Posts Tagged ‘group’

Working with Multiple Worksheets in MS Excel

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Working with multiple worksheets concurrently is how MS Excel power users create and format a complex workbook with the least amount of effort expended.

Follow the steps below to make working with multiple sheets a piece of cake and you will be on your way to becoming a power user!

  •     Hold down the CTRL key as you click each tab top select multiple worksheets.
  •     To select a contiguous group of worksheets, click the first one in the group and then hold down the Shift key and click the last one in the group.
  •     To select all the worksheets in the current workbook, right-click any worksheet tab and choose Select All Sheets from the shortcut menu.
  •     To quickly make any sheet active, click its index tab; to remove a sheet from a selected group of sheets, hold down CTRL and click its tab.
  •     To remove the multiple selection and resume working with a single sheet, click any unselected sheet. If you have selected every sheet in the workbook, right-click any worksheet tab and choose Ungroup Sheets.
  •     If you have selected more than one sheet, you see the word Group in brackets in the title board, and any data you enter appears in the corresponding cells on each worksheet in the group. So, if you have grouped Sheet1, Sheet2 and Sheet3, entering text in cellA1 on Sheet1 also enters the same text in the corresponding cells on Sheet2 and Sheet3.
  •     Any choices you make such as applying a number format, affect all the grouped worksheets identically. If you are building a workbook with identically formatted sheets, you can use these techniques to quickly enter category headings, etc. along the top of each sheet.

You cannot use the Clipboard to enter data into multiple sheets concurrently. When you paste data, it only appears in the active sheet and not in any other sheets you have selected.

Copy Formatting of Drawing Objects in MS Excel

Monday, May 16th, 2011

There are many reasons to use drawing objects and formatting in your MS Excel worksheets to create graphics.

So you create a drawing object and then you take lots of time to format it and tweak it until it fits your specifications. In the latest versions of MS Excel there are tons of colors, shadows and other cool effects that you can apply to your drawing objects.

So now you have your object exactly the way you want it and you want to create other drawing objects that will look just like it right down to the last detail. But whoa…that took a long time to do! Luckily you do not have to recreate the wheel!

You can simply copy your exact formatting from one object to another and it is fairly easy. Use the Format Painter!

Follow the steps below to learn how:

  1. Select your formatted object.
  2. Click the Format Painter tool in the Clipboard group on the Home tab.
  3. As you may recall, in earlier versions of Excel, the Format Painter resided on the Standard toolbar.
  4. Now click the object you want to copy your formatting to.
  5. To copy your formatting to multiple objects, select the formatted object and double-click the Format Painter toll in the Clipboard group on the Home tab.
  6. Now click each object to which you would like to copy your formatting.
  7. When you have finished, just click the Format Painter once more to turn it off.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that!

Customize the Ribbon in Word 2010

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Do not be intimidated by the new user interface in MS Word.  A lot of folks were very slow to purchase this latest version of Word because they loved being able to customze their toolbars and starting with version 2007 you could no longer do that unless you were a software programmer.

The good folks at Microsoft listened to the complaints of many though and gave users the ability to add custom tabs and groups in version 2010, as well as enabling you to make other tweaks to the Ribbon.

You can make the following changes to the Ribbon in version 2010:

  • Create new tabs.
  • Create new groups within custom tabs and/or within built-in tabs.
  • Add commands to custom groups (but not built-in groups).
  • Rename any tab, group or command.
  • Change the icons for commands.
  • Move tabs around on your ribbon.
  • Hide custom tabs and/or built-in tabs.
  • Remove groups from custom tabs and/or built-in tabs.

And that’s not all!  Once you have customized your ribbon, you can export your customizations to a file and use them on another computer!

Follow the steps below to create a Custom Tab and Custom Group:

  1. Right-click your Ribbon or the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT).
  2. Click the Customize the Ribbon…. option, or
  3. Click on File | Options | Customize Ribbon.

Either of the above methods will take you to the Customize Ribbon screen.

To add your own tab, follow the steps below:

  1. Determine where you would like your new tab to appear on your Ribbon, but don’t stress over it because you can move it later.
  2. Click to select the built-in tab that you want displayed in your Ribbon to the left of your new custom tab.
  3. Navigate to the right-hand side of the screen and you should see your new tab button at the bottom, beneath the diagram of the Main Tabs.
  4. Click the New Tab button.

Word will create both a new tab and within that tab, a new group. The new tab will appear below the tab you selected above.

You will most likely want to change the names that MS Word assigned to your new tab and group.

  1. Be certain that the New Tab is selected rather than the New Group, otherwise you will rename your group instead of your tab.
  2. Now locate the Rename button toward the bottom on the right and click it.
  3. When the dialog box displays, key in a name for your new tab.
  4. Click OK.

To rename your custom group:

  1. Select the group.
  2. Locate the Rename button toward the bottom on the right and click it.
  3. This time, when the Rename dialog displays you will see dozens of icons.
  4. Key in a name for your new group. You can use any but I opted for Legal.
  5. Click OK.

I will cover adding commands to your Custom Group in the next post!