Ms Office Tune Up

As you already know, a database is a collection of information. In Access, every database is stored in a single file. That file contains database objects, which are simply the components of a database.

Database objects are the main players in an Access database. Altogether, you have six different types of database objects:

• Tables store information. Tables are the heart of any database, and you can create as many tables as you need to store different types of information. A fitness database could track your daily running log, your inventory of exercise equipment, and the number of high-protein whey milkshakes you down each day, as three separate tables.
• Queries let you quickly perform an action on a table. Usually, this action involves retrieving a choice bit of information (like the 10 top-selling food items at Ed’s Roadside Dinner, or all the purchases you made in a single day). However, you can also use queries to apply changes.
• Forms are attractive windows that you create, arrange, and colorize. Forms provide an easy way to view or change the information in a table. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

When you start the Word application using the Start menu, it by default creates a new, blank document file for you. This document file has the placeholder name Document1 until you save it to assign a more specific name, as described later in the chapter. You can immediately start entering content into this blank document. If you need another blank document, you can create it at any time by following these steps:

1. 1. Select Office Button➪New. The New Document dialog box appears.
2. 2. Click the Blank Document icon if it isn’t selected by default.
3. 3. Click Create. The new, blank document appears.

Typing text

When you create a new, blank document, you can begin typing text to fill the page. As you type, each character appears to the right of the blinking vertical insertion point. You can use the Backspace and Delete keys to delete text, the Spacebar to enter spaces, and all the other keys that you’re using for typing. Word also enables you to start a line of text anywhere on the page using the Click and Type feature. (This feature only works in the Print Layout view, so to learn more about that view, see the later section describing Word 2007’s views.) To take advantage of Click and Type, move the mouse pointer over a blank area of the page. If you don’t see formatting symbols below the I-beam mouse pointer, click once. This enables Click and Type and displays its special mouse pointer. Then, you can double-click to position the pointer on the page and type your text. Figure 4-1 shows snippets of text added to a page using Click and Type.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

Some of Excel’s time saving frills can make your life easier when you’re entering data in a worksheet. This section covers four such features: AutoComplete, Auto-Correct, AutoFill, and AutoFit, along with Excel’s top candidates for the Lifetime Most Useful Achievement award: Undo and Redo.

Figure 2-6. Tweaking the regional settings on your computer gives you complete control over how Excel recognizes dates. Use the pull-down menus to specify the date separator, order of month, day, and year components in a date, and how Excel should interpret two-digit years. You can mix and match these settings freely, although you could wind up with a computer that’s completely counter intuitive to other people. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7% [?]

By looking at cell alignment, you can easily tell how Excel is interpreting your data. That’s helpful. But what happens when Excel’s interpretation is at odds with your wishes? For example, what if you type in something you consider a number but Excel freakishly treats it as text, or vice versa? The first step to solving this problem is grasping the logic behind Excel’s automatic decision-making process.

How Excel decides your data is text

If your cell meets any of the following criteria, Excel automatically treats the content as ordinary text:

• It contains any letters. Thus, C123 is text, not a number.

• It contains any punctuation that Excel can’t interpret numerically. Punctuation allowed in numbers and dates includes the comma (,), the decimal point (.), and the forward slash (/) or dash (-) for dates. When you type in any other punctuation, Excel treats the cell as text. Thus, 14! is text, not a number.

Occasionally, Excel reads your data the wrong way. For example, you may have a value like a social security number or a credit card number that’s made up entirely of numeric characters but that you want to treat like text because you don’t ever want to perform calculations with it. But Excel doesn’t know what you’re up to, and so it automatically treats the value as a number. You can also run into problems when you precede text with the equal sign (which tells Excel that you have a formula in progress), or when you use a series of numbers and dashes that you don’t intend to be part of a date (for example, you want to enter 1-2-3 but you don’t want Excel to read it as January 2, 2007which is what it wants to do).

In all these cases, the solution’s simple. Before you type the cell value, start by typing an apostrophe (’). The apostrophe tells Excel to treat the cell content as text. Figure 2-3 shows you how it works. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7% [?]

