Carol Bratt

You can turn any PowerPoint presentation into a template that can be used at a later date. I know that more than a few of you have received PowerPoint presentations in emails and thought to yourself "Wow, what a nice background, I wish I could do ... that." Well guess what --- you can! Follow the steps below to find out how: First remove any unnecessary slides or information from the presentation. Click on Save As | Other Formats. Select PowerPoint Template (*.potx) from the Save As Type drop-down list. Congratulations! You have now saved your very own template to use in PowerPoint whenever you ... (view more)

When you enter text into your Word document that is something other than English, chances are that MS Word will not recognize it and will interpret it as being misspelled. If it is necessary for you to have sections of non-English text within your ... English-language Word documents, then you know how annoying it is when Word checks the spelling of the non-English text using its English dictionary. Word is programmed to automatically proofread your document for the language version that is installed on your computer. If you purchased your licensed copy of MS Word in the United States, your text ... (view more)

I hate it when an error message shows up in my Excel spreadsheets! Doesn't everyone? When you see an error message it generally means that somehow, somewhere, a typo has made its way into one of your formulas or a piece of information is either ... incorrect or missing. If you were the author of the formula that is returning the error, you may not have too much difficulty in determining where the trouble is located. However, if you are working in someone else's spreadsheet it may not be as easy to spot that error. That is when you use the Auditing Tools in MS Excel to sniff out the cause of the ... (view more)

Prior to Access version 2007, you could calculate totals of your data in query, report or form view. Now, Access 2007 lets you add a Total row field to your tables which seems to make a lot more sense doesn't it? Let's suppose you want to find out ... the average number of hours your employees worked per week in August. Follow the steps below to add a total row to the hours field column in your Employees database: Open your Employees database. In the Navigation pane, double-click the tale that records the hours worked for the month of August. Click the Hours field name in the open table. Click ... (view more)

It's very easy to add a simple header in Word 2007. Don't be intimidated by the sophisticated looking, complex headers that are included in this latest version of MS Word. Follow the easy steps below to add your header: In the Ribbon, click the ... Insert tab. Click Header under the Header Footer Group. Click Edit Header. In the blank header area, you can add your name and page numbers or whatever information you desire. Follow the steps below to accomplish this task: Press CTRL + R. Type your name and press Enter. Type Page. Click the Insert tab. Click Page Number in the Header Footer Group. ... (view more)

I am sure you knew that you can copy multiple blocks of text in MS Word - at least I hope I have taught you that much! But did you know that you can paste multiple blocks of text rather than the last chunk that you copied? Well guess what? You can! ... Follow the steps below to learn how: To make use of this feature, turn on the Clipboard toolbar in MS Word version 2003, or the clipboard menu in the latest version of MS Word - 2007. When you do this, you will see all the snippets that you have copied, in the order that you copied them. You can now be selective about what you pick and choose to ... (view more)

Sometimes you want to get a little fancy with your PowerPoint presentation. Suppose you had put together a little presentation for Grandma and you wanted to do something special for her. Sure, that snazzy template is great but it won't mean a lot to ... Grandma. Wait! I bet Grandma's eyes would light up if she saw her old house in the background of this presentation, wouldn't they? Follow the steps below to learn how to accomplish this task: To use a picture file, rather than the template's defined background, select Format | Custom Background. Check the Omit Background Graphics From Master box. ... (view more)

When applying formatting to a single word or the random phrase I usually will do it manually, but we all know that I am the queen of saving time and keystrokes and so, if I have lots of changes to make in a document, you can bet that I will be doing ... it in the quickest manner possible. It simply is not efficient to keep manually repeating the formatting process. Fortunately, there is a key combination that will greatly simplify this and I am going to share it with you! The key combination is CTRL + Y. This key combination remembers the last set of formats applied. By set, I mean multiple ... (view more)