Outlook has rules?
I have been floorwalking at a company, wandering their floors answering questions from staff on how to use Outlook. Love this, I can see how people use their software and give them suggestions on how to use it better.
Outlook was the software I was supporting, most people who use outlook think they are experts, “no I don’t need training”. But those same people will gasp when I show them a very small feature that will save them hours.
One of these is Rules. These are different in MAC versions of Outlook then PC version of Outlook. But the concept is the same.
Outlook will perform an action that you specify when a condition is met. For example, when an email comes in with a specific word in the subject it can be moved into a folder.
Rules can be run manually so that you control how often they are actioned.
When creating rules you must think about the entire process of the rule, for example I was helping someone set up a rule that replied to all emails within a folder when it was run. But if the email was left within the folder and the rule was run again another email would be sent to the original emails in the folder.
So another action needed to be added to the rule, once a reply was sent the email was moved to another folder.
Think about what you would like the rule to do, then test test test. you can send yourself emails or you can ask a friend or collegue to send some to you for testing.
How have you used rules?
Removing all formatting
When you have a document sometimes the formatting can go a tad wonky or worse, you try and change the format a bit and things go very wrong. I once saw a secretary who added a bullet to the text and a bullet appeared on the next like as well and the indentation of both paragraphs were wrong.
Has anything like that happened to you? Sometimes you need to wipe all the formatting off the text so you can start fresh and apply the format you want.
Clear formatting is this tool. It is available within the styles and formatting area, pre 2007 this was in the styles and formatting task pane, there was an option for clear formatting within the list of styles, if this is not automatically available change which styles are shown. There is a button at the bottom of the styles task pane called manage styles or a drop down list.
There is also a clear formats button, looks like an eraser, in 2007 and 2010 it is on the home ribbon in the font section.
Select the text to clear the formats from then either press the clear formats button or the option within the Ribbon.
You can use Ctrl A to select the entire document then use the clear format to start from formatting scratch!
Why is it better to include training in a bespoke software package?
When you give your proposal of software design to your client do you include training? Is this training by professional training consultants rather than sales or programming staff?
Training the end users to use the software you designed is very important in ensuring that they get the most from it. Not everyone can understand new software immediately even software that is intuitive, having a little training and support can help.
The training needs to be able to pass the maximum amount of information across without the attendees reaching saturation (too much information being passed and the attendees not being able to remember anything), interesting, relevant and memorable.
A professional trainer can create courses that do this and deliver them so that there are less help desk calls during go live and the users will be able to use the software from day 1.
When a person who does not understand the learning process and learning styles creates training they do not know how to maximise the training for the learner. Evaluations may be good but there is no reduction in help desk calls or in praise from the users.
Comparing a Sales person to a trainer is like apples and oranges. Does the sales person understand how much information is too much, what to tell and what to leave out when dealing with the end users? Do they really need to know the full background or everything the software can do?
A trainer can be more cost effective, less need for support at go live, user buy in of the product and telling others how great it is. You may think I am exaggerating but I have been brought in late on many projects where I could have designed the courses and trained the trainers, instead the project team were doing training and the users were extremely hostile. That soon changed, once the documentation and training courses were altered everyone realised that the software was much better than they thought, it was easy to use and they had a process they could follow.
Several years later I am told that the users are still using the documentation as reference for new people.
What formatting is on that text
If you receive a document from someone and are not sure what the format is and want to see exactly what has been done, you can within Microsoft Word.
Formatting can be simple or complicated, if someone applies formatting to text rather than use styles it can be harder to see all they have applied.
Use Reveal Formatting to see what has been applied to selected text. It will list all the formatting. To use the reveal formatting feature press Shift F1 on the keyboard. A new task pane will appear and show details of what formats are applied to the selected text.
If you want to remove the formatting you should use clear formatting, and if you want to apply that formatting to other text use the paste format feature.
7 Ways to make spreadsheets easier for other people
Do you create spreadsheets that other people use or look at the data? If you do there are a lot of features that can make the spreadsheet easier for them to be able to use, here are 7 features:
1. Grouping and Outline – Sometimes you want to hide columns or rows but allow the user to show them easily. Grouping does this.
2. Cell Protection – Great for spreadsheets that you only want certain cells changed, you can protect cells against change. This feature does much more as well.
3. Conditional Formatting – this is one of my favorites. I use if all the time. If will colour or apply other formatting when z cell meets a condition. Like make a cell yellow if if is a negative.
