Archive for September, 2008

MS Excel 2007: Change Text Orientation

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

You can make your MS Excel spreadsheets look so professional if you want.  Perhaps you have seen spreadsheets with slanted text in the titles. It looks pretty snazzy don’t you think? Well, I can tell you to achieve the same thing.

Follow the steps below:

  1. Key in your text into the cell.
  2. Select the cell.
  3. On the Home tab of the Ribbon, find the Alignment Group.
  4. You will see a button with a small a and b and an arrow at an angle. This is the Orientation menu.
  5. Click on the little dropdown arrow beside it to see your choices.
  6. Select one of the quick options to angle your text.
  • To have more control over the slant of your text, select Format Cell Alignment and you can then decide just how slanted you would like your text!

Inserting a Non-Breaking Hyphen in MS Word

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Many times you wish to have a non-breaking hyphen in your document.  For example, when you type a phone number, you do not want to have three numbers at the end of one line and a hyphen at the beginning of the next line.  It’s just poor form.  This is just one example but there are many other reasons why you would want to use a non-breaking hyphen in your documents.

Follow the steps below to learn how to insert a non-breaking hyphen:

  1. Click on Insert | Symbol.
  2. Click on the Special Characters tab.
  3. Highlight the Non-breaking hyphen character.
  4. Click on Insert.
  5. Click on Cancel to close the dialog box.

You can also use the shortcut that I use which is CTRL + Shift + _

Word 2007 – Disable the Mini Toolbar

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

When text is selected in MS Word 2007, the Mini toolbar will appear. At first you can barely see it because it is so faint, but if you hover your mouse over it, it becomes much more visible.

The function of the Mini toolbar is to make common formatting commands handy for you. It can be very convenient if you want to highlight some text or make some changes to the font.

Alternatively, the Mini toolbar can be cumbersome if you want to rearrange text using the click and drag method. It can also be very distracting at times.

For whatever reason, if you would like to disable the Mini toolbar, follow the steps below:

  1. Click the Office Button.
  2. Select Word Options.
  3. Click Popular on the left-hand side.
  4. Deselect Show Mini Toolbar on selection.

That’s it – you’re finished – no more Mini toolbar!