A good many of the worksheets that are created Excel contain headings in the top row of the sheet. Normally, whenever we scroll down the sheet, any headings at the top will disappear. Similarly, if one scrolls to the right, any headings on the left will disappear. Excel’s Freeze Panes command, which is located in the View Tab of the Excel Ribbon, allows you to freeze our headings so that, as we scroll the sheet, headings remain in view.
Excel offers us three options: firstly, we can choose “Freeze Top Row”. A bold horizontal line is then displayed underneath the first row which extends into the row headings. As we scroll down the worksheet, the headings at the top of the sheet remain in view. Similarly, we can choose “Freeze First Column”. This time, the bold line extends to the right of the first column and into the column heading area. Then, as we scroll to the right, the first column remains frozen so that we can see the headings it contains and compare them with the data in the adjacent cells. To return to normal scrolling, we simply choose “Unfreeze Panes” in the “Freeze Panes” drop-down menu.
As well as freezing a single row or column, it is also possible to freeze an arbitrary number of rows and columns. To do this, you simply highlight the cell below the last row you want frozen and to the right of the last column you want frozen. So, for example, if you want to to freeze the first row and the first column, you just select cell “B2″. Once you have highlighted the cell, in the “Freeze Panes” drop-down menu, you would then choose “Freeze Panes”.
This time, there are two bold lines: one indicating the column that is frozen and one indicating the row that is frozen. Then, as we scroll down the first row remains frozen and, similarly, when we scroll to the right the first column remains frozen. Once again, to return to normal behaviour, we simply choose “Unfreeze Panes” in the “Freeze Panes” drop-down menu.
Since this command allows you to freeze any number of rows or columns, if you are ever working on a large worksheet perhaps containing multiple row and column headings, you will probably find it pretty much an essential feature.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007Classes in London and throughout the UK.
Microsoft Excel is an excellent spreadsheet environment and a very powerful tool for business analysis. If you bought this sophisticated piece of software, it makes sense to ensure that your staff members know how to use it effectively. Having allowed them a week or two to get used to the new environment and go through some online tutorials, you will probably want to get them properly trained. Tutor-led software training has the benefit that delegates are able to ask questions as they learn and have complex concepts explained and demonstrated to them until they fully understand them.
Sending your people on a public Excel course is one possibility. However, increasingly companies are demanding to have this training customised to meet their specific demands. Microsoft Excel can be used for a variety of data analysis and storage tasks: not everyone uses it in the same way. Perhaps you will be using it for complex business modelling. Or, you may be using it to create interactive forms and reports complete with complex calculations. Maybe your staff will be using the program in a database role recording information under column headings. Booking a customised course will ensure that you only pay for instruction which is relevant to your requirements and reflects the way in which you will be using Microsoft Excel.
Before you start contacting Excel training companies, it would be a good idea to ensure that you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve by using Excel and that your expectations are realistic. When you approach training companies, you should make it clear that you do not simply want them to deliver their standard Excel courses but that you require a customised programme of training. Between you, a schedule of topics to be covered should then be drawn up and the duration of the program decided.
Part of tailoring the training will be the identification of the different requirements within your own organisation. Different people may need to do different tasks with the program and therefore need different skills. For example, some of your users will be primarily interested in using Excel for business analysis and projection. Their primary areas of interest will be the “What if” analysis tool like goal seek, scenarios and pivot tables. On the other hand, you may have people who are interested in create charts and reports either for printing or for use in PowerPoint presentations.
If a training company offer customised Excel courses, they should also be willing to accommodate the specific needs of your organisation and the different profiles of the staff members: accounts, sales and marketing, etc. Between you, you can then create a program of study which satisfies the needs of all users. Perhaps this may mean, having different courses for users with different profiles or perhaps the best approach will be a modular one whereby some modules are taken by everyone while others are only attended by certain user groups.
The Mini toolbar is a floating window which automatically pops up whenever you highlight text. Initially all the options it contains are conveniently dimmed. However, as soon as you position the cursor over its controls, the Mini toolbar becomes activated.
