Number 246 - November 2003

Office Tips - EXCEL
by John Heenan, NOCCC - July 08, 2002
Sheet Addition with Excel 97/2002    For Excel 97/2000 users, if you need to add more worksheets to an existing workbook, don't worry, you can add worksheets without doing any harm to existing data, but here's one peculiarity: Let's say that your current workbook has three sheets. These sheets are named Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. To add a new sheet that is to be named Sheet4. Right-click the Sheet3 tab and choose Insert | Worksheet. You'll get a new sheet named Sheet4, but it will appear between Sheet2 and Sheet3. Excel inserts a new sheet before the selected sheet. But you wanted it after Sheet3, right? So, use the left mouse button to grab the new Sheet4 tab, then drag it to the right of the Sheet3 tab. You'll see an arrow appear to show you the new sheet placement. When you release the mouse button, Sheet4 will appear after Sheet3. Make Excel Worksheets Fit Your Paper    Large worksheets in Excel can make for cumbersome printouts, with rows spreading across several sheets and pages breaking in the wrong places. To get the hard copies you want, select File | Page Setup.    In the Page Setup dialog box, select the orientation for the worksheet Landscape orientation is better when the number of columns exceeds 20.    In the Scaling section of the dialog box, click "Fit to," and then use the arrows to indicate the number of pages wide and number of pages tall the worksheet should be. At this point, click the Print Preview button to check the results.    Click the Zoom button in the Print Preview window. If you can't read the worksheet on screen, you probably won't be able to read it on paper. You've squeezed your worksheet into too few pages. To change the number of pages, click Page Setup button. If the worksheet does not fit properly, go back to the worksheet and adjust column sizes.    To check the position of page breaks, click Page Break Preview while in the Print Preview window. Scroll down until you see a blue line indicating a page break. If it's not where you want it, click and drag it up. (You can't drag it down.) Click File | Print Preview to return to the Preview window.    When you're satisfied, click Print in the Preview window or the Page Setup dialog box to put your worksheet on paper. Filling In Multiple Excel Worksheets    Issue 3.02 discussed how to enter the same value into multiple sheets in an Excel workbook. To do this, you hold down Ctrl and click one or more additional worksheet tabs. Now, if you go to Sheet 1 and enter something into cell A1, that value will appear in cell A1 on every selected sheet.    A word of caution: Make sure you deselect the multiple sheets within your workbook. It's all too easy to save your work with the tabs still selected. When you next open it, you could accidentally overwrite stuff all over the place!"	Copying Values Only In Excel    There are times when you have formulas in a group of cells that you don't want to copy. You want to copy only the data in those cells.    Try this: Open a blank worksheet and enter           1, 2, 3, 4    into cells A1 through A4. Now click in cell A7 and type =sum(a1:a5)    Next, select cells A1 through A7. Use the right mouse button to drag the selected cells to their new location C1 to C7. When you release the right mouse button, a pop-up menu appears. From this menu, choose Copy Here As Values Only. The data in cell A7 appears in the new location C7, but, the formula does not appear. Printing Multiple Excel Worksheets    You can print from two different sheets within a single file with one command by holding down Ctrl while you single-click the desired sheet tab names. When you click on Print Preview button, you will see all of the selected worksheets ready to be printed. Office Tips - POWERPOINT    Producing A Remote PowerPoint Presentation    This is a job for Pack And Go. Since you want to put the presentation on a floppy disk, place a formatted blank floppy disk into drive A:. Also put your Office installation disc into your CD-ROM drive--you'll need it later. If your presentation is very long, you should format two or three floppies. Pack And Go prompts you for a new disk when one fills up.    Open your presentation in PowerPoint and choose File, Pack And Go. When the Pack And Go wizard opens, click Next. Since you want to save the current presentation, make sure the Active Presentation check box is selected and click Next again.    Now select the A: Drive radio button and click Next. Click Next again, then select the Viewer For Windows 95 Or NT radio button and click Next. Click Finish Now to create your Pack And Go disk.    When your friend receives the disk, he should put it into drive A: and double-click the Pngsetup.exe icon. This installs the slide show and the viewer on his computer. He can now play the show even though he doesn't have PowerPoint. The sound will also work.    Note: When we rely on this method, we have had problems with losing the correct timing on single slides that loop continuously using custom animation.    Copyright (c) 1995-2002 by North Orange County Computer Club. All rights reserved.    Articles by NOCCC authors may be reprinted by other user groups without permission provided they are unaltered and the publication acknowledges the author thereof and NOCCC. Articles contained herein by authors from other organizations retain their original copyright.
Number 246 - November 2003