Excel shortcut keys to save you time and frustration

Thursday, September 19th, 2013

Written by Jane Hames If you like using keyboard shortcuts to improve your efficiency, these two Excel shortcut keys are not so well known, but can be very useful to format numbers as a percentage or with the pound symbol. Fomatting keys First select the cell or cells to be formatted and then do the […]

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PowerPoint – Exporting Notes Pages to Word

Wednesday, June 12th, 2013

Written by Jane Hames In PowerPoint it is useful to be able to print your notes pages along with miniatures of your slides. The notes could be for the benefit of the presenter or to hand out to the audience. If you want to edit those notes or save them as a Word document, this […]

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Confused by the symbols used in Excel formulas?

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

Written by Jane Hames. Last week, one of my Excel workshop participants said they were confused when looking at Excel formulas with quotes, exclamation marks, colons and commas. I thought that my response was worth sharing as I’m sure he’s not the only one to be confused by this. The formula below, is calculating the […]

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A Clever Use of Slicers in an Excel Pivot Table

Tuesday, January 29th, 2013

Written by Jane Hames I have posted a how-to guide about slicers before, but Excel Pivot Tables are such a popular tool for data analysis and people can become a bit attached to them! Using the Excel Pivot Table Slicer with Groups On a recent Advanced Excel training course, I was asked by a buying […]

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Splitting Text Into Separate Columns

Thursday, December 13th, 2012

Written by Jane Hames Lists of data are often received in a format that is not ideal for the work that needs to be carried out with it. One example of this is when you have first name and surname in one cell, where you really need the information to be in two separate cells. […]

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One space or two? A clever use of Find and Replace in Word

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

Written by Jane Hames I have been delivering Word training to secretaries this week and they like to have two spaces after a full stop. For a lot of us one space is enough, but for those who are “proper” typists or trained secretaries two spaces is the correct way to do things. This explain […]

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The Perfectly Centred Heading In Excel

Wednesday, October 10th, 2012

Written by Jane Hames In Excel you can centre values within a cell, merge cells and centre values within those cells, but my preferred option is the one that I often get asked about – Center Across Selection. Center Across Selection, centres values across a range of cells. The advantage of this option is that […]

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Using Transpose in Excel to rotate data

Wednesday, September 5th, 2012

Written by Jane Hames I often hear a ripple of words like “wow”, “ooo, I never knew that”, “ahhh, write that down” when I show my workshop participants how to use the Transpose feature, so I thought I would share it with you too! Transpose enables you rotate the orientation of data with row and […]

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Changing a negative value into a positive value in Excel

Thursday, August 16th, 2012

Written by Jane Hames I was doing some analysis on my banking this week (hmmm, not the most exciting job!) and decided to export the month’s transactions into Excel so that I could separate my incomings and outgoings more easily. The outgoings were displayed as negative values which is what I would expect. However, I […]

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How can I shrink text to fit a page in Word 2010?

Thursday, August 9th, 2012

Written by Jane Hames I deliver a lot of Microsoft Office upgrade training and I have been asked this same question several times recently: “From the Print Preview, in older versions of Word, I used to be able to shrink the text in a document onto one page. The option doesn’t seem to be available […]

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