Posts Tagged ‘MS Office’

Open Multiple Files at Once in MS Office

Friday, February 27th, 2009

I am a multi-tasker. I almost always have several applications open at any one time, for instance, when I am creating my newsletter! So, in the interest of saving time, I usually open all of these documents, spreadsheets, etc. all at once.

Follow the steps below to learn how:

  1. Click on File | Open, or in 2007, click the Office button and Open. You can also use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + O.
  2. Find the files you would like to open.
  3. If the files are contiguous, click on the first one to highlight it and then depress your Shift key and while still holding it down, click on the last item in your list.
  4. If the files are NOT contiguous, simply click on the first one and then depress your CTRL key and keep it held down while you select your other files.
  5. Once you have selected your files, click on Open.

NOTE: These files must all reside in the same folder for this method to work.

Toasts of the Week!

Friday, October 17th, 2008

My week has ended rather quickly.  Even though some days this week felt as if they were a month long, I was quite busy and before I hardly knew it, Friday was upon us.  I am too old to celebrate TGIF anymore. The weekend gives me a little bit of time to myself to do what I like best, reading, researching, learning and the obligatory cleaning, laundry, etc. Tomorrow my family and I will be attending a Fall Festival/Wine Tasting.  The weather is perfect for this sort of thing.  My daughter will be bringing her two dogs and we will have a grand time, walking in the cool weather sipping wine – what better way to spend a nice Fall afternoon?

But now that the week has ended I have some toasts for some of the folks that I came across this week. I have to admit that most of these meetings were not by choice. In any event, here goes:

Here’s to the folks on the Expressway during rush hour who get in the fast lane and then decide they will force everyone to go at least ten miles per hour below the speed limit by driving very, very slowly.  This toast is also for their compadres who get into the middle lane of that same Expressway and try to keep pace with the nut in the fast lane holding up a gazillion commuters.  Here’s to you folks! I will keep you in my prayers in the hopes that you get some therapy and overcome your control issues. Thank God for gun control – else I fear the expressway would be littered with bodies come the end of every week!

And a lovely skoal to the folks in offices who think it is perfectly acceptable to sit in their office and shout to that friend of theirs who sits two offices away while other people are actually trying to work – you know, trying to transcribe dictation or taking a phone call. I know your conversation about that new bar downtown is terribly important to you, but not so much for those of us who are trying to finish our work. Honestly, there is NO civility in the world any longer. I mean isn’t it common courtesy to use an indoor voice when you are indoors??? My mother always taught me that good manners and good taste never go out of style. Perhaps folks should keep that going when they raise their children eh?

I am also lifting my glass this fine Friday to service vendors who tell you one thing and then do something entirely different, such as say – tell you they will be in your office on Friday and then just not showing up and when you call they say oh….I thought that other person called you. Which part of customer service do they not get?  It takes a minute or less to make a phone call and keep a happy customer.  All I know is business must be booming despite our tanking economy! On the bright side, they are at least a good example as to how NOT to win and keep new customers right?

My last toast is to a lovely eighty year old gentleman who wrote to me to tell me that I was a blessing in his life because I had taught him so much about MS Office in my newsletter. He thanked me from the bottom of his heart.  He will probably never know how that lit up my day for me. There is a lesson to be learned here for all of us.  Let’s start each day trying to be a small blessing in someone’s life. You will be amazed at how good it makes you feel.

Enjoy your weekend everyone!  I will endeavor to make daily posts next week!

OpenOffice

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

Ever heard of OpenOffice? Well it’s an office suite to rival that of MS Office. The major difference between the two of them is that OpenOffice is FREE!

That is correct dear readers, I said free. The learning curve is not steep at all either. If you know your way around MS Office, it is not a huge leap to learn to navigate in OpenOffice either.

In OpenOffice you have Writer, which is the word processing equivalent of MS Word. You also will find Calc in OpenOffice, which is the equivalent of MS excel. Then there is Impress which is the equivalent of MS PowerPoint. You will also find Math and Draw in OpenOffice.

I didn’t really know much about OpenOffice until Dave Hartsock asked me to start writing articles about it for him and now I feel pretty secure using it. If you would like to read some of my articles, hop on over to Dave’s site and subscribe to his FREE newsletter. He has an archive of my older articles as well as all the other great in formation on his site.

You can download OpenOffice for free here so go ahead and give it a whirl. I think you will like it.