Category Archives: Microsoft Office

Content related to the Microsoft Office suite of products.

Minimize the Ribbon

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Getting back some screen real estate.

One of the things that you might find bothersome about Excel 2007′s Ribbon is the amount of space it takes up at the top of the workbook window. Fortunately, you can get it out of the way and recover that space. Here’s how.

  1. Right click on any button on the Ribbon. A contextual menu appears:

    Contextual Menu

  2. Choose Minimize the Ribbon. The Ribbon shrinks so it looks a lot like a good, old fashioned menu bar.

    Minimized Ribbon

From that point on, to access the Ribbon, click the tab you want to expand and display it. It will overlap the top of the document window, as shown here:

Expanded Ribbon

When you continue working in the worksheet window, the Ribbon collapses again.

To get the Ribbon back to normal, right-click on any Ribbon tab and choose Minimize the Ribbon from the contextual menu that appears. That will toggle the feature to “off.”

Excel 2003 VQS Correction of the Day

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Another very minor correction to my Excel 2003 VQS for Windows book.

As I continue to revise the book for Excel 2007 on Windows Vista, I continue to find tiny errors in the existing book.

Today’s error is on page 118, in the caption for Figure 38. The caption states that gridlines have been turned off for the illustration. In reality, they have not. But I do explain how to turn gridlines off in Chapter 15.

A Closer Look at Word 2004′s Status Bar

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There’s a lot of information there.

Word 2004 (and other versions of Word, for that matter) packs a lot of information into the status bar at the bottom of the document window. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Word's Status Bar

What appears depends on the view of the document, its contents, and the features you have enabled or disabled. Here’s a quick rundown of what to expect and how to take advantage of this information:

  • Page is the page number of the page currently displayed. If you’re viewing the document in Normal view or are viewing multiple pages at once, it’s the page where the insertion point is blinking or text is selected. The number that appears corresponds to the page numbering of the document. For example, if you indicated to Word that the first page is 17 and you’re looking at the second page of the document, Page will display 18.
  • Sec is the section number currently displayed. This will be 1 unless you inserted section breaks in your document. Like Page, if you’re looking at multiple sections, it displays section number for the blinking insertion point or beginning of selected text.
  • number/number is the current page number and the total number of pages in the document. This is based on the physical count of pages — not special page numbering you may have assigned.
  • At is the distance between the top of the page and the blinking insertion point. If the insertion point is not in the window, no value is displayed.
  • Ln is the insertion point’s line number, measured from the top of the page. If the insertion point is not in the window, no value is displayed.
  • Col is the number of characters from the left margin to the insertion point. If the insertion point is not in the window, no value is displayed.
  • The Word Count dialognumber/number is the word count statistics for the document. The Live Word Count feature must be turned on for this to display. (Choose Word > Preferences, click View, turn on the check box for Live Word Count.) The first value is the position of the insertion point as measured in words from the beginning of the document. If multiple words are selected, that value is the number of words selected. The second value is the total number of words in the document. If you click these values, the Word Count dialog appears, displaying the number of pages, words, characters (no spaces), characters (with spaces), paragraphs, and lines in the document.
  • Spelling Contextual MenuSpelling and Grammar Checking status is an icon that indicates the status of the spelling and grammar checker. During a check, the icon is animated. If no errors are found, a check mark appears. If an error is found, an X appears; you can click the icon to select the first unknown word with a contextual menu you can use to correct, ignore, or learn it.
  • REC is the macro recorder status. Click REC to display the Record Macro dialog and turn the macro recorder on or off. When the recorder is on, a green bullet appears next to REC.
  • TRK is the track changes feature status. Click TRK to display the Reviewing toolbar and turn the track changes feature on or off. When changes are being tracked, a green bullet appears next to REC.
  • EXT is the extend selection mode status. Click EXT to turn the mode on or off. When selection mode is on, a green bullet appears next to EXT and using various keyboard keys extends the selection of text in the document. (I don’t use this feature and would love to hear from people who do. Use the Comments link to share your insight on this feature.)
  • OVR is the overtype mode status. Click OVR to turn the mode on or off. When overtype mode is on, a green bullet appears next to OVR and the insertion cursor turns into an overtype cursor, automatically overwriting everything to the right as you type.
  • File version status is an icon that indicates the document includes more than one version. It only appears if the document has multiple versions. Clicking the icon displays the Versions dialog so you can choose the version you want to display onscreen. You can create multiple versions of a Word document by choosing File > Versions.

