Could On-site Excel Training The Best Solutions For Your Organisation?
March 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment
One of the pivotal components of the Microsoft Office 2007, Excel is a uniquely powerful spreadsheet. If you bought this sophisticated piece of software, it makes sense to ensure that your staff members know how to use it effectively. Having allowed them a week or two to get used to the new environment and go through some online tutorials, you will probably want to get them properly trained. Tutor-led software training has the benefit that delegates are able to ask questions as they learn and have complex concepts explained and demonstrated to them until they fully understand them.
Booking your staff on a public Excel course is of course one possibility. However, increasingly companies are demanding to have this training customised to meet their specific demands. Microsoft Excel can be used for a variety of data analysis and storage tasks: not everyone uses it in the same way. Perhaps you will be using it for complex business modelling. Or, you may be using it to create interactive forms and reports complete with complex calculations. Maybe your staff will be using the program in a database role recording information under column headings. Booking a customised course will ensure that you only pay for instruction which is relevant to your requirements and reflects the way in which you will be using Microsoft Excel.
Before you start contacting Excel training companies, it would be a good idea to ensure that you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve by using Excel and that your expectations are realistic. When you approach training companies, you should make it clear that you do not simply want them to deliver their standard Excel courses but that you require a customised programme of training. Between you, a schedule of topics to be covered should then be drawn up and the duration of the program decided.
The customisation process may also involve identifying different requirements within your own organisation. Different people may need to do different tasks with the program and therefore need different skills. For example, some of your users will be primarily interested in using Excel for business analysis and projection. Their primary areas of interest will be the “What if” analysis tool like goal seek, scenarios and pivot tables. On the other hand, you may have people who are interested in create charts and reports either for printing or for use in PowerPoint presentations.
Most training companies offering customised Excel courses should be willing to accommodate the specific needs of your organisation and the different profiles of the staff members: accounts, sales and marketing, etc. Between you, you can then create a program of study which satisfies the needs of all users. Perhaps this may mean, having different courses for users with different profiles or perhaps the best approach will be a modular one whereby some modules are taken by everyone while others are only attended by certain user groups.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with On-SiteTrainingCourses.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel Classes at their central London training centre.
Understand The Microsoft Word Mini Toolbar
February 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment
The Mini toolbar is a floating window which automatically pops up whenever you highlight text. Initially all the options it contains are conveniently dimmed. However, as soon as you position the cursor over its controls, the Mini toolbar becomes activated.
It contains a number of options for formatting your text. All of these options can be found in the Home tab of the Word Ribbon. The top row of icons allows you to change the font, size and colour of our text and also contains Word’s nifty Format Painter. The Format Painter allows you to copy the format of the selected text to other areas of your document.
The second row of the Mini toolbar has buttons for making text bold, italic, centre aligned. It also has tools for changing the colour of the highlighted text, indenting text and converting your text to bullet points.
The Mini toolbar provides users with a very convenient way of quickly formatting your text without having to go back to the Ribbon to find the options they are looking for. However, there are times when it can be an inconvenience. This is particularly true when using the very useful drag-and-drop facility within Microsoft Word.
This useful feature allows you to highlight text and simply drag it to a new location. However, what you sometimes find is that, as you are about to drag, your cursor collides with the Mini toolbar and instead of dragging your text you end up changing its format.
As a user of Word 2007, only you can decide whether you like the Mini toolbar facility or not. If you decide it’s not for you, Word allows you to deactivate the Mini toolbar facility. Choose Word Options from the Office button. The very first option in the Popular category is “Show Mini Toolbar on selection”. If you decide that the you not like the Mini toolbar, simply switch off this option. Now, whenever you highlight text, no Mini toolbar palette will appear.
Even if you have asked Word not to show the Mini toolbar, it is still possible to display it by simply right-clicking on selected text.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Word 2007 training courses, as well as Word VBA training in London and throughout the UK.
Navigating In Microsoft Excel 2007
February 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Each Excel document is referred to as a workbook and each workbook can contain up to 255 worksheets. To navigate to a particular worksheet, click on one of the sheet tabs displayed at the bottom of your screen.
