File Triage. Work Smarter in Word, Excel, & PowerPoint. Neil Malek, MCT-ACI-CTT+

Transcription

1 Neil Malek, MCT-ACI-CTT+ Founder and Principal, Knack Training File Triage Work Smarter in Word, Excel, & PowerPoint

2 Microsoft Word 2 Terminology Style: A named entry that describes all the formatting something can have. There are paragraph styles, which describe fonts, alignment, spacing, and the other formatting choices you can apply to an entire paragraph. There are table styles, which describe the cell borders, background colors, and other choices you can apply to a table or a part of a table. Template: AutoCorrect: Building Block: Ribbon: Tab: Group: Macro: A file used to create new files with all the content and settings of the template. In Microsoft Word, template files are the file extensions.dot or.dotx. By double-clicking one of these files, it does not open the file, but instead creates a new file based on the template. The settings in Microsoft Word that automatically replace a userentered bit of content with a different bit of content. AutoCorrect can replace commonly misspelled words, and can also understand content that is intended to look differently, like replacing 1st with 1 st. Elements that are pre-built to be quickly inserted. Examples of Building Blocks Microsoft provides us are headers, footers, page numbers, bibliographies, and tables of contents. The container for buttons at the top of the screen in all Microsoft products. The clickable area attached to each Ribbon of tools to switch to that Ribbon. A partitioned section of the Ribbon, devoted to a particular set of tools. A function, written in Visual Basic for Applications, that is executed within a Microsoft program. This function may be written or recorded, and may be executed by a button, keyboard shortcut, or other event in the file.

3 Microsoft Word 3 Working with Styles Paragraph Styles The most commonly-used type of style is a Paragraph Style, which is a style applied to an entire paragraph. The styles you will use most frequently reside on the Home Ribbon, in the Styles Group. Normal Style The most important style in Microsoft Word is Normal, the style that is applied to content that has not been altered. The default style for a Word document in the later versions of Office is Calibri font, 11 pt. To change the default font for your document, right-click the Normal Style on the Ribbon, and choose Modify... Don t focus entirely on the screen that appears; in the bottom-left corner, you ll find a dropdown menu that allows you to change everything about your document s default formatting.

4 Microsoft Word 4 Heading Styles Heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2...) are completely underutilized. Besides being a standard formatting that can be applied multiple times, the Heading styles are used to automatically create a Table of Contents. Without applying Heading 1 and Heading 2 to different sections of the document, you ll have to build your TOC manually, and that s a real pain. The biggest reason people give for not using Heading styles is that they don t look like the creator of the document wants them to. However, using the technique from before - rightclick the Heading 1 Style on the Ribbon, and choose Modify... - you can alter Heading 1, 2, or any other in any way you like.

5 Microsoft Word 5 Custom Styles It s very likely that you will run into a situation where you have a unique idea for a formatting look, and you ll want to be able to create that look once and reapply everywhere else. For example, on the Terminology page, you can see that I have a single term extended far to the left, and everything in the definition pushed over quite a bit. In this situation, you d want to create a new Custom Style. The easiest way to create a custom style is a two-step process: Step 1: Change some text to match with your vision In this step, you re doing what you would have done before, select the text you have in mind and make changes to it. In this example, I ve selected a paragraph, indented it on both sides, italicized it, and made the font bigger and grey. Whatever you have in mind - go for it! Step 2: Create a style based on these changes Click the drop-down menu on the panel for the Styles Group on the Home Ribbon. From this drop-down menu, select Create a Style. You should see in the dialog box that opens, that the changes you made are reflected in the Preview box. Type a name, and click OK.

6 Microsoft Word 6 Find & Formatting Replace Besides being able to find and replace specific terms within your document, you can also find types of formatting and replace them - with different colors, sizes, etc. Begin by clicking Home Tab > Replace and click the More >> button on the Find and Replace dialog box. Now, click the Format drop-down menu in the bottom-left corner.

7 Microsoft Word 7 Special Characters Structural changes to a document - spacing, returns, etc. - can be exceptionally tedious. If you ve copied from a document that continually used double presses of the return key to create the right amount of space between paragraphs, you ll need to remove dozens and dozens of extra returns. By using special character codes, you can find-and-replace essentially anything. Click Home Tab > Replace. In the Find box, type ^p^p (representing two new paragraphs). Then, in the Replace box, type ^p (representing a single new paragraph).

