Carol's Corner Office

When you begin a new workbook, the "active cell" is located at the top-left corner of the worksheet (in Cell A1). To create your worksheet or make changes to it, you must move around in it. Getting around in a worksheet quickly is the mark of an ... experienced Excel user. You want to learn the quickest way to get from place to place so you can use your time more efficiently. Keyboard Shortcuts for Moving Around in a Worksheet You can move around in the worksheet by pressing the arrow keys and other direction keys on the keyboard. When you use the keyboard to move around in the ... (view more)

If your computer has a sound card and a microphone, you can record voice comments to your documents in MS Word. Voice comments are recordings that are attached to your document, and are are added as sound object inside comment balloons. Follow the ... easy steps below to add voice comments to your documents: Open the Reviewing toolbar if it isn't already open. To open the toolbar, right-click in a blank area of the visible toolbars and select the Reviewing toolbar. Click the Insert Voice button. If the Insert Voice button is not visible on the Reviewing toolbar, click Toolbar Options on the ... (view more)

Cells in an Excel worksheet can contain five kinds of entries; each one is handled a little differently. For example: Text is any word or combination of letters and numbers. Text is automatically left-aligned in the cell. The text too long for the ... cell overlaps any blank cells to the right. Numbers, such as 2,340 or 82%, form the basis for all your calculations. They're automatically right-aligned in the cell to keep the columns of numbers lined up. Dates and times are curious types of numbers. Although they may contain words, such as January and PM, Excel knows what you mean and changes them ... (view more)

When entering numbers in Excel you can type the numbers into a cell by using the keys on the top row of the keyboard or, if Num Lock is turned on, by using the keypad on the right side of the keyboard. To do so, follow the steps below: Type the ... numbers in the cell and press Enter. If you type decimals, such as 1.5000, Excel often eliminates the trailing zeros and displays 1.5. Note that another future article will tell you how to control this. You can also type dollar signs, commas, or percent signs, and Excel displays them with the numbers. Even when you type these symbols, Excel interprets ... (view more)

Suppose your Excel worksheet has a long list of numbers to add. You can sum them instantly using Excel's AutoSum feature. Don't count on your fingers or pull out a calculator; Excel can calculate more quickly and accurately. Even more importantly, ... whenever a number changes, Excel instantly recalculates and displays the corrected sum. You can use either of these two methods to total the numbers using Excel: Click the cell below the list to make it the active cell. Click the AutoSum button. Excel surrounds the cells it thinks you want to total with a moving border. Press Enter or click the ... (view more)

You've just gotten a new computer and it's Windows XP. You're thrilled to have a new machine and an upgraded operating system -- that is, until you click on the Start button. Windows XP, has a new Start Menu and a very different layout than previous ... releases of MS Windows; luckily you can very easily switch to the Classic view that you're used to. Just follow the steps below: To change the Start menu to the Classic Start menu: In Control Panel, double-click Appearance and Themes. Click Taskbar and Start Menu. On the Start Menu tab, click Classic Start menu and then click OK. If you want the ... (view more)

When you've inserted a picture in MS Word, the first thing you notice is where it's located and how large it is. You can modify the picture to fit your needs. Some of the ways you can change a picture include those outlined below: Size the picture ... (larger or smaller). Crop, or trim off, one or more edges. Change it to black and white or grayscale (shades of gray) instead of color. Increase or reduce contrast and brightness, just like a television screen. The first step in modifying is to click the picture to select it. When you do this, sizing handles appear at each corner and edge of the ... (view more)

While you are building an Excel worksheet, it is held in a temporary memory within your computer (called "RAM", or random access memory). Unlike human memory, the computer won't remember anything unless you save your work. If you turn off the ... computer or if the power goes out, all your work disappears. To store your work permanently, you must save it on a disk. The First Time You Save You can save a spreadsheet by using any of these methods: Choose File | Save. Click the Save button on the toolbar. Use the shortcut key Ctrl+S. The first time you save, the Save As dialog box appears ... (view more)

A newsletter or article usually begins with a larger title or headline. To have a headline span the width of several columns in MS Word, it must be formatted with a different number of columns. Formatting Pages with Section Breaks Whenever you have ... different page-level formatting applied to a single document, you need to break it into different sections with something called a "section break." In doing so, sections of a document can be formatted with different margins, page orientation, number of columns, headers and footers, page numbering, et cetera. For example: in a newsletter ... (view more)

Although tables are used to present text that must remain in side-by-side columns, they would be clumsy to use when creating a newsletter. MS Word provides a different feature that lets you create "snaking" or newspaper-style columns, where the text ... flows down the page in a narrow column and then continues to the next column. To establish this multi-column format, you'd use the Columns button in Word. Newspaper-style columns are used whenever you have a lot of text to fit on a page, particularly a large page. If the pages were printed in long lines that ran the width of the page, ... (view more)