Now that it’s past the annual holiday season here in the US (Santa brought me a way-big monitor!) it’s back in the saddle again for the Weekly Roundup. This week: Microsoft Office blog does its own list of most popular posts (including a couple of issues that continually plague legal Office users), a quick-and-dirty Excel tutorial on printing title rows, and an exciting rumor for iPad users.
Excel 2010
This week’s Roundup of the reading file is an embarrassment of riches from the usual suspects: TechRepublic’s take on the most important Microsoft Word skills, how to put time values into Microsoft Excel, Vivian Manning tackles Microsoft Word’s mail merge feature, making it easier to switch between Word documents, and how to share your Microsoft Outlook calendar. Click the “Read More” link for the details. Click to continue…
![Post image for [Insanely] Popular Post: Printing Those Monster Excel Sheets](http://legalofficeguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/filestack-e1303672461628.jpg)
Because I’m always trying to make sure I’m posting tutorials that help as many readers as possible, I regularly check out the statistics on what current posts are getting the most eyeballs (so I can do “more like that“). Sometimes, the stats surprise me.
For instance, who’d have guessed that a post on how to print large Excel spreadsheets would be the #1 most popular post on this blog? Not me.
But it is. And don’t get me wrong: I’m glad it’s helping so many people, especially considering how much work went into it.
In fact, at the time I originally posted it six months ago, I had done a video tutorial to go with the illustrations and text. Unfortunately, I was still scaling the learning curve on my newly-purchased screencasting software, and since I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the irritating background whine in the the audio portion of the video, I set the video aside and published the post without it.
Now, I’ve gone back and fixed the original video showing the 5 steps to formatting a large Excel spreadsheet for printing, and I’ve added it to the post. So if printing in Excel is a mystery to you, click here to check out the post and the new companion video. (There’s even a downloadable transcript of the video in case the narration’s not 100% clear — I had to talk a little faster than normal in some spots when re-recording the narration!)
The editors at Attorney at Work reached out to me for some quick tech tips for their blog this week, and I was happy to oblige. Ranging across the most popular Microsoft Office suite applications, this guest post will show you how to:
- Set up your Status Bar to maximize its usefulness in every Microsoft Office application
- Improve the full-justification of text in Microsoft Word
- Make sure your Microsoft Excel sheets auto-calculate
- Start your Microsoft Outlook each day in the folder of your choice: Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, or even the Outlook Today overview
Click here to read these four useful tips.
A reader contacted me recently with a deceptively simple Microsoft Excel question: “How do I calculate the difference between two dates?”
I say “deceptively simple” because the answer depends upon the context, namely, whether the two dates being compared are actually embedded in cells within the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
For this week’s Roundup: how to put zeroes in otherwise blank cells in Excel (and not the long way, either), how to pick and choose which formatting marks Word shows you with Show/Hide, and a heads-up on some hefty discounts on several Outlook plug-ins.
From this week’s reading: when Outlook’s Autocomplete … won’t, when Excel’s autocalc … doesn’t, cleaning up imported data in Excel, and what to do with 250 Vcards.
If you’ve ever been presented with an Excel spreadsheet with a gosh-awful number of rows and/or columns in it and assigned the task of making sense of all those numbers (grouping, summarizing, or making other calculations), you need to learn about Pivot Tables.
Okay, people, I hear yawning out there! Seriously, this is a good skill to have in your back pocket, even if you only work with Excel occasionally, because it saves so much time. So to motivate you properly, here’s a fun little YouTube introduction to the whys behind Pivot Tables:
Basically, a Pivot Table is a way to summarize columns and rows in a meaningful way. Instead of your having to manipulate rows and rows of data by hand (which, depending on the size of the spreadsheet, could take hours), you can select the data to be summarized, go to the Insert tab, click Pivot Table, and tell Excel how you want those rows summarized.
For example, say your client is involved in an employment discrimination suit. The employer has produced a very large spreadsheet showing all the time entries recorded, including this information:
- Timekeeper initials
- Date worked
- Hours worked
- Work code
- Description of work performed
If you’re being asked to figure out how many hours timekeeper CAL (the plaintiff) clocked in Word Code 01 during the month of June, you don’t want to have to manually add those hours. Sure, you could sort the rows and put in a summary row, but even that’s not necessary with Pivot Tables.
A pivot table allows you to take a spreadsheet that looks like this (times several hundred or thousand rows);
And turn it into a summary table that looks like this:
And it just takes a few mouse clicks. Let Excel do all the work for you!
Here’s a video demonstration:
[To view this full-screen, click the button in the lower right-hand corner]
Where could you put this trick to use? Let me know in the comments below.
Want one-click access to the commands you use most in Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010? Then you need to be taking full advantage of the Quick Access Toolbar!
The Quick Access Toolbar really lives up to its name: it provides one-click access to virtually any command you want. All you have to do is customize it.
And one of the great things about the Quick Access Toolbar (or QAT) is that it’s virtually the same throughout Microsoft Office. Sure, the commands vary according to the application, but the way you update it is the same across the Office Suite.
Here are two ways to add your favorite commands to the QAT:
What commands would you want on your QAT? Let me know in the comments below!
My friend Karen has issues. No, I’m not talking about those kinds of issues. She’s got issues with Microsoft Excel.
Every time her boss gives her one of those monster Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (the kind that span 10 pages across and have 20,000 rows of data) and says, “Print this,” she panics. And then she comes to my desk and begs me to print it for her.
I can’t say I blame her. Unless you’re worked with Microsoft Excel a fair bit, the prospect of formatting something that large for printing is pretty daunting. (I always felt the same way about Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS back in its heyday. Yes, I am that old.)
I promised her I’d break this process down for her so, in case I’m on vacation one day when she really, really needs something printed now, she’ll know how to do it herself.
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