To the left of the tabs will find four navigation buttons. These are useful where you have a workbook that either contains lots of worksheets or has worksheets with very long names. The very first one makes the name of the first worksheet visible; the very last one makes the name of the last worksheet visible. The left pointing arrow makes the name of the previous worksheet visible and of course the right pointing arrow makes the name of the next worksheet visible. These icons don’t actually activate a worksheet; they simply make its name tab visible. To activate a sheet, you still have to click on that particular tab.
Worksheets can also be activated via the keyboard. To activate the next sheet to the right, hold down Control and press Page Down. This moves you forward through your worksheets are naturally holding Control and pressing the Page Up button moves you back to the left.
Once you’ve navigated to a particular worksheet, you will need to go to a particular cell or a particular section of that worksheet. Naturally, you can use the scrollbars to make different parts of the worksheet visible. You can also move around the worksheet using the arrows on your keyboard: down, right, up and left.
Excel also allows you to use keyboard shortcuts for moving to the edges of a given body of data. To get to the right-most cell of the current range, hold down Control and press the right arrow and of course to get to the bottom cell, hold down Control and press the down arrow.
It is also possible to do exactly the same thing using the mouse. Position the cursor on one of the edges of the bold selection rectangle surrounding the active cell and then simply double-click. Double-clicking on the right hand edge of the selection rectangle activates the extreme right of the current range. Double-clicking on the bottom edge moves the cursor to the bottom edge of the range, and so on.
There are two final navigation keyboard shortcuts which should be mentioned: Control-Home and Control-End. Hold down the Control key and press End to move to the bottom right of the current range. Hold down Control and press Home to move to the top left of the current range.
As well as navigating through worksheets, most Excel users make frequent use of the Ribbon. Excel offers a series of handy keyboard shortcuts when working with the Ribbon.
To access the ribbon keyboard shortcuts simply press the Alt key once on your keyboard. A series of letters and numbers is then displayed which represent the shortcuts that you should type to activate that part of the Ribbon. For example, “W” is the shortcut for accessing the View Tab.
When you press “W”, the View Tab is activated and another series of badges is displayed on each of the commands within the View Tab. For example, the “Arrange All” command uses “A” as its keyboard shortcut, so simply typing “A” is equivalent to clicking the Arrange All button.
Once you’ve typed a letter to execute a command, the Ribbon loses focus and the shortcut badges disappear. To access Ribbon commands via the keyboard once more, simply press the Alt Key and the badges will reappear. This means that you never have to worry about learning keyboard shortcuts. All you have to remember is to press the Alt key on your keyboard and Excel will prompt you from there.
The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007 Classes at their central London training centre.
Customizing Print Area and Print Titles in Excel 2007
February 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment
This article describes two features which are very useful when printing worksheets in Microsoft Excel: Set Print Area and Print Titles.
Set Print Area
In addition to printing headers and footers on every page, Excel also allows you to specify Print Titles. Whereas headers and footers give an overall description of the report, print titles are taken from the worksheet itself. They are normally row and column headings and they are very often an essential part of the printed report.
For example, if you have a worksheet with only five average-sized columns but several hundred rows, although the header and footer appear on every page, only page 1 will have column headings. This means that it becomes difficult to know what the figures on the other pages relate to. We can use Excel’s Print Titles feature to print the column headings on every page. Print Titles are in the Page Setup section of the Page Layout tab; simply click on the button and Excel displays the Page Setup dialog box with the Sheet tab activated. In our five column worksheet example, we would only need to specify the number of rows that we would like to repeat at the top of every page. In our example, it would be only the first row. Having clicked to specify row one, we can click Print Preview to see the result and we would see that the headings are repeated at the top of each page.
Set Print Area
When you print a worksheet, Excel normally prints all the data that it contains. However, there are times when you only want to print a selection of your data. Although you can achieve this by hiding rows and columns, Excel offers a simpler solution.
In the Page Layout tab of the Excel 2007 ribbon, you will find the Set Print Area drop-down menu. When you click on it, it offers two options: Set Print Area and Clear Print Area. The Set Print Area command allows you to highlight a range of data and specify that this is the only part of the worksheet that will be printed whenever you use the print command. Having chosen the Set Print Area command, Excel will now display a dotted lined border around the area that has been set, in much the same way as it normally displays the page boundaries after the print command has been used.
Only one print area can be specified at a time. The Clear Print Area command restores normal behaviour; so that, when you print, the entire worksheet will be printed.