It is interesting that when tate.co.uk making a poll about “What is most important to you when searching for a new role?” many respondent (70%) choose location instead of salary (27%) or benefits (3%). Even if I found this kind of odd, but there you have it. Some people don’t necessarily work for money, there are people who work simply because of they seek for self improvement and contribution. These differences are important to be acknowledged and to be treated wisely in terms of finding jobs.

But before I continue, let me first introduce tate.co.uk

Tate is a national office recruitment business founded in 1985. They specialise in sourcing staff for Office Jobs, including data entry jobs, secretarial, HR jobs and more. They claim that what makes them different is their unique blend of innovative processes, consistently high levels of service and a real passion for their work. Furthermore, what makes them special is the way they build ongoing relationships with their customers and candidates. These relationships are based on total honesty, a genuine commitment to quality and a constant desire for continuous improvement.

It seems to me that they have a unique philosophy which is integral to all of their service. After I learn more about them, I found there are 7 interesting Tate’s values that intrigue me very much. The first one is respect; that they don’t see a pot of gold when they look at people. Instead, it is the people’s hopes and dreams, their goals and their values. They listen carefully and respect everything their clients, candidates, suppliers and staff saya and do. That’s why they are truly different. Many admire their principles and infact proud to be part of their story.

That is nice. I think it is important to be understood bacause each of us has different values regarding our jobs.

Take for example a personal assistant and receptionist job. For you who are looking for PA Jobs, then you must already knew that personal assistant jobs are not as simple as assisting a busy or successful person to do daily personal tasks. The role of a personal assistant has expanded as the business environment has required more responsibilities. Today, a Personal Assistant may be responsible for screening incoming calls, checking emails, reviewing documentation, sending mail, doing research, scheduling reservations, booking meetings, etc.

Now lets compare it with Receptionist Jobs; their work is usually performed in a waiting area such as a lobby or front office desk of an organization or business. PA and receptionist seems similar in some way. In many cases the titles are used interchangeably. But a personal assistant is actualy just a PC word for a secretary. A secretary usually does more specialized work, like writing letters, handling phone calls and letters for the boss. Your computer skills have to be much better to be a personal assistant since most of your time will be spent on a computer.

So how does this affect you? Well, simple, do you enjoy working with people or things? This preference alone will influence you career choice. And this is what Tate is listening to from their candidates. Nice.

Popularity: 5% [?]

One of Excel’s most important features is its ability to distinguish between different types of information. A typical worksheet contains both text and numbers. There isn’t a lot you can do in Excel with ordinary text (other than alphabetize a list, perform a simple spell check, and apply some basic formatting). On the other hand, Excel gives you a wide range of options for numeric data. For example, you can string your numbers together into complex calculations and formulas, or you can graph them on a chart. Programs that don’t try to separate text and numbers like Microsoft Word, for example can’t provide these features.

Most of the time, when you enter information in Excel, you don’t explicitly indicate the type of data. Instead, Excel examines the information you’ve typed in, and, based on your formatting and other clues, classifies it automatically. Excel distinguishes between four core data types:

• Ordinary text. This data type includes column headings, descriptions, and any content that Excel can’t identify as one of the other data types.

• Numbers. This data type includes prices, integers, fractions, percentages, and every other type of numeric data. Numbers are the basic ingredient of most Excel worksheets.

• Dates and times. This data type includes dates (like Oct 3, 2007), times (like 4:30 p.m.), and combined date and time information (like Oct 3, 2007, 4:30 p.m.). You can enter date and time information in a variety of formats.

• True or false values. This data type (known in geekdom as a Boolean value) can contain one of two things: TRUE or FALSE (displayed in all capitals). You don’t need Boolean data types in most worksheets, but they’re useful in worksheets that include Visual Basic macro code or that use complex formulas that evaluate conditions.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

You’ve probably seen or read books where the introductory material displays page numbers using lower-case Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, and so on), whereas the rest of the book dis­plays page numbers using Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, and so on). Using multiple page num­ber formats in this way is an easy method for differentiating two different sections of a book, and it’s a technique you can apply to your own Word documents.

