Tips and Tricks from Right-Track Learning Center


Schedule Certification Register

Tips & Tricks

Right-Track gives you tips to popular software applications.

Microsoft Word | Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Office

MICROSOFT OFFICE TIPS!

Watch Me Pull a Toolbar Out of My Hat

All of a sudden, you look up and one of your Office application's toolbars has disappeared! No, it wasn't magic. You may have accidentally right-clicked on a toolbar button and deselected it. To make the toolbar reappear, choose View|Toolbars and then select the missing toolbar from the list. You can also right-click on an existing toolbar to open the toolbar dialog box.

We Got Yer Toolbars Right Here

If you need to move a toolbar temporarily (or permanently), use the mouse to grab it (with a click and drag) someplace where there's no button and then drag it out into the workspace. Look, it's a floating toolbar now! It can be moved anywhere in the window. To make the toolbar stay in this position forever, you must choose a spot that elongates the toolbar, usually on the side or bottom of the screen.

Getting Rid of the Office 97 Assistant

If you are not fond of the Office Assistant, few things are more annoying. It seems as though you can't get rid of the little pest. Microsoft does not make it easy for you to permanently make it disappear. Here's how to make it happen:

Put your MS Office disc in the CD-ROM player.
Click Start|Settings|Control Panel, then double-click on the Add/Remove Programs icon.
Select Microsoft Office from the list and click the Add/Remove button.
Follow all the onscreen instructions then deselect (clear the check mark beside) "Office Assistant".
Go through all the rest of the dialog boxes that appear, and that perky little paperclip will vanish.

MICROSOFT WORD TIPS!

When You Have Too Much Style

A paragraph is totally messed up. You don't know what you did, but it's time to start over. To remove all formatting, click in the paragraph, type CTRL+SHIFT+N. That will return the paragraph to Normal, the default style for the document. To clear just character formatting, select the words, press CTRL+SPACEBAR and all character formatting is history.

Over the Line

If you have some reason to type three or more hyphens on a line and then press the Enter key, you may be annoyed by Word's insistence on changing those hyphens into a drawn line across you page. That's a feature, not a bug! That's AutoFormat doing its job to make your life easier. But if that's not what you want, you'll need to turn it off.

In Word97, choose Tools|AutoCorrect, then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. In the Apply As You Type section, clear the check box for Borders. Click OK.

In other versions of Word, select Tools|Options and click on the AutoFormat tab. Deselect the Symbol Characters. with Symbols check box. Click OK.

Mouse Selection

Selection Method	Technique
Drag	Press and hold mouse button at beginning of text to be selected, drag over remaining text.
Select a word	Double-click inside the word.
Select a sentence	Hold down the CTRL key and click inside the sentence.
Select a line	Click in the Selection Bar next to the line.
Select multiple lines	Click and drag up or down in Selection Bar.
Select a paragraph	Double-click in the Selection Bar, or triple-click inside of paragraph.
Select a document	Hold down CTRL key and click in Selection Bar, or triple-click in Selection Bar.
Select variable amount of text	Click to put insertion point at beginning of selection, hold down the Shift key, click at end of selection.
Deselect	Make another selection or click mouse button in any non-selected text.

Keyboard Cursor Movement

Keystroke	To move the cursor...
Right or Left arrow	One character to the right or left.
Up or Down arrow	One character up or down.
Home	To the beginning of a line.
End	To the end of a line.
PageUp or PageDown	Up or Down one screen.
CTRL+Home	To the beginning of the document.
CTRL+End	To the end of the document.
CTRL+PageUp	To the top of the screen.
CTRL+PageDown	To the bottom of the screen.
CTRL+ALT+PageUp	To the top of the previous page.
CTRL+ALT+PageDown	To the top of the next page.
CTRL+G, F5 or Edit\|Go To	To bring up the Go To dialog box.

Jumping Through Your Pages

To scan your document one page at a time, simply use the Edit|Go To command (or press F5). Instead of typing a specific page number in the Go To dialog box that appears, just click on the Next button. Each time you do, you will advance to the next page.

No Borders, Please!

You may at some point want to remove a border you've placed around a paragraph. It's easy to do, but not as obvious as it could be.

Position your insertion point somewhere in the paragraph that contains the border.
Select Borders and Shading from the Format menu. This activates the Borders and Shading dialog box.
Select the "None" option in the upper-left corner, then click OK.

Using the Correct Accent

When preparing a document to show a prospective employer how great you are, you don't want to use the word "resume" in it. The word is résumé. These accented characters are available from the Insert|Symbol... menu, but you can also type them from the keyboard. Typing CTRL+' (the apostrophe key) and then the letter you want, such as "e", will produce the correct accented character. Try also: CTRL+` (the accent-grave character), CTRL+SHIFT+^ (caret), CTRL+SHIFT+~ (the tilde), and CTRL+SHIFT+: (colon) for other accented characters.

MICROSOFT EXCEL TIPS!

Spell Checking Everything

You can check the spelling in your workbook even if you have data in more than one worksheet of that workbook. Here's how:

Right-click on one of the worksheet tabs. This opens a menu.
Choose Select All Sheets from the menu.
Start your spell check (press F7 or the Spell Check button on the toolbar).

Using the Print Area

If your worksheet is fairly small, and you will always want to print only the cells that contain data, using Excel's Print Area feature can save a great deal of time. Here's how: using the mouse to select the cells you want to print. Choose File|Print Area|Set Print Area from the menu. Now when you select File|Print, or simple press CTRL+P, you'll print only the area you want.

A Permanent Template

If you use the same Excel template over and over again, rather than opening the template each time you want to create a new worksheet, make it the default template. Here's how: Save the template with the name "Book.XLT" and place it in the "Xlstart" folder. Now your template will open automatically when you start Excel.

Calculating Julian Dates

Sometimes it may be necessary to know where a particular date falls within a year. For example, September 11, 1997 is the 254th day of the year. It's easier than you may think. Assuming the date is entered in cell A1, enter this formula in the cell you wish to display the day of the year: +a1-date(year(a1)-1,12,31). See the Date command in Excel Help for details on how this works.

My End Key Doesn't Work!

If you're new to Excel, you may think your End key is broken. It doesn't behave the way End does in your word processor, that is, it doesn't move you to the end of a line. That's because, technically speaking, there are no "lines" in Excel. Pressing the End key activates what is called "End Mode". Excel is waiting for you to press an arrow key after pressing End. If you press End, then right-arrow on a row with data, Excel will move you to the last cell in that row containing data. If there is no data in that row, you'll go to the last cell in the row instead.