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Tips and Tricks

Common Problems...

Cut those every-day tasks in half with these simple and efficient solutions to some of the most common problems we all face at work-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1.
My boss asked me to send this letter to all our customers in Delhi. He asked me to e-mail those who have e-mail access.
This task is very simple if you have the list of customers in a database. Microsoft Excel is the easiest to work with, so request your database operator to give you the list in Excel. Type your letter in Word, leaving blanks where the customer's information (name, for example) should appear. In Word, open Tools > Mail Merge, and click Create > Form Letters. Click Active Window and then Get Data > Open Data Source. Select the Excel file and then edit the document. The Mail Merge toolbar will automatically appear. Click Insert Merge Field to insert the customer's name. You can filter out the residents in Delhi in the Excel sheet itself, or when extracting the list from the original database or even from the Mail Merge function itself. Once you've added all the fields, click the Mail Merge icon. Select Merge to Printer and click Query Options. Here, set the criteria to select only the people who don't have e-mail addresses (select the E-mail column under Field and set the Comparison to 'is blank') and set the city to Delhi if you want. Click Merge to print all the letters. Similarly, select Electronic Mail in the 'Merge to' options and set the query to pick up only the records that have an e-mail address. These can be sent automatically via e-mail. Again, open Tools > Mail Merge in Word. This time select Create > Envelopes (or Mailing Labels). Following the same process as above, you can print envelopes (or labels to stick on the envelopes) for those who will be receiving the printed letter.

2.
My temp who enters all these forms into the database is quite slow. He's probably never used Access.
Give the data entry operator a form on the screen that looks similar to the form he's entering data from. In Access, open the database and click the Forms tab. Click New and select Autoform: Columnar. Access will automatically create a data entry form that is linked to the table. Once the form is created, you can rearrange the text fields to look exactly like the paper form-just drag the elements to the correct positions!

3.
We've got so many different kinds of customers. How can I find all those situated in Delhi?
If you have the list of clients in Excel or can convert it to Excel, simply click Data > Filter > AutoFilter. All column headings will be converted to drop down lists from where you can filter the records to any level. The drop down will automatically pick up all unique values in the column, so click any value to see rows that only have that value (e.g. Delhi). The filtering is additive: selecting values in the various drop down lists will apply all filters simultaneously. Click Custom and set an advanced rule for filtering. This is very powerful with both, numbers and text. You can return to the original view by choosing All in the drop down list box. If you are using Access, you can simply right-click a cell and select Filter By Selection to filter the column by that value, or enter a value for the Filter For box for a custom filter.

4.
I regularly need to send e-mail to everyone in the company.
If you send e-mail regularly to the same people, create a group for them in the address book. If these names are already present in your address book, creating a group is much simpler. Open up the address book and click New > New Group from the toolbar. Enter a name for the group and click Select Members. Here, you can select all the people you want included in the group. When you want to e-mail these people, enter the name of the group instead of the individual e-mail addresses and the mail will be sent to every member on the list.

5.
There are just so many documents! I can't find the contract agreement for the Power project!
If you have a lot of unorganised documents, finding the right one can be quite time-consuming. It's always faster to have the computer look for them rather than you taking up the task. All the applications in Microsoft Office-Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access-have extremely powerful search features that locate the required file. On the File Open dialog, you can have the program look for files that contain certain text by entering the text in the Text or Property area. You can also filter down the selection to a particular date from the Last Modified drop down list. Click Advanced and you can specify an infinite number of criteria to locate documents. The Advanced Find dialog automatically picks up criteria specified on the File Open dialog (text, document type and modified date). You can add more by selecting a property (File Name, Company, Author, etc), selecting a comparison condition (includes or begins with), entering a value for comparison and clicking Add to List. Once you've specified all the criteria, click Find Now. The File Open dialog box will display only documents that match. If you enabled 'Search subfolders', Word will display the entire tree structure down to the documents!
From the Advanced Find dialog, you can also save searches for later reuse. Thus, even if your documents are organised well, but across a few folders, you can save certain commonly-used searches and simply use those to open up documents of a particular kind in a single click. The New Search button resets the search criteria.

6.
He expects me to know the entire Internet by heart? Now where am I going to find Web sites on corporate successes?
The World Wide Web is a huge resource of information, but research is akin to filling a glass from a gushing fire hydrant. However, search engines are getting better by the day and within minutes you can open up a whole bunch of Web sites that are relevant to your topic. Search engines have grown smarter and know how to avoid cheap tactics of Web developers to get their pages to show up on search results. Also, some of them actually have hand-picked selections of Web sites. Most already use referral ratings to prioritise search results-if the site is linked from a reputed site, it gets a higher priority. Thus, you can simply enter the words you are looking for and find relevant results within the first 20 matches.
Google (www.google.com) is known to give the most accurate search results for the simplest of queries. However, almost all search engines have a lot of mechanisms for advanced searching, which are usually unknown to most. Again, the way to use advanced searches differs from engine to engine. For example, wrapping text in double-quotes indicates a phrase search. And, Or, - and + usually indicate boolean searches, depending on the search engine. Sites like Altavista (www.altavista.com) also recognise keywords such as Near for boolean searches-it will return results for pages that contain words close to each other, for example, in the same paragraph. Most search engines can also search for matches only in the page titles. Advanced searching instructions are usually located in some corner of the search page-look for such a link on your search engine, go through the instructions, and you will be able to locate sites more powerfully. Many advanced options are controlled by the way you type the search criteria, but almost all of them have a user-friendly form for at least some of the frequently-used features. HotBot (www.hotbot.com) has some very good advanced search features missing from most other search engines, such as return only top-level pages, pages must include certain kinds of files, etc.