8 Microsoft Excel 8 Keyboard Shortcuts Navigation CTRL + HOME: Move to cell A1 CTRL + END: PgUp: PgDn: CTRL + PgUp: CTRL + PgDn: CTRL + RIGHT: CTRL + LEFT: CTRL + UP: CTRL + DOWN: Selection CTRL + A: CTRL + A: Move to final edited cell Move until top cell is bottom Move until bottom cell is top Previous sheet Next sheet Move right until empty cell Move left until empty cell Move up until empty cell Move down until empty cell Select contiguous cells Select all cells CTRL + SHIFT + UP, DOWN, LEFT, and RIGHT: Select all cells until next empty cell Editing F2: Edit contents Esc: Cancel editing ENTER: OK editing and move down TAB: OK editing and move right SHIFT + ENTER: OK editing and move up SHIFT + TAB: OK editing and move left CTRL + ENTER: OK editing (no move)

9 Microsoft Excel 9 Text to Columns One of the most common issues we face when analyzing data is placing too much information into a single cell. This is seen in cells that have both first and last names, as well as cells that contain an entire address in a single cell. To work with this data, we can easily segment it by using the Text to Columns feature in Excel. Select the data you want to segment. Click Data Tab > Text to Columns. On the first step of the dialog box, simply ask is this a standardized ID number or other value that always has the same length? In my world, the data I want to break into columns is typically not of a fixed width, so I choose Delimited.

10 Microsoft Excel 10 Now, we need to analyze our data to decide what breaks first name from last name. Sometimes we have punctuation like commas and periods, but in this scenario, we re just given a space between first and last. Click to de-select the checkbox for Tab, and click to select the checkbox for Space. On the final step of the wizard, you can decide to format the cells that come out of this as dates, currency, etc. In a name or address scenario, as described here, a general formatting works just fine.

11 Microsoft Excel 11 Custom Formatting Number Values Another common mistake is trying to type something exactly the way you want it shown - users typing dates in the format , for example. By doing this, you re entering a value Excel can t recognize as a date. And if Excel doesn t know it s a date - you can t calculate deadlines, or anything else useful. For that reason, we should always do our data entry simply - 02/17/81, for example, is easily understood - and let number formatting do the rest. Custom Date Formatting First, select any cell that has a date in it, and click Home Tab > Clear > Clear Formats. On my cell, the date 1/19/2013 now says This shows you that real dates in Excel are just numbers representing the number of days it s been since Jan. 1, Armed with this information, you should be able to format a date into anything you want. With the same cell selected, click Home Tab > Number Group > Group Dialog Button (see image).

12 Microsoft Excel 12 In the Format Cells dialog, on the Number tab, choose the category Date. You ll see several options you can choose between for displaying dates. Once you find a format that is similar to what you want, click the Custom category on the left, and see the characters used to represent that formatting. Simply use m for a one- or two-digit month, mm for a two-digit month, mmm for a three-character abbreviation of the month, and mmmm for the full name of the month. Use the same idea with d for days and y for years.

13 Microsoft Excel 13 Data Validation If you want to guarantee the contents entered into a specific cell conform to your rules, you can apply Data Validation to those cells before distributing the spreadsheet. First, select the cells you re interested in, then click Data Tab > Data Validation. Now, choose the type of data to be entered, and the potential range of values.

14 Microsoft Excel 14 LEFT and FIND Whenever we want to get someone s first name, city, state, zip, or other bit of information from a larger cell full of information, we need to use the FIND function, nested into LEFT, RIGHT, or MID. Let s start with LEFT, RIGHT, and MID. LEFT starts from the left side of your text, and grabs as much of the content as you like. For example, the function below would return Daytona Beach. However, it wouldn t work for the other pieces of information, because each city has a different number of characters. This is where the FIND function comes in. FIND has one job - it finds the position of whatever character you want. So, for example, you could use the FIND function to determine that the comma in Daytona Beach, FL was the 14th position. Combine these together - LEFT using FIND to determine the location of the comma - and subtract 1 in order to not include the comma. You ve got a nested function that can pull data apart.

15 Microsoft PowerPoint 15 Accessing the Slide Master and Layouts The template for every presentation is called the Slide Master, and it has sub-templates called Slide Layouts. To get to your Slide Master, click View > Slide Master. To get back to your presentation, click Slide Master > Close Master View. The structure you see has the Slide Master at the top, then the Slide Layouts under, and indented slightly. A Slide Master controls the font sizes, bullet points, and positions, just like the Theme controls the color, font, and visual effects.

16 Microsoft PowerPoint 16 Modifying Presentations Each Slide Layout gets its information from the Slide Master, then builds on it for a different layout. Select a Slide Layout or the Slide Master and make a change, then close the Master View to see the effect on the presentation. If you ve changed an individual slide, the effects won t take hold. To set a changed slide back to its original look - and allow it to be controlled by the Slide Master - use the Reset button on the Home Tab. If you see multiple Slide Masters in the Master View, multiple Themes are being applied. Applying a consistent Theme throughout the presentation will resolve this problem.