The trick here is to create a section break between the parts of the document where you want to use the different page numbers. A section is a document part that stores page layout options such margins, page size, page orientation, columns, line numbering, and footnotes and endnotes. The transition from one section to another is called a section break. Sections also include headers and footers, and we’ll use that fact to set up our different numbering schemes.

The first step is to create the section break, which you do by following these steps:

1. Position the cursor at the point where you want the new section to start.
2. Choose Page Layout, Breaks. Word displays a menu of break options.
3. In the Section Breaks group, click the type of section break you want:

Next Page-Starts a new section on a new page.

Continuous-Starts a new section at the cursor. (Note that this command doesn’t create a page break, so you probably won’t use it in this context.)

Even Page-Starts a new section on the next even-numbered page.

Odd Page-Starts a new section on the next odd-numbered page. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8% [?]

Numbered lists (choose Home, Numbering) are a great way to present a sequential series of items-steps in a procedure, rankings, Top Ten lists, and so on. When you create one numbered list, press Enter twice after the last item and then start a second numbered list, (Word starts the second list at 1). That’s usually the behavior you want, but there may be times when you have to insert text between two steps. In this case, you want to make sure that Word continues the numbering when the list continues after the inserted text.

Word gives you a couple of ways to do this, and the method you choose depends on when you want to insert the text: while you’re creating the numbered list or after you’ve finished the numbered list.

The easiest method is to insert the text after you have completed the numbered list:

1. Navigate to the end of the step before which you want to insert the non-numbered text.
2. Press Enter. Word inserts a new step.
3. Choose Home, Numbering to deactivate the Numbering button. Word converts the new step into a regular paragraph.
4. Insert your text.

To insert the text while you’re creating the numbered list, follow these steps: Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7% [?]

In these complex and uncertain times, forecasting business performance is increasingly important. Today, more than ever, managers at all levels need to make intelligent predic­tions of future sales and profit trends as part of their overall business strategy. By forecast­ing sales six months, a year, or even three years down the road, managers can anticipate related needs such as employee acquisitions, warehouse space, and raw material require­ments. Similarly, a profit forecast enables the planning of the future expansion of a com­pany.

Business forecasting has been around for many years, and various methods have been developed-some more successful than others. The most common forecasting method is the qualitative “seat-of-the-pants” approach, in which a manager (or a group of managers) estimates future trends based on experience and knowledge of the market. This method, however, suffers from an inherent subjectivity and a short-term focus because many man­agers tend to extrapolate from recent experience and ignore the long-term trend. Other methods (such as averaging past results) are more objective but generally useful for fore­casting only a few months in advance.

In business, it’s becoming increasingly popular to use a statistical tool called regression analy­sis to determine the relationship between one phenomenon that depends on another. For example, car sales might be dependent on interest rates, and units sold might be dependent on Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]

One of my goals in this book is to present you with tricks that are practical in the sense that you can use them right away to be more productive or more efficient. I also try to focus on reducing drudgery, mostly by automating tedious or routine tasks with macros. This section’s trick isn’t even remotely practical, but I think it falls somewhat into the “reducing drudgery” category, as you’ll see (I hope!).

We all have certain documents that we use almost every day. A good example is a to-do list that is checked constantly throughout the day and that is added to or deleted from as nec­essary. Any document that you look at many times a day gets boring awfully fast. To add some visual interest, Listing 1 presents a macro that applies a random background texture to a specified document.

Listing 1 A Macro That Applies a Random Background Texture to a Specified Document

Public Sub ApplyRandomTexture(doc As Document)
Dim i As Integer
‘
‘ Initialize the random number generator
‘
Randomize
‘
‘ Generate a random number between 1 and 24
‘
i = Int(24 * Rnd + 1)
‘
‘ Apply the random number as a background texture constant
‘
doc.Background.Fill.PresetTextured i
End Sub

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Popularity: 7% [?]