4. Tables – this feature is more than one feature. You can have totals at the bottom, auto filter is automatic and adding more data is extremely easy.
5. Autofilter – hides some rows based on a condition, like all order for the month of May. In newer versions of Excel you can also filter on formatting ie all cells that have a yellow background.
6. Pivot Tables – Another of my favorites, take a list and group the data that matches then creates a calculation with another column ie in s list of all orders for the last 6 months you could create a pivot table grouping all orders for each city and sum the order total for each.
7. Deleting unused sheets – this is a nice to do. Delete all unused sheets, makes the spreadsheet more tidy and professional looking.
What are your favorite features to make spreadsheets easier to use?
How do I add 2 separate ranges together?
Occasionally you might not want to add up just 1 range of numbers, but several. This is very easy to do, if you Know how.
First let me explain what a range is. It is s group of cells that are together. A1:A10 is an example. We use ranges all the time. But what if you want to add up A1:A10 and D1:D10?
If you use the sum function if is easy. To add up one range we would use the following:
=Sum (A1:A10)
To add a second range we just put a comma in and add the other range.
=Sum (A10:A10,D1:D10)
You can add up to 30 ranges this way in newer versions of Excel if is even more.
Have you tried this before?
When you have too many items for an IF statement
Do you have if statements that are long and confusing? Maybe several nested together, every time you look at it you need to think about what it does?
Why not use a more simple function, a Lookup, either Vlookup or Hlookup. Instead of nesting an if you create a data table with the values and what their corresponding values are i.e.:
Monday 35
Tuesday 54
Wednesday 63
Thursday 24
Friday 73
The first column is what you are matching up, the test part of the if statement, the 2nd column is the value to return, what would be in the true part of the if statement.
The if would look something like this:
=if (A1 =”Monday”, 35 , if (A1 = “Tuesday”, 54 , if (A1 = “Wednesday”, 63 , if (A1 = “Thursday”, 24 , 73)
I am only using 5 days of the week for this example imagine if I tried it will months of the years or states in a country. I can get the same answers from the following:
= VLookup (A1, MyTable, 2, False)
This works when the table with the 2 columns is named MyTable. The function used makes the calculation much shorter and easier to change, if you want to add more variables you add to the lookup table then redefine the named range. The calculation will automatically update.
Do you have any shorter functions or calculations that save you time?
Text to numbers
Have you ever had a spreadsheet where the numbers did not align properly or add up correctly. Excel could think the numbers are text.
When you have an unformatted cell and you enter text, like the word hello, the text will align left. If you type a number the cell should align right. This is how you can tell what Excel thinks is the type of information in a cell.
Why is this important? In older versions of Excel only cells that Excel recognised had numbers in them were used within calculations. So if you summed a column but the total did not add up as it should have it was probably because some of the numbers were not included.
Sometimes you might want Excel to treat a number like text, leaving spaces and leading zeros, again why? Telephone numbers are the most common, central London numbers start with 0207 but if you type that into a cell Excel will remove the 0 and leave 207, not so good if you don’t know it has done this.
Numbers that Excel think are text are not formatted the same so it is better to know what Excel thinks is in the cell. Next time you enter anything in cells take a look at how Excel automatically aligns them.
How to add a Watermark to a document
Watermarks have changed over the years. They used to be reserved for printers, the paper would arrive with a watermark already on it. Sometimes it was the printers name others were the company name or the crest. Then we started using computers and posibilities changed.
In older versions of Microsoft Word Watermarks could be added through the Format menu, backgrounds, watermark. This had several options within and was easy to use as long as you knew where it was.
In newer versions of Microsoft Word Watermark can be found within the Page Layout tab in the Page Background section. There are a few predesigned ones, you can get some from Office.com or create a custom one.
Watermarks can be pictures or text but should not stop you from being able to see the text on the page.
How to change text to numbers
If you have a spreadsheet and a lot of numbers that Excel thinks is text you would want to change them. This is easy to do but can differ depending on what version of Excel you have.
New versions of excel have smart tags, those little square pictures that pop up in the corner when you have done something or when Excel wants to tell you something. If you copy and paste you will see the smart tags if you have them. The paste smart tag looks like a clip board and will show you options for pasting. If you select the column that has the numbers Excel acts as if are text and there is a smart tag you can click on the smart tag and select change to number.
If smart tags are not an option try clicking in the formula bar when the cell is selected (or f2) the pressing enter. Excel will re-evaluate the type of data and should treat the cell as a number.
Have you had a problem with Excel treating cells as something other than what you wanted?