Author is a developer and trainer with On-SiteTrainingCourses.Com, an independent computer training company offering XML and XSLT Classes in London and throughout the UK.
Creating Custom Headers And Footers For Your Microsoft Excel Reports
February 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Headers and footers are particularly useful for documents that require several pages to print. The header is information printed at the top of each page; the footer at the bottom of each page. There are two ways of working with headers and footers in Excel. Both are found in the Page Layout Tab Of the Excel Ribbon. When working in Normal mode, you can access headers and footers by clicking on the Launch button in the Page Setup section. Here, in the Header/Footer tab, you gain access to all of Excel features relating to headers and footers.
As you choose these options, you can click on the Print Preview button then to return to Headers/Footers, click on Page Setup. This method of editing headers and footers is particularly useful if you’re working on a fairly small screen.
The second method requires that you are in Page Layout mode. To switch to Page Layout mode, simply click on the Page Layout icon on the right of the Status Bar. You now have direct access to the header and footer areas of the page. Simply follow the prompt “Click to Add Header”. As soon as you activate the header or footer area, “Header & Footer Tools” appears. This consists of the context sensitive “Design” Tab. (A context sensitive Tab is one which only displays in certain contexts.)
Apart from their position on the page, Excel treats headers and footers as identical. Each consists of three sections: left, centre and right. In each of these sections, you can insert a wide range of information. This is done by clicking on the buttons in the “Header And Footer Elements” section of the “Design” Tab. For example, at the bottom of the page, you might want to insert the date, the page number, “Page 1 of 4″, etc. To do this, you would simply activate the footer area, type the word “Page” followed by a space, then click on the page number icon which will generate the page number. Then type ” of ” and finally click on the “Number Of Pages” button.
Other items which can be inserted automatically include “File Path”, as in “c:\Excel Work\myfile.xlsx”; “File Name”, as in “myfile.xlsx”; and images, for example, your company logo. To insert an image, click on the picture button and then double click on the image to insert it, just as you would in any other region of the page. You can then resize the image as necessary or increase/decrease the space available for the header/footer.
The The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with TrainingCompany.Com, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel Classes in London and throughout the UK.
Using Embedded Charts in Microsoft Excel
February 19, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Before you can create a chart in Microsoft Excel, you need to highlight the data that you want to plot. Your selection should also include any relevant headings. Excel allows you to create charts on chart sheets independent of the worksheet containing the data or to embed the chart on the worksheet alongside the data.
To create a chart which is embedded in the worksheet, as opposed to a separate chart sheet, having selected the range of data that you wish to plot, click on the Insert tab of the Excel ribbon and, in the chart section, you will find a series of drop-down menus offering each of the main chart types. Each drop-down reveals a gallery of customised chart types.
Additionally, we can click on the launch button in the bottom right of the Charts group to bring up the Insert Chart dialog box. Here, we are given access to the full range of chart types that Excel has to offer. You will also notice that there is a button which says Set as Default Chart. If you use a particular type more than any other, you can choose that type and click this button so that the next time you create a standalone chart, by right-clicking on a worksheet tab and choosing Insert, the new default chart will be used as the chart type.
When you choose an option from one of the drop-down menus in the Charts group of the Insert tab, Excel creates the embedded chart. The chart is placed on the draw layer of Excel which is different from the worksheet layer. When you click on a worksheet cell, you are working on the worksheet layer and the chart becomes inactive. When you click on the chart, it is highlighted and you will then be working on the draw layer.
You will notice that whenever the chart is highlighted, Excel displays three contextual tabs called Design, Layout and Format. They contain a series of options specifically related to charts.
The Design tab contains the Location Group which contains The Move Chart button. Clicking on this button gives us the option to move the chart to a separate sheet. If you choose the option, Excel creates a new chart sheet and places the chart on it. We can also do the reverse. If you click the Move Chart button again and click on “Object In…”, we can now choose the worksheet that we want to transfer the chart to. When we click OK, Excel embeds the chart in that worksheet and deletes the empty chart sheet.
The The writer of this article is a training consultant with TrainingCompany.Com, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft Excel 2007training courses at their central London training centre.
Validation XML Files With XML Schema
February 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment
XML schema definition languages are based on the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They use XML 1.0 syntax and aim to explicit describe the structure of XML documents and constrain the data which they may contain. They offer a distinct improvement on the more limited schema features offered by the Document Type Definition (DTD) recommendation which formed part of the original XML specification released in 1998. The most widely used schema language is the one defined by the W3C in 2001: W3C XML Schema. However, there are alternatives, such as RELAX NG and Schematron.
