Number 239 - April 2003

Tips 'N Tricks
Compiled by Charlotte Semple, President LACS
WORD    1. Unwanted Lines Have you ever had a horizontal line appear in a word document that you neither entered nor do not want? It turns out that this line is a border, not a line of characters or even a drawn object. By default, if you enter three or more hyphens (-) , underscores U, equal signs (=), or asterisks (*) followed by a carriage return, Word automatically gives the current paragraph a thin, thick, double, or even a dotted bottom border. To get rid of the line, put the cursor directly above it and select Borders and Shading from the Format menu. Click the None box and click OK. To prevent the automatic insertion of borders, select AutoCorrect Options from the Tools menu, click AutoFormat As You Type tab, and uncheck Borderlines. In Word 97, the menu item is AutoCorrect and the check box is labeled simply as Borders.    2. What Have You Done? Has someone "fiddled" with or edited a document, making revisions that you never authorized, and you want to see what the revisions were? You can force Word to record revisions made by anyone who edits your file by simply clicking on Tools Protect Document, selecting Tracked Changes, and entering a password that is easily remembered. This works even when you edit and revise your documents yourself so, if you don't want to see your revisions turn out blue and underlined, you might want to go to Tools Unprotect Document for your own revisions, remembering to turn everything back on when you are through. I just tried this and it works! This is a standard procedure for writing legal documents or when several people are working on the same document.	EXCEL    3. Here are a few standard shortcuts for working in Excel:    Edit or create a comment in the current cell: Shift-F2.    Move a comment that's being edited: Esc, Arrow keys.    Close a comment that's being edited: Esc, Esc.    Fill a selected range: Type the data, then Ctrl-Enter.    Copy the value from the cell above the current cell: Ctrl-Shift-" (quotation mark).    Copy the formula from the cell above the current cell: Ctrl-' (apostrophe ).    4. Fit Data Onto Pages    Excel tries its best to get as much data as possible onto each sheet of paper, but you can reduce or enlarge your spreadsheet data by changing the Adjust to % Normal Size option. Or you can use the Fit To Pages option to compress data to fill a specific number of pages. Simply choose File, Page Setup and experiment with these two options by changing their settings. Finally, click the Print Preview button to see the results. When resetting these options, be careful to take into account placement of any page breaks.
Number 239 - April 2003