Other icons may appear at the far right end of the status bar when Word is saving a document with the background save feature or printing a document in the background.

As you can see, the status bar is more than just a collection of numbers and icons at the bottom of a Word document window. It can provide useful information and give you easy access to Word features.

Excel 2003 VQS Figure Correction

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Well, it only took me 3 years to notice this.

Sheesh. It always happens. I find errors in books I’m revising, after thousands of people have bought the book and consulted it, sometimes for years.

Well, that’s part of what my Book Support sites are about: to provide corrections and clarifications to the books. So here’s a correction on my Excel 2003 Visual QuickStart Guide.

Due to a cropping error in the layout (my fault), Figure 6 on Page 107 is incorrect. It should look like this:

Formatting Examples

If you find an error in any of my books, please don’t keep it to yourself. Use the appropriate Q & A post to comment on it. If it’s wrong, I’ll fix it and note it on the Book Support pages. If it’s not wrong, we’ll try to figure out why you think it is.

Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide is Off to the Printer

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(I just write ‘em — I don’t name ‘em.)

Excel Visual QuickProjectThe revision to my Excel 2007 Visual QuickStart Guide was shipped to the printer this week. My editor expects the book to be in stores by year-end.

The book is a raw beginners guide to Excel. This version covers Excel 2007, which will be widely available at January month-end. The previous edition, which is still available and has been selling very well since its publication over two years ago, covers Excel 2003 for Windows and Excel 2004 for Macintosh. I expect both editions of the book to sell side by side at least until Excel for Macintosh is revised — whenever that may be.

For more information about the book and downloadable files, visit the Excel QuickProject area of this site.

Interested in buying the book? Check it out at Amazon.com.

Solutions for Failing Eyesight

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Don’t make the font size larger — zoom it!

Yesterday, I reread a blog entry I wrote earlier this year about my failing eyesight (“The Eyes Had It“). My far vision has always been bad, but now I’m beginning to lose my close vision, too. Miraz, my co-author on the WordPress book, commented that she’s going through the same thing and now uses a larger font size when working with Word.

As a writer, I spend a good portion of my workday in front of word processing or page layout software. I have a 21″ Sony monitor at my office — you know, one of those enormous super VGA CRTs that weighs about 80 lbs. I have the screen resolution set so I see a lot on my screen. But that means that most of what I see is small.

I found that if I received a document from someone with a normal font size — say 12 points — I just wasn’t able to view it comfortably at 100% magnification. So I needed a workaround.

There were two options:

  • Change the screen resolution to a lower setting. On a Mac, you do this with the Displays preferences pane. On Windows, I think it’s also called Displays and its a control panel. I’m not sure what that big monitor at the office is set to, but my 12″ PowerBook is set all the way up to 1024 x 786. If I dropped that down to 800 x 600, everything on screen would look larger and I’d probably have a better time seeing it. But I’d also get less on my screen. And some Web sites — like Flying M Air, for example — actually require a high resolution setting of at least 1024 x 786. So that isn’t the optimum solution.
  • Zoom the contents of windows. Most applications have a zoom feature. For example, in Microsoft Word 2003 for Windows and 2004 for Mac OS, there’s a Zoom drop-down list right on the Standard toolbar. Choose an option from the menu or enter a new value in the text box there and press Return or Enter. I usually use 120%, unless the author of the document formatted it at some crazy font size like 9 points. Then I pop it up to 150%. I even had a document I worked on at 200% because between the small font size and the font design itself, I just couldn’t read it comfortably at any other magnification. Other programs, such as Excel, Adobe Reader (and Apple Preview, for that matter), Photoshop, and just about any other graphics or page layout program you can think of, have zoom features. I even have keystrokes remembered in some apps to toggle magnifications as necessary.

