Carol Bratt

If you are fairly new to PowerPoint or even if you have been using this software for quite a while now, a lot of you are most likely not very familiar with the Slide Master. Oh, you've probably heard of it, but aren't quite sure what it is or what ... it does, so you haven't really fiddled with it much. Well I am going to answer those questions so that you can start using the Slide Master and see how it simplifies your life when creating presentations and slide shows! The Slide Master in MS PowerPoint is an integral part of your design template and it stores information about font, background ... (view more)

MS Word's Borders and Shading feature allows you to control exactly where to place a border in a document. For example, let's say you want only your title page to have a border along the left and right margins. Follow the steps below to make it ... happen: Select the title page. Go to Format | Borders and Shading. On the Page Border tab, select a setting. Decide on your formatting by making selections from the Line Style, Art, Width, and Color drop-down lists. In the Preview section, click the buttons to turn off the border at the top and bottom margins. Select This Section - First Page Only from ... (view more)

How many times have you started to perform an operation or action within Excel, when you decided half way through that you wanted to cancel it before it finished? Well the good news is that it is not impossible to do this, and it's not even ... difficult at all either! Usually all that is necessary is to simply press the Esc key. This one little key stroke should cancel any command or action that Excel is processing at that instant. It isn't very well known, but you can also press Esc to close almost any dialog box that may pop up in MS Excel. When you become a member at CarolsCornerOffice.com, ... (view more)

I am sure that more than a few of my subscribers have used lots of pictures and graphics in their MS Word documents. How often have you spent a load of time resizing your pictures so that they will fit perfectly in the space where you wanted them? I ... am sure that you have fiddled with them only to find that they just didn't look right any longer because they are now distorted. Now what? How do you get the picture back to its original size? Well, you could use the Reset Picture button from the Picture toolbar (or the Picture Tools ribbon in Office 2007), but that one resets everything, ... (view more)

MS Excel will allow you to select which date you use as the beginning point for serial numbers. In Personal Computers, this date is January 1, 1900. Excel workbooks imported from the Macintosh environment require you to set the starting date to ... January 2, 1904--the date used on the Mac. To set these two dates, follow the steps below: Click on Tools | Options. MS Excel will display the Options dialog box. Make sure the Calculation tab is selected. The 1904 Date System check box controls which dating system is used. If the check box is not selected, then the January 1, 1900 starting date is ... (view more)

Most of you already know that you can use your mouse to select a range of cells by depressing the left mouse button and holding it and dragging the mouse to make your selection. How about if I told you an even quicker and easier method? I thought ... that would make you happy! Follow the steps below to learn how: Select the cell that marks one corner of the range of cells you want to select. Move the mouse pointer so it points to the cell at the opposite diagonal corner of the range you want selected. Hold down the Shift key as you click the left mouse button and drag. That's it! See how simple ... (view more)

As you may have noticed, I do tend to try and save time and keystrokes most of the time and in that pursuit I am always looking for keyboard shortcuts to use. I have found a couple that I think are very useful and very cool and I am going to share ... them with you. Your fingers will move so quickly that folks will never guess what you did to get the results that takes them a lot more time! Suppose you have created a list in your MS Word document but it is very long and about three quarters of the way through it you decide that you really should have placed some of the items near the beginning. ... (view more)

A reader recently wrote to me and asked me how to print multiple envelopes at one time. What he wanted to do was print a dozen or so envelopes with his return address on them so he would have them on hand. Good question! Follow the steps below to ... learn the answer: In MS Word, click on Letters and Envelopes (or click on the envelope icon on your toolbar). In the Tools menu, select Envelopes and Labels. Make certain that you are on the Envelopes tab. You will notice that there are some options that will allow you to choose Delivery Address, Return Address and Delivery Point Barcode (which I ... (view more)

I received an e-mail from one of my subscribers, making an inquiry as follows: "We have a health savings account, which is referred to as 'HSA.' I often need to refer to it in inter-office emails, or in Word documents. Even though I have put HSA in ... my custom dictionary, both Word and Outlook change those three letters (IN ALL CAPS) automatically to HAS. It won't even highlight the word and then ask me to change it or to 'add to dictionary.' I have to go back within the letters and change them each time I use it. I thought that, once you put something into the custom dictionary, Word and ... (view more)

Not everyone who uses MS Excel is a 'Power User'. Everyone has to start someplace, though, and sometimes all those icons on the toolbar are a bit overwhelming. Sometimes you will find that you have been using MS Excel for months and it has never ... occurred to you to see what those icons do so I am going to tell you about a couple today that can prove to be very, very useful to you. Follow along with the steps below: Launch MS Excel if it is not already open. Look at your Formatting toolbar. In MS Excel 2007, look on the Home ribbon. Find the button with the zeros and arrows. The button on the ... (view more)