7.
I want to send this presentation to others. They may not have PowerPoint and I want the fonts, transitions, etc to look the same.
PowerPoint has some great features for sharing presentations. If you want to simply run the presentation over a LAN, you can simply click Slide Show > Online Broadcast > Begin Broadcast. However, with this everyone viewing the presentation must have PowerPoint installed. A simple solution to this is to use the PowerPoint Viewer. This is a small installation just for viewing PowerPoint slide shows. You can have your presentation carry the fonts used along with it, if the fonts do not have license restrictions. Click File > Save As to save the presentation. In the Save As dialog box, click Tools > Embed TrueType Fonts. The best way to distribute presentations is to use the Pack and Go feature. This creates a self-extracting archive of the presentation so that it can be sent by mail and you can optionally include the viewer along with it as well as embed fonts. Click File > Pack and Go and simply run through all the screens.

8.
How can I preview e-mail and download only the relevant ones?
There are various freeware and shareware tools available that allow you to preview e-mail before downloading them from the server, even from POP3 servers. You can see the sender, recipients, subject and time stamps-these are usually enough to determine whether the message is important or not.
Magic Mail Monitor (www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/2576/magic.html) is a free tool that can handle multiple e-mail accounts and check them at regular intervals. It sits in the system tray and can optionally display the entire message, too. From here itself, you can reply, send or delete the e-mail.
If your server supports it, you can use IMAP for the same functionality. By default, Outlook and Outlook Express download only headers for IMAP folders. You can preview each message, download the ones you want and delete the rest. You can use IMAP just for preview and have the same account configured for POP3, so after previewing and deleting messages, the ones you need can be downloaded to your desktop.

9.
These agreement documents are huge. It takes me so much time to go through them and most of it is fluff anyway.
Word uses a powerful feature called Outlines for organising information. It takes just a slight extra effort and diligence on your part when creating a document to organise the information correctly. Use Styles to mark out headings and subheadings in the document, in the hierarchy in which they are supposed to be (Heading1 corresponds to the first level, Heading2 to the second, and so on). Don't use or not use certain styles just because the font doesn't look good-you can change the appearance from Format > Styles.
If your document is created correctly, you can use the Document Map (from the View menu) to browse through the sections and subsections. The items are grouped according to the hierarchy, and you can show or hide any of the levels (to see all sections at one glance, for example), making it extremely simple to navigate the document. Another advantage of using styles is that it makes reorganisation very simple. Switch to Outline View (View > Outline). Here, the entire document is displayed in a hierarchical form. Each group can be collapsed or expanded. You can click on the marker next to the heading or paragraph and drag it up, down, left or right. Pulling it up or down will move the entire group and its subgroups above or below other items, pulling it left or right will promote or demote the group. For a quick glance at the sections, click the Show First Line Only icon on the toolbar. This will display only the first line of every paragraph, again making it extremely simple to navigate a document.
Another advantage of using these styles in your document is that it can be imported directly into PowerPoint to make a presentation.

10.
We dispatch several hundred units across 20 regions. It takes me half a day every week to decide on the correct distribution plan and to make reports for region-wise break-ups.
Excel can be very useful for small-time inventory tracking. Plus, you don't need to know too much about Excel to be able to use it-basic inventory tracking simply involves addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. As a one-time exercise, you can make a worksheet that has all the functions defined. You can probably use one sheet to keep a tab on all products. Thus, if you have all the products listed in one column, the total number of products in another column and the regions across a row, all you have to do is punch in the right numbers in the right cells. If you want an estimate of how many pieces of each to send to each region, just fill in the cells with the percentage of products you send to that region from the total number of products (e.g., =B3*12%) and every time the total number of products changes, you will automatically get the new estimate.
When filling up the sheet, if the number of products exceed the total number, or if a particular region is receiving very few products, you can have Excel warn you about it by using conditional formatting. Select the cells for which you want the warnings, click Format > Conditional Formatting and select 'Cell Value Is' in the first drop down, less than in the second drop down and enter the threshold value in the text area. Click the Format button to set the formatting. You can add up to three such conditions. If you simply want to highlight negative numbers, open Format > Cells, under the Number tab set Category to Number and choose a style for negative numbers.
Again, rather than simply formatting such discrepancies, you can have Excel throw up an error message. Click Data > Validation and choose 'Allow Decimal with data greater than' and enter the minimum value the cell should have. Under the Error Alert tab, enter an error message to be displayed every time the data does not match the criteria.
Creating reports and graphs from this data is a breeze. Just click the Chart Wizard icon on the toolbar and click through the screens. You can link the data from Excel into Word too, say for creating vouchers for the products that are being sent to every region, by using Word's Mail Merge feature.

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