It’s odd because on one book I worked on, I’d submit Word files I’d been reading at 120% magnification and get them back from the copyeditor at 92% magnification. I’d have to pop them back up to read them. The benefit of using the magnification feature rather than simply changing font size is that layout isn’t affected. Document magnification settings can be set at anything and it’ll always have the same word wrap (except in Word’s Online Layout View perhaps) and it’ll always print the same. If you change the font size, however, you also change the word wrap and layout.

Of course, if you have trouble reading a printed version of the document, font size is just about the only solution.

But I’m not quite there. Yet.

New Excel Book in Progress

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After two months off from writing, I begin work on an Excel book revision.

Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Excel: Visual QuickProject GuideI dove into a revision of my Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Excel: Visual QuickProject Guide book today. I actually got the first chapter — all 16 pages of it — done.

If you’re not familiar with the VQJ (as Peachpit calls it) series, it’s pretty simple. Written for raw beginners, the books use a lot of full color illustrations, large text, numbered steps, and callout lines. Each book in the series is only 144 or 168 pages long — this one weighs in at 144 pages. It’s not the least bit intimidating for any reader.

The first edition of the book covered Excel 2003 for Windows and Excel 2004 for Mac OS. The two versions of Excel are virtually identical, so it made sense to do one book to cover them both. I think I did a good job giving each platform equal space and showing screenshots from both platforms when they were significantly different.

The idea behind the series is to present a project — in this case, creating a budget spreadsheet, duplicating it for multiple months of information, consolidating the months, formatting the spreadsheets so they look good, creating a chart, and printing. All the basics are covered in one project, presented over multiple chapters. The first chapter covers preliminary stuff like interface elements and terminology. The next chapter is where we start creating the spreadsheet.

Creating Resumes, Letters, Business Cards, and Flyers in Word: Visual QuickProject GuideI have two books in this series. This one is doing very well and has been translated into at least two languages. The other book — take a deep breath if you plan to read the title out loud — Creating Resumes, Letters, Business Cards, and Flyers in Word: Visual QuickProject Guide (I had to look it up; I can never remember the title of that book), isn’t doing quite as well. I like to think it’s because people don’t really want to create all those things. But it’s probably because the Word book market is full of titles and this 168-page tome just doesn’t stand out enough on bookstore shelves.

Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Microsoft Excel 2007: Visual QuickProject GuideThis Excel book revision is not cross platform. Tentatively titled Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Microsoft Excel 2007: Visual QuickProject Guide, it covers Excel 2007 for Windows only. (It always amazes me when Amazon.com knows what one of my books will look like before I do.) To write it, I not only had to get my hands on the Office beta, but I also had to get the Windows Vista beta, which my editor wanted running on the computer for all the screenshots. Without Vista, he claimed, the book would look outdated right away. He’s right. And although I wasn’t too thrilled about running beta application software on beta System software, it seems to be working pretty well. Of course, I had to buy a new computer to run all this stuff. My ancient Dell desktop machine would have dropped dead if I tried installing Vista on it, especially with the new graphics-intensive interface. The new Dell Latitude 820 laptop I bought to replace it is handling everything with ease. It should for what it cost me. But with luck, I won’t have to replace it for 4 to 5 years.

Office 2007 is no secret. You can see screenshots and all kinds of training material on the Microsoft Office 2007 Preview site. You might even still be able to download a beta. It’ll run on Windows XP and Vista, so you don’t have to do a double beta like I did to run it.

Over the years, many have complained that Office doesn’t change much with each new version. You won’t hear those complaints this time around. Microsoft has completely reworked the interface. The menus and toolbars are gone, replaced with something called the Ribbon. Click a Ribbon tab to view groups of commands. Click a command to invoke it. Or click a tiny button in the corner of a group to display a good old dialog box.

The new design does appear to be easier for newbies to grasp. But I think it’ll frustrate the hell out of seasoned Office users — at least until they get used to the interface. There’s logic behind it, so if you think about what you want to do, you can figure out where to find the buttons or menus you need to do it. And all the old keyboard shortcuts still work, so if you’ve been using Office applications for years, you won’t be at a total loss in the new version.

