ‘.doc’.

One of the reasons MS Word is so well known and not just a little respected amongst its competitors is, its versatility. PDF files, XML files and even HTML files can be created from Word documents. There are many methods of improving the accessibility of Word-based documents or files. One of the things that can be done is to make documents that are structured. The right method of structuring in MS Word is the usage of Word styles, instead of merely performing formatting changes such as bold, font-size increase, etc.

The versions of MS Word, over the years, have had varying but not dissimilar methods of getting structured. For example, in MS Word 2000-2003, you can make true headings from the styles list, and you also get to work with any custom style you might have fashioned. So why does a Word file need true structure in the first place? That’s because of its usefulness – if you export the file to HTML, the structure will remain unchanged, allowing people to read it online, as it was created. The same holds true when it comes to exporting .doc files as PDF. Now, in Word 2007, you’ll find an improvement, in that, more than adequate attention has been given to appropriate styling.

Let’s consider the case of Word 2004 for the Mac. Word 2004 for Mac thankfully has a dropdown list of styles quite like the one in Word 2000 and 2003 for Windows. In the 2004 version for Mac, styling can be performed through the formatting palette. Now let’s shift pay attention to the method of providing alternate text in all the versions of Word for Windows mentioned above. In Word 2000 – 2003, you need to right-click the image and choose ‘Format Picture’, then select the Web tab in order to provide the alternate text you want. Unfortunately, it’s more complicated with Word 2007. If you want to add alternate text, you’ll have to begin by right-clicking on the image and selecting ‘size’. After which you’ll select ‘Alt Text’. What happens here is, the filename of the image gets entered into the field by default, and this is a problem owing to the fact that the image filename is not the right alternative text. You can remedy this if the filename is replaced with the correct alternative text.

Moving on now to data tables and issues with accessibility, you should know that it is not possible to assign the table header element to table-cells in MS Word. It’s possible to specify that a row must ‘repeat as header on the top of each page’ in ‘Table Properties’, you won’t get the correct table headers.

Alternatives to Microsoft Excel

Posted by andre – November 12, 2009

If you’re looking for free, open-source spreadsheets, some of which are web-based, as an alternative to MS Excel, then have a look at this top-ten list:

1. OpenOffice Spreadsheets

OpenOffice Calc is an extremely popular substitute for Microsoft Excel as most of its features mirror those of the latter. Another plus point is its interface which is quite user-friendly. With OpenOffice Spreadsheets, you can source data from numerous corporate databases, perform cross-tabulation and many, many more things. All in all, an excellent piece of software.

2. Gnumeric

Gnumeric is a useful alternative to MS Excel. Referred to by some as ‘Gnome Office Spreadsheet’, Gnumeric includes mostly every single worksheet function that Excel offers. What makes Gnumeric better – and this is a contentious topic – than Excel is that is offers one hundred and fifty four other functions that the aforementioned software does not.

3. Abykus 2.0

A lot of people use Abykus 2.0 for many purposes, most of them scientific and business-related. Abykus 2.0’s interface is very intuitive which makes it easy for first timers. Calculations of many sorts are possible with the Abykus 2.0.

4. CleanSheets

CleanSheets is another independent alternative to MS Excel. Just a word of caution – make sure you have JRE running on your computer, otherwise this software will not work. What sets CleanSheets apart from others like it is the fact that its formula language is quite similar to that of MS Excel.

5. Numbers

Numbers’ is a handy Macintosh alternative to MS Excel. Loaded with templates, and a part of Apple’s iWork suite, ‘Numbers’ is quite different from its Windows counterpart, but it’s simple enough to get used to in very little time.

6. Google Docs –Spreadsheet

Google Docs – Spreadsheet is also quite good. A web-based substitute, it is definitely lacking in extensive functionality, but it’s meant for basic spreadsheet-work anyway. This software allows you to do the usual things you’d expect from an Excel substitute – use formulas, create and edit worksheets, make charts, etc., but what’s noteworthy is that you can share your work with others through an internet connection.

7. Spread32

A very basic program that allows you to work with spreadsheets, Spread32 provides free panes, key sorting, etc. With Spread32, you get 256 columns x 65536 rows x 255 sheets. It is meant for the simplest of calculations and tasks.

8. Thinkfree cal

Another Java-based app., Thinkfree cal is an alternative to MS Excel that works with most all OS. Basic, but useful.

9. Zoho Sheets

Yet another web-based substitute for MS Excel, Zoho Sheets is simple but reasonably powerful software. Its advantage is that a lot of people can simultaneously work on a single spreadsheet.

10. KSpread

The freeware KOffice suite runs on Unix and Unix-like OS, and KSpread is its answer to MS Excel. It’s not that great in comparison with most commercial spreadsheet software in that it doesn’t have what most of the others do. However, what redeems KSpread is that it offers features like formatting, conditional coloring, graphs, etc.