XML Schema documents are the successors to DTDs and overcome some key limitations associated with them. Firstly, DTDs do not support data types. Secondly, DTDs do not support namespaces. Thirdly, DTDs do not allow developers to accurately define the number of permitted occurrences of elements within their parent element.
An XML schema describes the structure of an XML instance document by defining what each element must or may contain. An element is limited by its type. For example, an element of complex type can contain child elements and attributes, whereas a simple-type element can only contain text. The diagram below gives a first look at the types of XML Schema elements.
Three main purposes are fulfilled by schema documents. Firstly, they can be used to validate XML documents. Secondly, they can be used as a dictionary or grammar for the creation of a given class of XML document. And, thirdly, they can be used to provide documentation for XML documents.
An XML schema is itself an XML document and it contains definitions of all elements and attributes permitted in a class of XML documents. The schema also specifies the structure or hierarchy to which elements must adhere and the type of content each particular element may contain. Elements may be of the simple or complex type. Complex type elements may contain child elements as well as attributes. Simple type element may only contain data. XML documents using a particular schema are referred to as instances of the schema. An XML instance that correctly adheres to its associated schema is said to be valid.
Validation is usually the main purpose of schema documents. Validation offers many benefits. It ensures the consistency of data within a document. It ensures that data has the right structure and internal hierarchy. It ensures that data within the document structure is of the correct type. It allows us to receive data from multiple sources.
Most XML documents are produced by programs and scripts written to extract information held in databases and transform it into XML. However, it is also possible for human beings to create XML documents. Schemas can be used during this process to assist in the document creation process. XML schemas also provide a mechanism for documenting XML documents and form an important part of the specification of XML vocabularies.
The The writer of this article is a training consultant with Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering XML training courses in London and throughout the UK.
PowerPoint 2007’s Slide Masters Offer Total Control Over Your Presentation
February 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Microsoft PowerPoint 2007’s slide master feature has been significantly enhanced. It now offers users very powerful and flexible control over the appearance of related slides within a presentation. To access the slide master, activate the View Tab of the PowerPoint Ribbon and click on the button marked “Slide Master”. There is also a nifty shortcut for switching between normal view and slide master view: hold down the shift key and click on the Normal View icon on the right of the status bar (next to the zoom icons). The slide master is displayed in the pane on the left of your screen along with the various master slide layouts.
This new arrangement means that you now have two levels of control over the formatting of your slides. You can apply settings to the master and, in addition, you can make changes to individual layouts. The two levels are designed to work in a cascade and the changes you make at each level will both affect the slides in your presentation. Let’s examine how masters are used in a typical workflow.
Before editing the slide master, it is probably a good idea to decide if a single master will be enough for your presentation. If the presentation is fairly substantial with various sections and/or various speakers, you may need to create several different slide formats. If so, you will probably be better off creating several masters, perhaps completing the first and then duplicating it to get the others. Each master you create will have its own layouts displayed and indented below the master icon.
To edit the master, begin by making changes to the master icon itself, the large icon displayed above the layout icons. Typical changes you might make on the master would include the insertion of a corporate logo, setting the background colour(s) or setting a background image and specifying the format of the slide title and each level of bullet points in the body text.
Next, you can make changes to individual layouts within the master to either contradict or complement the formats on the main master. For example, if you have set a background colour scheme on the main master, you may want certain layouts to have a different or plain background. To achieve this, click on appropriate layout icon to activate that layout, right click on the layout and choose “Format Background” from the context menu. Having chosen a background different from that of the main master, the link between the background of that layout and that of the master will be broken: subsequent changes to the background of the master will no longer affect that layout.
You may also need to make modification to elements on layouts because they do not exist on the main master icon. For example, you cannot set the attributes of the subtitle placeholder on the main master; you need to click on the Title Slide layout and change it there.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Classes in London and throughout the UK.
Key Elements Microsoft Access 2007
February 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Tables
A table is the storage mechanism used by Microsoft Access to store information. Each table in Access resembles an Excel worksheet and consists of rows and columns. In a really simple database, only one table may be required but, more typically, a database will include several related tables. For databases to work efficiently, each table should store only one type of data. For example, in a typical database, you might have one table for storing client information, another for storing information about the company products, and so forth.
