K2E Canada Office Tips March 2019


Excel Tips

Moving Cells Using a Mouse

Summary:  It is easy to move cells with your mouse from one section of a workbook to another. Here is how to do this:

Highlight the range of cells you want to move.
  1. Place your mouse pointer over the heavy border that surrounds the selected range. Your mouse pointer should turn into an arrow.
  2. Click and drag the range to the new location. As you are moving your mouse, the outline of the range moves with it.
  3. When you reach the new location, release the mouse pointer. The cells are then moved.
If there is data at the target location, Excel will ask you if you want to overwrite the existing cells. That decision is up to you.
 
If this doesn't work and there is no heavy border around your selected range, then drag-and-drop editing is probably turned off on your system. To check this, do the following steps:
  1. Display the Excel Options dialog box. To do this click on the File tab of the ribbon and click Options.
  2. Click the Advanced option at the left of the dialog box.
  3. In the Editing Options area, make sure the Enable Fill Handle and Cell Drag-and-Drop check box is checked.
  4. If you want to be warned before overwriting information during an edit, make sure the Alert Before Overwriting Cells check box is selected.
  5. Click on OK.

Quickly Close All Open Workbooks Without Closing Excel

Summary: There are times when you want to close all of your open Excel workbooks. Excel normally requires you to close each one individually. Here is how to close them all at once:
 
You need to add the Close All icon to your Quick Access Toolbar
  1. Right mouse click on your Quick Access toolbar and select Customize QAT.
  2. Select All Commands from the drop-down arrow in the middle panel of the QAT window.
  3. Select Close All.
  4. Click on Add. The Close All icon will now move to the Quick Access Toolbar selections on the right.
  5. Click on OK.

The Close All icon will now be in your Quick Access Toolbar. To close all your open workbooks just click on the Close All icon. Note that you will still have to save any workbook that has been changed for which you do not have AutoSave turned on for. 

Word Tip

Adding Columns in Word

Summary: There are times in a Word document when you want your text split into multiple columns. Here is how to do this:
 
Word lets you to divide your page into as many as 45 columns (depending on other characteristics of your page). To add columns, do the following:
  1. Position the insertion point at the beginning of the text that you want to appear in columns.
  2. Select the Layout tab for the ribbon.
  3. In the Page Setup group (Layout group in Excel 2016), click the Columns drop-down list.
  4. Pick the number of columns you want to use for the selected text.
When you do step 3 you can select the most common numbers of columns (1, 2, or 3). If you need more columns than these, click the More Columns option in step 4 and you will see the Columns dialog box where you can set up to 45 columns.
 
If you use the up and down arrows in the Number of Columns field of the Columns dialog box to set columns, you can only choose a range between 1 and 13 columns when you are using portrait-oriented letter-size paper. If you change to landscape-oriented paper, then you can use the control to go between 1 and 18 columns.
 
Word sets the upper limit of the control so that no individual column on the paper will be less than a half-inch wide. If you change the printable area of your page (adjust the paper size, orientation, and margins), then Word adjusts the upper limit of the Number of Columns control.
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Video Tip

Using Flash Fill

Summary:  If you are using Excel 2013 or later you can use the Flash Fill feature to save you time when you are trying to reshape imperfect data. Many times, you get data from somewhere that isn’t in the right format--
the text is all caps, phone numbers appear without dashes, or a bunch of fields are jammed into a single column. By providing one or two examples of what you are trying to do, Flash Fill uses heuristics to make a correction of the data in an adjoining column.
 
Here's the video tip from the webinar K2's Road to Excellence with Excel Part 3 and Receipt Bank