Of course, all this has me wondering whether they’ll use the same interface in the Mac version of Office when it gets updated. That would be almost sacrilegious. After all, didn’t Apple invent the interface so widely used by Mac OS and Windows programs? I can’t imagine a Mac program without a menu bar that starts with File and Edit. I guess time will tell.

What’s good about all this for me is that people will need a book to learn the new versions of Office applications. They can’t just use an old Office book to work with the new version. With luck, that’ll help book sales a little. After all, I have to pay for that fancy new computer, don’t I?

Stay tuned for more information about this book as it is completed. It will definitely make it to stores at the same time as Office 2007 — heck, at the rate I’m going, I should be done with it by the end of the month.

On the Intelligence of Quotes

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Maria Speaks Episode 27: On the Intelligence of Quotes.

This short podcast is a reading from a recent article I wrote on my book support site for Microsoft Word users. It explains the difference between smart and straight quotes and tells you how to work with them in Microsoft Word. You can read the transcript of this podcast and see the accompanying screenshots at www.aneclecticmind.com

Transcripts:

Curly or “smart” quotes are single and double quote marks that curve in toward what they surround. This blog, if viewed in the intended font, displays all quotes as smart quotes. Smart quotes are also often referred to as “typographers” quotes because they’re common in printed work like books, magazine articles, and other documents.

You may not realize it, but a smart quote character is actually a different character than its corresponding straight quote. Think about it: it has to be. After all, it looks different, doesn’t it? That means it has to be a different character.

These characters are easy to type on a Macintosh. For example, to get the “ character, type Option-[. to get the ’ character, type Shift-Option-]. (Although there must be some way to type these in on a Windows computer, I don’t know how to do it; perhaps a reader can use the Comments link to share the keystrokes?)

Special CharactersIn Word, you can also use the Special Characters pane of the Symbols dialog. Choose Insert > Symbol to display the dialog and click the Special Characters tab or button. Scroll down to find the character you want (they’re listed at the bottom of the list) and double-click the one you want to insert it. This is a rather cumbersome way to get the job done, but it does work.

AutoFormat as You TypeFortunately, Word offers a better, automated way. You can set an option in the AutoFormat as you Type pane of the AutoCorrect dialog that will automatically convert every straight quote you type to the corresponding smart quote. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click the AutoFormat as You Type tab or button in the dialog that appears. Then turn on the “Straight quotes” with “Smart quotes” check box. (As you can see, that’s the only feature I have enabled in this pane on my copy of Word; I don’t like Word messing with the formatting of what I type, as I discuss in “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them.”) Click OK to save your setting.

From that point on, every time you type a single or double quote, Word will convert it to a smart quote. If your computer isn’t very fast, you might actually be able to see the conversion happen. And, if you use Word’s Undo feature, you can undo the conversion to revert the character back to the regular quote you typed.

I should mention here that this feature is enabled by default, so if you never changed this setting and you want smart quotes, you don’t have to do a thing to get them.

Now suppose you have a document that was typed without smart quotes. Perhaps a passage of text copied from a Web site or a document someone wrote with a plain old text editor. You want to dress up the document for printing and smart quotes are important to you. Do you have to retype all those quotes to “educate” them? Heck no! Just use Find and Replace.

Find and ReplaceFirst double check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” feature is enabled as discussed above. Then choose Edit > Replace to display the Find and Replace window. Type the same plain old double quote character in the Find What and Replace With boxes. Then click Replace All. Word will replace the dumb double quotes with the correct smart quotes and tell you how many it replaced. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog. Then type the same plain old single quote character in the Find What and Replace with boxes and click Replace All. Word replaces all the dumb single quotes with smart single quotes. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog and close the Find and Replace window.

If you do this a lot, you might consider writing a macro that does the job for you. But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

What if you have a document with smart quotes and you need to turn them into straight quotes? Easy enough. Follow the same process, but before you use the Find and Replace window, check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” option is turned off. Find and Replace should dumb up the quotes.

Now that you know the tricks, there’s no reason why your Word documents shouldn’t have the smartest quotes around.

Microsoft, Word, smart quotes

Excel Books Q & A

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Post your questions about my Excel books here.