It offers a selection of handy options for formatting your text. All of these options can equally be found in the Home tab of the Word Ribbon. The top row of Mini toolbar icons allows you to change the font, size and colour of our text and also contains Word’s nifty Format Painter. Word’s Format Painter tool allows you to copy the format of the selected text to other areas of your document.
The second row of the Mini toolbar contains buttons for making your text bold, italic or centre aligned. It also has options for altering the colour of the highlighted text, indenting text and inserting bullets.
The Mini toolbar offers a very convenient way of quickly formatting your text without having to go back to the Ribbon to find the options you’re looking for. However, there are times when it can be inconvenient. This is particularly true when using the drag-and-drop facility within Microsoft Word.
This feature allows you to highlight text and simply drag it to a new location. However, just as you are about to drag, it’s very easy for the cursor to collide with the Mini toolbar and instead of dragging your text, you simply change its format.
As a user of Word 2007, only you can decide whether you like the Mini toolbar facility or not. If you decide it’s not for you, Word allows you to deactivate the Mini toolbar facility. Choose Word Options from the Office button. The very first option in the Popular category is “Show Mini Toolbar on selection”. If you decide that the you not like the Mini toolbar, simply switch off this option. Now, whenever you highlight text, no Mini toolbar palette will appear.
The creators of Word 2007 obviously believe that you will eventually come round and become a fan of the Mini toolbar because, even when you have asked Word not to display the Mini toolbar, it is still possible to show it by simply right-clicking on selected text.
Each Excel document is referred to as a workbook and each workbook can contain up to 255 worksheets. To activate a particular worksheet, click on one of the tabs displayed at the bottom of your screen.
To the left of the worksheet tabs will find four navigation icons. These are useful where you have a workbook that either contains lots of worksheets or has worksheets with very long names. The very first icon makes the name of the first worksheet visible; the very last icon makes the name of the last worksheet visible. The left pointing arrow reveals the name of the previous worksheet and of course the right pointing arrow reveals the name of the next worksheet. These icons do not actually activate a worksheet; they simply make its name tab visible. To activate a worksheet, you still have to click on that particular tab.
Worksheets can also be activated from the keyboard. To activate the next worksheet to the right, hold down the Control key and press Page Down. This moves you forward through your worksheets are naturally holding the Control key and pressing Page Up moves you back to the left.
Having navigated to a particular worksheet, you will need to go to a particular cell or a particular section of that worksheet. Naturally, you can use the scroll bars to make different areas of the worksheet visible. You can also move around the worksheet by pressing the arrows on your keyboard: down, right, up and left.
Excel also allows you to use keyboard shortcuts for moving to the edges of a given body of data. To get to the right-most cell of the current range, hold down Control and press the right arrow and of course to get to the bottom cell, hold down Control and press the down arrow.
It is also possible to do exactly the same thing with the mouse. Position the cursor on one of the edges of the selection rectangle (that bold highlight which is displayed around the currently active cell) and then you simply double-click. Double-clicking on the right hand edge of the selection rectangle takes you to the extreme right of the current range. Double-clicking on the bottom edge jumps to the bottom of the range, and so forth.
There are two final navigation key combinations which should be mentioned: Control-Home and Control-End. Hold down the Control key and press the End key to move to the bottom right of the current range. Hold down Control and press Home to move to the top left of the current range.
As well as navigating through worksheets, all users of Excel make frequent use of the Ribbon. Excel offers a series of useful keyboard shortcuts when working with the Ribbon.
To access the ribbon keyboard shortcuts simply press the Alt key once on your keyboard. A series of badges are then displayed which represent the letters or numbers that you should type to activate that part of the Ribbon. For example, “W” is the shortcut for accessing the View Tab.
When you press “W”, the View Tab is activated and another series of badges is displayed on each of the commands within the View Tab. For example, the “Arrange All” command uses “A” as its keyboard shortcut, so simply typing “A” is equivalent to clicking the Arrange All button.
