Once you have mastered each individual Office program, you can begin to combine Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint together. What follows is an outline of the kind of things you can try and is common to most of Word, Excel & PowerPoint.
Advice for Word97 users is to always create a text box and put the element in that. Use the Insert menu. This method allows you to move elements freely around a document in a 'publisher' type fashion. Word2000+ users simply can Insert whatever they want and have full control.
Once inserted into a document, a graphical element may be formatted by right-clicking. Notice also the 'Grouping' and 'Ordering' options, allowing you to group elements together (Use Shift+Select on each element in turn to highlight them all) and to define what 'layer' they make up on the document.
Use of the 'Format Picture' menu from the Right-Click allows you to change the intensity and dimensions of a graphic.
Easier than you might think. You can embed existing charts & tables from Excel or Word etc (From File) or insert new ones and build them 'on the fly' (Create New). Use Insert-Object to initiate this.
With an inserted Excel element, the view you leave the element in will be the view shown in the document. You are essentialy running Excel within Word, so all Chart Options etc are available via the Right Click.
Naturally, anyone needing to manipulate a document with embedded elements requires the necessary program element to be installed on their computer.
WORD tables can have formulae wth number formats applied ('Table-Formula' menu), but entry is more manual than the Copy & auto recaluclation or Excel. To Update a Word Table's formulae, Select the entire table and press F9.
You can also sort WORD tables, making sure you specify the header row, if present, in the process.
Captions can be added for Word Tables in the Insert menu
The Tables & Borders Toolbar allows you to customise the lines on a table.
Incidentally you can also sort Paragraphs based on their first words - useful for lists.
Why? Simply to define particular pages/ areas in your document to control display/ printing & outlining. Using the 'Insert-breaks' menu, you can enable whole sections to print out on new pages.
Paragraphs can be set to stay together if necessary rather than split across pages. Use the Right-Click Paragraph menu and set the Widow/Orphan Control, Keep Lines Together, Keep With Next and Page Break Before options.
Shortcuts for Breaks:
CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE Non-breaking space
CTRL+SHIFT+HYPHEN Non-breaking hyphen
SHIFT+ENTER Manual line break
CTRL+ENTER Manual page break
A web page contains links that when clicked on take the user to another page or initiate a file. This same technique is possible in all Office Programs.
Use the 'Insert-Hyperlink' menu to make your specifications. MS applications by default change any web or email address into a hyperlink. To get rid of the blue underlined hyperlink just Right-Click and use the menu. Note that the 'address' or 'URL' should usually be relative to the document the link is in. Examples include:
The first example points to a Web Page on the Net. The second points to a folder, in the same location as the open document, in which there is an Excel file called assets.xls. The third links to a file in a local a network location and the final example creates a link that will initiate a new email to the address specified. Note the use of forward slashes for web and backward slashes for local network addresses.
You can also make a graphic behave lke a 'button' by inserting a hyperlink underneath it. (Right-Click the graphic and choose Hyperlink)
You can remove a hyperlink by highlighting it, Right-Clicking and going to the Hyperlink dialogue.
Routing refers to sending a document to a series of people one after the other, or all at once, with a view to them seeing & editing it before their changes being emailled back to you. It is similar to Emailling, except that you use the 'File-Send' menu and send to a routing recipient and name your addressees.
In Word, your specification of styles (Heading1, Heading2 etc) dictates how your document will be outlined. (Use'View-Document Map' to see the outline 'contents')
Use the View options to see your document in different ways.
In PowerPoint, outlining corresponds with different levels of text on slides.
Both the above can be edited in 'Outline View', meaning page/slide layout is not in evidence at the time.
In Excel, an automatic outline can be ceated based upon where summarial functions (eg SUM(A2:H2)) occur in columns or rows. This effectively means that rows & columns may be expanded and collapsed to show just summaries rather than full data. Data needs to be neatly presented in columns & rows for this to really be effective.
Linking is different from Embedding. When a document is inserted from file, it stays live so that if it changes, its insertion to a document changes also.
The most obvious application of this is when you create a Linked Table in an Access database. Rather than importing the data as a table into Access, you simply tell Access which (for example) Excel or ODBC-compliant file to use. This means that an address database from an accounts system may be linked to and read via Access. In this case, the linked table would not have a related form in Access, but will probably provide a source for a query or report.
This use of linked documents can also be used in PowerPoint or Word as then a graph in a Quarterly Report can always show the most current data.
