Microsoft has long produced software with a belt-and-braces approach, offering a choice of ways to perform a particular task. For example, in Word, you’ll find a smorgasbord of methods for cutting, copying and pasting text. There’s the usual cut, copy and paste via keystroke, menu or toolbar. There’s also the Office Clipboard, which is like [...]
This tutorial guides you through building a simple, single-file database. In a single-file database, also known as a flat-file database, you put all your information into a single table. This is the simplest form of database to create, but it has some serious limitations and disadvantages. The most important of these limitations are that single-table [...]
What’s a database? If you think of word processors as… well… processors of words, and spreadsheets as number processors, then you can think of databases as processors of unstructured information, aka “data”. Feed a database data in any sort of guise – as numbers, text, dates, images, web links – and it will digest all [...]
Can’t tell your first normal form from your third? Untangle basic database jargon with this easy-to-understand dictionary of terms.
Most text selection in Word involves selecting horizontally – selecting a line or a paragraph of text. Sometimes, though, you need to select a vertical slab of text. To do that, hold down the Alt key while you click and drag your mouse over the text. This comes in handy when someone sends you an [...]
If you frequently find yourself wanting to edit the same document you were using in your last Word session, you can create a shortcut which does just this, using a command-line switch. Here’s how: Right-click an empty spot on your desktop and choose New -> Shortcut from the pop-up menu. Click the Browse button and [...]
Have you ever wanted to delete the document currently open in Word? I find I often want to do this when I’m trying to clean out a whole bunch of old documents: I open each one, check the contents and, if I no longer need it, delete it on the spot. Word won’t normally let [...]
How do you omit the page number on the final page of a Word document? I was asked this recently by someone who is using Lulu.com’s self-publishing service. Lulu had asked her to resubmit her book with a completely blank final page – no page number, nothing. Finding the solution to this seemingly simple request [...]
You’ve probably heard the stats: 80% of Microsoft Word users make use of only 20% of its features. My guess is that only about 0.1% of Word users use the handy calculator built right into the program. I’m not talking about the SUM() and AVERAGE() fields or any of the other of Word’s useful but [...]
When you refer to a cell in an Excel formula, you can use any of three different ways of referring to that cell, known as relative, absolute and mixed references. Relative cell references are the most commonly used. A relative cell reference in a formula is based on the position of the formula’s cell relative [...]
Most text selection in Word involves selecting horizontally – selecting a line or a paragraph of text. Sometimes, though, you need to select a vertical slab of text. To do that, hold down the Alt key while you click and drag your mouse over the text. This comes in handy when someone sends you an [...]
Microsoft Outlook comes with a collection of command-line switches which let you determine how the program starts. By default, Outlook opens to either your Inbox or the Outlook Today page, using a command-line that looks something like this: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OUTLOOK.EXE” /recycle The /recycle at the end of that line is a switch which tells [...]
One of Word’s quirky, tucked-away features is the rand() function. It lets you quickly insert a block of text in a document. To use the function in pre-2007 versions of Word, at the beginning of a line type =rand() and press Enter. Word inserts three paragraphs, each containing five sentences like this: The quick brown [...]
I’ve put the Kindle and the Sony Reader aside for a day to finish writing my latest comparative review of database software for Australian PC User magazine. I’ve been writing such reviews since the early 1980s, when dBASE was top dog in the database stakes. It was a seriously buggy program, but in the very [...]