Once you’ve typed a letter to execute a command, the Ribbon loses focus and the shortcut badges disappear. To access Ribbon commands via the keyboard once more, simply press the Alt Key and the badges will reappear. This means that you never have to worry about learning keyboard shortcuts. All you have to remember is to press the Alt key on your keyboard and Excel will prompt you from there.
In order to create a chart in Microsoft Excel, you must highlight the data that you want to plot. Your selection should also include any relevant headings. Excel allows you to create charts on chart sheets independent of the worksheet containing the data or to embed the chart on the worksheet alongside the data.
To create a chart which is embedded in the worksheet, having selected the range of data that you wish to plot, click on the Insert tab of the Excel ribbon and, in the chart section, you will find a series of drop-down menus offering each of the main chart types. Each drop-down reveals a gallery of customised chart types.
In addition to these options, we can click on the launch button in the bottom right of the Charts group to bring up the Insert Chart dialog box. Here, we are given access to the full range of chart types that Excel has to offer. You will also notice that there is a button which says Set as Default Chart. If you use a particular type more than any other, you can choose that type and click this button so that the next time you create a standalone chart, by right-clicking on a worksheet tab and choosing Insert, the new default chart will be used as the chart type.
When you choose an option from one of the drop-down menus in the Charts group of the Insert tab, Excel creates the embedded chart. The chart is placed on the draw layer of Excel which is different from the worksheet layer. When you click on a worksheet cell, you are working on the worksheet layer and the chart becomes inactive. When you click on the chart, it is highlighted and you will then be working on the draw layer.
You will notice that whenever the chart is selected, Excel shows three contextual tabs called Design, Layout and Format. They contain a series of options specifically related to charts.
In the Design tab, we have the Location Group which contains The Move Chart button. Clicking on this button gives us the option to move the chart to a separate sheet. If you choose the option, Excel creates a new chart sheet and places the chart on it. We can also do the reverse. If you click the Move Chart button again and click on “Object In…”, we can now choose the worksheet that we want to transfer the chart to. When we click OK, Excel embeds the chart in that worksheet and deletes the empty chart sheet.
The The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007Classes at their central London training centre.
This article describes two features which are very useful when printing worksheets in Microsoft Excel: Set Print Area and Print Titles.
Set Print Area
As well as printing headers and footers on every page, Excel also allows you to specify Print Titles. Whereas headers and footers give an overall description of the report, print titles are taken from the worksheet itself. They are normally row and column headings and they are very often an essential part of the printed report.
For example, let’s say you have a worksheet with only five average-sized columns but several hundred rows, although the header and footer appear on every page, only page 1 will have column headings. This means that it becomes difficult to know what the figures on the other pages relate to. We can make use of Excel’s Print Titles feature to print the column headings on every page. Print Titles are in the Page Setup section of the Page Layout tab; simply click on the button and Excel displays the Page Setup dialog box with the Sheet tab activated. In our five column worksheet example, we would only need to specify the number of rows that we want to repeat at the top of every page. In our example, it would be only the first row. Having clicked to specify row one, we can click Print Preview to see the result and we would see that the headings are repeated at the top of each page.
Set Print Area
When you print a worksheet, Excel normally prints all the data that it contains. However, there are times when you only want to print a selection of your data. Although you can achieve this by hiding rows and columns, Excel offers a simpler solution.
As well as printing headers and footers on every page, Excel also allows you to specify Print Titles. Whereas headers and footers give an overall description of the report, print titles are taken from the worksheet itself. They are normally row and column headings and they are very often an essential part of the printed report.
For example, let’s say you have a worksheet with only five average-sized columns but several hundred rows, although the header and footer appear on every page, only page 1 will have column headings. This means that it becomes difficult to know what the figures on the other pages relate to. We can make use of Excel’s Print Titles feature to print the column headings on every page. Print Titles are in the Page Setup section of the Page Layout tab; simply click on the button and Excel displays the Page Setup dialog box with the Sheet tab activated. In our five column worksheet example, we would only need to specify the number of rows that we want to repeat at the top of every page. In our example, it would be only the first row. Having clicked to specify row one, we can click Print Preview to see the result and we would see that the headings are repeated at the top of each page.