A connection between the information in the destination file to the source file is established by the creation of a link. The link contains references to the location of the source file and the selection within the document that is linked to the destination file.
Any changes made in the source file that affect the linked object are automatically reflected in the destination file when it is opened. This is called live link. When you create linked objects, the date and time on your machine should be accurate. This is because the program refers to the date of the source file to determine whether updates are needed when you next open the destination file.
Suppose you want to display the column chart of the sales trends for the four categories in your Word document.
The steps required to do this are:
Switch to the Excel application and select the chart
Copy the selected chart object to the Clipboard
Switch to the Word document and move to the location where you want to insert the chart
Choose Edit/Paste Special
Select Paste Link
The source area displays the type of object contained in the Clipboard and its location. From the As list box select the type of format in which you want the object inserted into the destination file. The only available option for this object is a Microsoft Excel Chart Object.
The Result area describes the effect of your selections. In this case the object will be inserted as a picture and a link will be created to the chart in the source file.
The last two options in this dialog box allow you to control how the object is inserted and displayed. Float over text adds the object to the drawing layer. It can then be positioned anywhere in the document and manipulated using the Draw menu. If this option is cleared, the object is inserted on-line where it functions like regular text.
Selecting the Display as icon option changes the display of the object from a picture to an icon. Double-click oning on the icon displays the object picture. The default selection for both options is appropriate.
Click on OK. The chart object is now displayed at the location of the cursor aligned with the left margin.
Any open Office document may be sent as an Email or attached to an Email through the 'File-Send' menu.
This works with the default Email client on the users computer. (Use Control Panel-Internet Options to set which Email Program your computer uses by default). Best used with Outlook Express or Outlook Itself.
This refers to enabling a normal document to sit on top of a database (word table/ spreadsheet/ Address book/ database table) and to show certain fields through so they do not have to be typed in. It also means that if the underlying data is modified, the document contents may be modified also if it refers to those particular fields that have changed.
See Word Workshop for details.
This denies users the right to modify areas of a spreadsheet or a whole document. There are several methods, depending upon how much protection and why:
In a Word/ PowerPoint/ Excel file:
Use 'File-Save As' to create a new copy of the open document under a new name
Right-Click a closed file icon in a window, select Properties and tick 'read only'.
Use 'File-Save As' and choose '... Template' in the save as type box. This saves the files amongst the standard templates as a read only file.
On a spreadsheet:
Highlight selected cells you want available to users to change
Choose 'Format-Cells' from the toolbar
Deselect 'Locked' from the Protection Dialogue
Select 'Hidden' is you want formula or contents NOT to show in the formula bar
Choose 'Tools-Protection' and protect what you want to enable previous settings.
Password is case-sensitive and optional
You may also find a Zipping utility such as WinZip useful to compress, distribute & protect files or groups of files as you distribute them.
A little-known feature of Office. Highlight an element of a document and drag it to your desktop. This saves it as a file on you desktop, enabling you to copy & paste (or drag) it into several places. You could even save regularly used clips of text in this way and drag them into relevant emails/ documents to save time.
Both Word & Excel can be made to act like forms, allowing user input in certain boxes and storing the data entered. Access of course can create its own forms and this is often more straight forward than doing it manually in the other 2 programs.
How forms are achieved relies upon the user specifying cells in a worksheet or table that are entry fields and are linked to display their results in other cells or in a linked database. The ins & outs are rather complicated and beyond this tutorial but the Help menu in each program is useful as a guide. See Excel Detailled Workshop for Forms in Excel.
For flexibility, use a spreadsheet and then merge it via a Word Document or just use Access. Using just Word for forms is less flexible. Remember to save a Word Form as a Template so it cannot be changed. Users automatically have a fresh form reated for them then.
On an open file you can use 'File-Properties' or on a closed file use Right-Click and select 'Properties' to give extra info about a document. This info appears in Win98+ under the Thumbnail when a window is set to 'View-As Web Page' or in WinNT/95 in the Properties box.
You can also set a file to 'Read Only' or 'Hidden'. The latter is effective until you use 'View-Folder Options' to 'View all files' or the equivalent. Use with discretion.
Setting File Properties looks more professional and can mean users don't have to open a file to discover what it is about. They simply use the 'View as Web Page' option as above or Right Click + Properties to see info and therefore save time and reduce the risk of corrupting your file if you've not set it to Read Only.