Word & Excel Tips - June 2008
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Microsoft Word
Emailing Documents-If you are emailing someone a finished document, send it as a .pdf not a word file. This shows that it is complete and also your document will not show on their screen with whatever marks that automatically appear in Word such as spelling and grammar correction, table outlines and other “invisible” marks that do not print. It gives you much more control over how your document looks both onscreen and printed. If you must send a Word doc make sure that all spelling and grammar errors are corrected.
Creating a PDF-you need a type of software called a “pdf writer”. This is included in newer versions of MS Office under the print function. If you don’t have it already, you can look online for pdf writer software which can usually be purchased for about $20. Once it is setup it is usually listed as a printer.
Tables-This useful tools is good any time you want to line text up for any reason. Tabs are finicky and hard to figure out. Just insert a table and make sure that there are no borders on it. There will be a dotted line onscreen but no lines when printed and everything will line up like magic.
Format Painter-This is one of my favorite features in Word. It’s the little button on the toolbar that looks like a paint brush. 
It is a way of copying formatting from one section to another. To use:
- Highlight the portion of text that is formatted the way you want (bold, italics, font etc…),
- Click the format painter button
- Select the portion of text that you want formatted.
Note: If you double click the format painter you can transfer formatting to multiple sections.
Microsoft Excel
If you find yourself suddenly needing to be a power user in Excel, it is a good idea to take some sort of training. Excel is an extremely powerful program but is not very intuitive. One of my pet peeves about computers now is that everyone is expected to learn everything on their own which can be difficult and time consuming.
Absolute Values
One of the cool things about formulas is that if you create one you can copy and paste it into another cell and the formula will adjust to it’s new location. This is especially useful when working on rows of numbers. Sometimes you may want to refer to a value that is fixed and that you do not want to change. You need to make something an absolute reference by putting dollar signs in front of it and then when you copy and paste-it will stay the same.
For example: If your formula is: =a1*b1 when that is copied to the next row it will read: =a2*b2. If you want the second part of the formula to refer to an absolute value such as a tax percentage you would type the formula this way: =a1*$d$1 and when moved to the next row it will read: =a2*$d$1.