PowerPoint 2007’s slide master feature has been significantly enhanced. It now offers users very powerful and flexible control over the appearance of related slides within a presentation. To access the slide master, activate the View Tab of the PowerPoint Ribbon and click on the button marked “Slide Master”. There is also a handy shortcut for switching between normal view and slide master view: hold down the shift key and click on the Normal View icon on the right of the status bar (next to the zoom icons). The slide master is displayed in the pane on the left of your screen along with all the various master slide layouts.
This new arrangement means that users now have two levels of control over the formatting of your slides. You can make changes to the master and, in addition, you can make changes to individual layouts. The two levels are designed to work together and the changes you make at each level will both affect the slides in your presentation. Let’s examine how masters are used in a typical workflow.
Before editing the slide master, it is probably wise to decide if a single master will be enough for your presentation. If the presentation is fairly substantial with various sections and/or various speakers, you may need to create several different slide formats. If so, you will probably need to create several masters, perhaps completing the first and then duplicating it to get the others. Each master you create will have its own layouts displayed and indented below the master icon.
To edit the master, begin by making changes to the master icon itself, the large icon displayed above the layout icons. Typical changes you might make on the master would include the insertion of a corporate logo, setting the background colour(s) or setting a background image and specifying the format of the slide title and each level of bullet points in the body text.
Next, you can make changes to individual layouts within the master to either complement or contradict the formats on the main master. For example, if you have set a background colour scheme on the main master, you may want certain layouts to have a different or plain background. To achieve this, click on appropriate layout icon to activate that layout, right click on the layout and choose “Format Background” from the context menu. Having contradicted the background of the main master, the link between the background of that layout and that of the master will be broken: subsequent changes to the background of the master will no longer affect that layout.
You may also need to make modification to elements on layouts because they do not exist on the main master icon. For example, you cannot set the attributes of the subtitle placeholder on the main master; you need to click on the Title Slide layout and change it there.
Excel’s page formatting features can be accessed by clicking on the page layout tab of the Excel ribbon. When setting page formatting, you may also find it useful to enter page layout mode by clicking on the page layout button on the right of the status bar. Adjust the zoom as necessary and you will have a constantly updated preview of how your document will look when it prints out.
Excel will also display the number of pages required to print a document on the status bar. Some worksheets benefit by changing the orientation to landscape. This often enables you to fit all your columns of data onto a single page. To change the page orientation, choose Orientation and then Landscape in the page setup section of the layout tab.
Excel offers three methods of changing the margins. The first is to click on the Margins drop-down and choose one of the presets. There are four options: the last custom setting used, normal, wide and narrow. If none of these settings is ideal for your data, the second method of modifying margins is to enter custom settings. This is done by choosing Custom Margins: the last option in the Margins drop-down menu.
As you enter margin settings in this window, it is important to realise that there’s a difference between left and right margins and also between top and bottom margins. Any figure you enter in the left and top boxes will be faithfully reproduced by Excel. So, for example, if you set the left margin to 3 cm, you will have precisely 3 cm on the left-hand margin. However, because Excel only prints complete rows and columns, the figure you enter on the right will be the minimum margin rather than a figure which Excel can faithfully reproduce each time. And the same thing applies to the bottom margin.
The third method of altering margins is perhaps the best of all since it’s the most interactive. All you do is to position the cursor on the left of the ruler and drag to the left or right to change the margins. You will fijnd that Excel immediately updates the preview of your page and shows you the actual margin setting. Simply continue dragging until you are happy with the margins.
Another simple way of altering the way in which your data will print is to change the paper size. For example, you can reduce the number of pages required by using A3 paper instead of A4. Naturally, it’s only possible to alter the paper size in this way if you have a printer capable of handling that paper size. However, if you output most of your documents to PDF, paper size will not be a problem and changing the paper size in this manner is often a good solution.