Have a question about something in one of my Excel books? Here’s how to get the answer:

  1. Browse through the comments at the end of this article to see if someone else has already asked your question. You might get the answer without even asking!
  2. If your question is not asked (or answered), use the Leave a Comment form at the bottom of this post to enter your question. (If the form does not appear, click the Comment link below to display it.)
  3. Check in once in a while to see if your question is answered. I usually answer questions within 48 hours, unless I’m out of town. To have responses to your question delivered to you automatically by e-mail, along with other Q & A comments submitted for this book, turn on the Notify Me check box at the bottom of the form when submitting your question (step 2). You can unsubscribe to the notification feature at any time.

Please do not use the Contact form to ask me questions. I won’t answer them. I want the questions and answers here, where everyone can see them, so I don’t have to answer the same questions over and over again.

Remember, I can only answer questions that clarify or correct information in my books. If the answer to your question is in my book, I will provide a page number reference to help you find it.

October 27, 2011 Update: Due to the age of these titles, they are no longer supported. Comments have been closed but remain in case you have a question that has already been answered here. Support for my Lynda.com titles can be found on the course page on Lynda.com.

Word Books Q & A

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Post your questions about my Word books here.

Have a question about something in one of my Word books? Here’s how to get the answer:

  1. Browse through the comments at the end of this article to see if someone else has already asked your question. You might get the answer without even asking!
  2. If your question is not asked (or answered), use the Leave a Comment form at the bottom of this post to enter your question. (If the form does not appear, click the Comment link below to display it.)
  3. Check in once in a while to see if your question is answered. I usually answer questions within 48 hours, unless I’m out of town. To have responses to your question delivered to you automatically by e-mail, along with other Q & A comments submitted for this book, turn on the Notify Me check box at the bottom of the form when submitting your question (step 2). You can unsubscribe to the notification feature at any time.

Please do not use the Contact form to ask me questions. I won’t answer them. I want the questions and answers here, where everyone can see them, so I don’t have to answer the same questions over and over again.

Remember, I can only answer questions that clarify or correct information in my books. If the answer to your question is in my book, I will provide a page number reference to help you find it.

October 27, 2011 Update: Due to the age of these titles, they are no longer supported. Comments have been closed but remain in case you have a question that has already been answered here. Support for my Lynda.com titles can be found on the course page on Lynda.com.

Word Can Drive You Crazy

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Maria Speaks Episode 5: Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy…And What You Can Do About Them

This episode is the first audio recording of one of the many articles I’ve written for the Informit.com Web site. Informit is the Web publishing arm of Pearson Education, which is the company that owns Peachpit Press. Most of the books I’ve written since 1995 have been for Peachpit. This makes me one of Informit’s favorite authors.

The folks at Informit publish my articles with screen shots as I write them. They’ve asked me not to republish them on my site. To make these articles easy to find, I’ve linked to them on the Articles page of my Web site. So if you want to read the transcript for this article and see the screenshots that go with it, just visit the Articles page on my Web site, www.aneclecticmind.com.

And if you’re a Word user looking for a book to help you get more out of the software, I hope you’ll pick up one of my Word Visual QuickStart Guides. I’ve been writing them for a while for Mac OS and Windows versions of Word. You can learn more about them and read other Word articles on my Web site, www.aneclecticmind.com.

Absolutely the Last Article You Need To Read About Absolute References in Excel

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Informit article.

Ever copy a formula you think is perfect and have surprising (and incorrect) results in the destination cells? You might be missing out on a feature of Excel that can make your spreadsheet work easier.

Read more at: Absolutely the Last Article You Need To Read About Absolute References in Excel

Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them

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Informit.com Article

Does autoformatting make you nuts? We computer users have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft Word. Some of us see Microsoft as the Evil Empire of Computing and refuse to use its software at all. The rest of us are more realistic; we understand the benefits of using some of the world’s most popular software for everyday chores. But even fans know that Word has a few features that can drive anyone absolutely bonkers. In this article, I present the top three ways Word can drive you crazy and tell you how to fix it to maintain your sanity while you work.

Read here: “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them”.