Maria’s Guides

Two Excerpts from Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Microsoft Office Excel 2007: Visual QuickProject Guide.

Want to see some sample pages from my Excel Visual QuickProject? Here are a few links.

• Front Matter (including complete Table of Contents)
• Excerpt from Chapter 3

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Just a quick note to pass along some info I got in e-mail from Peachpit Press, one of my publishers.

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They’ve added features to the site, including online video tutorials, access to blogs, and online reference guides. But the news that might interest you most is that they’re also offering a 40% discount on all books purchased on the site:

To thank you for your feedback and to celebrate our new site we would like to offer you a 40% discount on your purchases. Just order before September 15 and enter coupon code PPT-NEWSITE-EM01 during checkout!

Sounds like a good deal to me. I hope you’ll take advantage of it, perhaps to buy one or more of my books?

Information from the Microsoft Web Site.

This update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. For more information about this update, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (KB940763).

System requirements

Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.6 Update is installed on your computer. To verify that you have installed this update, select the Microsoft Component Plugin file in the Microsoft Office 2004/Office folder on your hard disk, and then on the File menu, click Get Info.

Additionally, your computer must meet the following minimum requirements:

• Operating system: Mac OS X 10.2.8 (Jaguar) or a later version of Mac OS

Note:To verify that your computer meets these minimum requirements, on the Apple menu, click About This Mac.

More information

If you have technical questions or problems downloading or using this update, visit the Microsoft Support page at www.microsoft.com/mac/support to learn about the support options that are available to you.

Another quick spreadsheet to show off the capabilities of Excel.

Site visitor Jamie left the following comment on my recent post, “Random Number Generator for Excel“:

maria dont spose u know how to split a four digit number like 2365 into 4 different numbers 2 3 6 5 in all different cells in excel without having to do it manually just wandering please tell me if you know a way thanks

I had an idea of how to do this with the MID function, which is a text function. I just didn’t know if I had to convert the starting number to text before extracting the digits.

So I whipped up the attached worksheet and popped in the formulas. The answer: no, you don’t need to convert the number to text first.

The MID function has 3 arguments:

• text is the text you want to extract characters from. For this example, it’s the four-digit number.
• start_num is the number of the first character in the string you want to extract. For this example, it’s the digit number (1 though 4).
• num_chars is the number of characters you want to extract. For this example, it’s 1.

You can examine the formulas in the spreadsheet for yourself to learn more. Download it here.

Hope this helps, Jamie!

Information from Microsoft’s Web site.

This update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. This update also addresses an issue with using public folders in Entourage, and it contains the latest postal code information for Japanese addresses.

System requirements

Before you install this update, make sure that the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.5 Update is installed on your computer. To verify that you have installed this update, select the Microsoft Component Plugin file in the Microsoft Office 2004/Office folder on your hard disk, and then on the File menu, click Get Info.

Additionally, your computer must meet the following minimum requirements:

Operating system: Mac OS X 10.2.8 (Jaguar) or a later version of Mac OS

Note: To verify that your computer meets these minimum requirements, on the Apple menu, click About This Mac.

Improvements for Excel 2004

• Security is improved. This update fixes vulnerabilities in Excel 2004 that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code.

Improvements for Entourage 2004

• Microsoft Exchange public folder data loss issue is fixed. This update fixes an issue that causes data loss when public folder users who have a permission level of “Editor” or greater use Entourage to empty the cache for all public folders on the server running Exchange Server.
• Japanese postal code dictionary is updated. The Japanese postal code dictionary is updated with the latest information as of May 2007.

More information

If you have technical questions or problems downloading or using this update, visit the Microsoft Support page at www.microsoft.com/mac/support to learn about the support options that are available to you.

A quick little project.

I just happened to visit a Web site that used another Web site to generate random numbers for contest giveaways. To me, an Excel user, that seemed like a silly place to go to get a random number when you could easily generate one on the fly within Excel.

So I whipped up a tiny Excel spreadsheet to do the job. You just put the minimum value in one box and the maximum value in the other and Excel generates a random number between the two for you. To generate additional random numbers in the range, just press Command-= (on a Mac) or Control-= in Windows. The worksheet is protected so you can’t accidentally delete the formula that does the magic.

Although I created the worksheet in Excel 2004 for Mac OS, it can be opened in Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows, too.

Want a copy? Download it here.