Fields (Columns)
Each column in a table is known as a field. When designing tables, it is important to define a field for each bit of information you will need to store and not to lump separate pieces of information together in a single field. As a general rule, having more fields gives you greater flexibility in data retrieval. Thus, for example, if you define three fields called “Title”, “FirstName” and “LastName” rather than a single field called “Name”, you will be able to combine them either to form both a salutation and a full name.
Records (Rows)
Each row in a table is called a record. A record represents a single piece of information on a given topic. Thus, if the table holds student grades, each record will constitute the grade achieved by a particular student in a particular exam. In a client table, each record will contain details about an individual client, and so forth.
Primary Keys
In order for the information stored in a database to be useful and accurate, it is very important to avoid duplicate information since this will tend to increase the occurrence of errors. Each record in a database should be unique. Thus, for example, if we have a table containing student information and there are two students called “John Smith” living at the same address, we need to have some way to distinguish between them. The recommended technique is to define a field within each table which will always contain a unique value. This field is usually referred to as the primary key. So, in our student table example, we might create a “StudentID” field and assign each student a unique ID. When designing tables in Microsoft Access, this unique value is achieved by setting the field type to “AutoNumber”, enabling Access to automatically generate a unique value for each new record created in the table.
Relationships
Although the information within a database is held in separate tables, the complete system which this information represents is a unified whole and there are associations between the information in all the various tables. Microsoft Access is called a relational database management system because it allows users to create relationships between the various tables. Relationships lend efficiency to databases by preventing the creation of redundant data. For example, in a client database, the table containing client information would be related to the table(s) holding client invoices. When creating the invoice, information from all the related tables can therefore be included.
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with OnSiteTrainingCourses.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Access Classes at their central London training centre.
Editing Chart Objects In Microsoft Excel 2007
February 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Before you can perform any kind of manipulation on a chart, you need to highlight it. To select an embedded chart simply click once on its border. When a chart is highlighted, Excel does two things: it displays the data on which the chart is based and it displays the Chart Tools. Chart Tools consist of the Design, Layout and Format context sensitive tabs.
To select a stand-alone chart, just click on the sheet tab. In a standalone chart, the chart occupies the entire sheet and normally the chart remains highlighted. However, it can be deselected if you click on the blank space outside the chart area. If the chart has become deselected, simply click on its border to reselect it; just as you would with an embedded chart.
The simplest form of manipulation one can do to an embedded chart is to reposition and resize the chart. To resize the chart, use one of the resize handles. These are positioned on the corners of the chart and in the middle of each side. Each resize handle is an icon consisting of three dots. When using the middle handles, you can only change one dimension; either the width or the height. When you use the corner handles, you can change both dimensions. To resize proportionally, in other words to retain the aspect ratio, hold down the Shift key as you drag.
It is also possible to permanently lock the aspect ratio of a chart, so that it becomes impossible to stretch it disproportionally. Click on the Format tab and then click on the launch button. In the size section this displays the Size and Properties dialog box. Here you’ll find the very useful option Lock Aspect Ratio. If this option is activated, whenever you use the corner handles to resize a chart, the aspect ratio is automatically preserved without having to use the Shift key.
To move a chart within the worksheet, position the cursor on the border of the chart but away from the resize handles. You will notice that when the cursor is positioned over a resize handle it changes to an icon with two arrows. When you have the cursor over the border but away from the resize handles, the cursor changes to an icon with four arrows. At this point, simply click and hold and drag the chart to a new location.
Although Excel places a chart on a separate layer, it still associates it with the columns and rows over which it is place. This means that if you make adjustments to these rows and columns, the chart can move or be resized. For example, if we insert a column to the left of one of the columns over which the chart is placed, the chart becomes wider to accommodate the newly inserted column.
If link between the chart and the underlying cells becomes a nuisance at any time, Excel allows you to deactivate it. Simply highlight the chart, click on the Format tab and then click on the launch button in the Size section. This time, you need to click on the Properties tab and here you’ll find options for Object Positioning. If you choose the option Don’t Move or Size With Cells, this means that chart objects will become completely independent of the columns and rows on which they superimposed.
The author is a training consultant with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel Classes at their central London training centre.