Tables are the containers used by Microsoft Access to store information. Each Access table is very much like an Excel worksheet and consists of rows and columns. In a really simple database, a single table may be all that is required but, more typically, a database will contain several related tables. For databases to work efficiently, each table it contains should store only one type of information. For example, you might have one table for storing client information, another for storing information about products, and so forth.
Fields (Columns)
Each column in a table is known as a field. When designing tables, it is important to define a field for each category of information you will need to store and not to lump separate pieces of information together in a single column. As a general rule, having more fields provides you with more flexibility in data retrieval. Thus, for example, if you define three fields called “Title”, “FirstName” and “LastName” rather than having a single field called “Name”, you will be able to combine them either to form a salutation or a full name.
Records (Rows)
Each row in a table is known as a record. A record represents a single chunk of information on a given topic. Thus, if the table holds student grades, each record will constitute the grade achieved by one particular student in a particular exam. In a client table, each record will contain details about an individual client, and so forth.
Primary Key Fields
In order for the information stored in a database to be useful and accurate, it is important to avoid duplication of information since this will tend to increase the occurrence of errors. Each record in a database should be uniquely identifiable. Thus, for example, if we have a table containing student information and there are two students with the name “John Smith” living at the same address, we need to be able to distinguish between them. The recommended technique is to define a field within each table which will always contain a unique value. This field is often called the primary key. So, in our student table example, we would create a “StudentID” field and assign each student a unique student ID. When designing tables in Microsoft Access, the unique value is usually achieved by setting the field type to “AutoNumber”, enabling Access to automatically generate a unique value for each new record created in the table.
Relationships
Although the data within a database is held in discrete tables, the complete system which this information represents is a unified whole and there are associations between the information in the various tables. Microsoft Access is often called a relational database management system because it allows you to create relationships between the various tables. Relationships lend efficiency to databases by preventing the generation of redundant data. For example, in a client database, the table containing client information would be related to the table(s) holding client invoices. When creating a form or report with which to produce the invoice, information from all the related tables can be included.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with OnSiteTrainingCourses.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Access Classes at their central London training centre.
Although Excel’s Print Preview feature is fairly useful, it is purely a preview mode. You are not able to work on your data while in Print Preview mode. However, in addition to Print Preview, Excel 2007 has two new modes of working which offer similar benefits to Print Preview while allowing you full access to your data. To switch to these modes, use the buttons on the right of the Excel status bar. There are buttons which can take you from Normal mode to Page Layout or to Page Break Preview.
Normal mode is the default mode in Excel. Here, the focus is on modifying and entering your data without thinking too much about pagination. If you print or preview your data, Excel paginates the worksheet and inserts dotted lines to show you the page breaks. This is normally the only feedback which relates to the printed version of your document.
Page Layout mode, by contrast, gives you a permanent preview of where page breaks will occur and which data will be printed on which pages. When working in Page Layout view, zoom out so that you can see more of the worksheet and you will notice that Excel displays margins on the left, right, top and bottom, as well as headers and footers. However, the really nice thing is that Page Layout view not simply a preview mode. You still have access to all the data within your spreadsheet and you can edit each of the cells it contains. If the printed version of your worksheet is particularly important, for example when working on reports, you may find it convenient to stay in this mode permanently; particularly if you have the benefit of a large monitor.
Excel’s third mode is called Page Break Preview. When you click on the Page Break Preview button that Excel conveniently zooms out so that you can see more of your worksheet. Page Break Preview mode is not dissimilar to Normal mode. Like Normal mode, it is not WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) and neither headers and footers nor margins are shown. However, the key difference between Normal mode and Page Break Preview mode is that, when you’re working in Page Break Preview mode, the page break margins can be dragged.
This is a very useful facility: if you want to force a given column of data onto a new page, you just drag the blue dotted line representing the page break to the left of that column. It’s a deceptively simple facility. In fact, some experienced Excel 2003 users may even mistake the dotted lines representing page breaks for those which are displayed in Normal mode and may not even realise that they can in fact be dragged.