You can use the Trace Precedents button on the Formula Auditing toolbar to trace all the generations of cells that contribute to the formula in the selected cell (something like tracing all the ancestors in your family tree). Many times, finding the original source of the formula leads you right to the source of all the error values in your spreadsheet.

To activate the tool, click Formulas on the ribbon and then Trace Precedents under the Formula Auditing panel:

In the Fibonacci sequence below, you would see the blue arrows showing the precedents of the result of the formula:

Another example is shown below where the B1 cell is a result of summing A1 and A2:

Now to see the dependents of a value, click a cell that you want to audit then click the Trace Dependents value.  If the cell is used by other cells in formula, the arrows will point the to cells that depend on the cell.

To clear the arrows, click the Remove Arrows button and you should see the arrows disappear.

Use the Formula Auditing tools to trace dependents and precedents of your Excel formulas. They are very handy when the cell formulas get very complicated. As of Office 2007, the arrows don’t get automatically refreshed when you change the formula (they get cleared out) so you will need to click the trace buttons again to generate the arrows.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

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Let me start by comparing the main menu from the 2007 version.  The 2010 Ribbon interface has a separate menu for Transitions:

With this, it is easier to add transition effects to a slide .  You may choose from several types of effects like cut, split and fade.  You may also add sound effects and edit timing properties.

The animation menu is also improved as it now has user friendly “thumbnail” type of style choices.  Just by looking at each choice, you would know what the effect will do when you apply it on a picture or text.

Perhaps the best feature it has so far on this early technical preview is its capability to export to a high definition WMV video.  This is great for presenting using HDTV displays on market encounters or events.  This feature is accessible using the new “Backstage” button then choose Share > Create Video.

I hope to see more features added as the release date comes closer.  I’m sure there will be a lot of inputs from testers and evaluators of the Technical Preview. 

For users who have been using a version older than 2007, this could be a necessary upgrade if you are into rich media content. If you are just creating simple presentations and you don’t need the new features, you might want to skip this release.

See the official Microsoft Office 2010 website here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

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Well, OfficeTab is a nifty little program that adds tabbed document support to Microsoft Office programs. Tabbed documents in a program is really nice because it means you can view multiple Word documents in one window and switch between the documents by clicking on a different tab.

Currently, if you open two Word documents, they open in two separate instances of Word and you have to press Ctrl + Tab or click in the taskbar to switch between the two documents.

First, go to the website, which is in Chinese, and click on the download link for the program. This is a bit tricky since the entire site is in Chinese! I have taken a screenshot, so you know where to click:

Once you download it, unzip the files and run the OfficeTab setup program. Choose which Office programs you want the tabbed support to work on: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Once the installation is complete, make sure the “Run the setup center” box is checked. This will bring up the OfficeTab settings dialog where you can enable and disable the tabbed support for each program.

The program is pretty cool because you can setup keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs, change the layout of the tabs, change the color and appearance of the tabs and even set the position of the tabs.

Click OK to save the settings and then Cancel to close out of the dialog. Now open any of your Office programs and you’ll see a small area where each document has it’s own tab!

Pretty neat eh!? Overall, the program works very well and is definitely worth installing if you use Office quite a bit, especially with multiple documents open at the same time. Enjoy! [via LifeHacker]

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Unfortunately, this functionality is not available in Outlook by default, however, since it’s one of the most used email clients in the world, it would be nice to have the option!

Outlook Attachment Reminder is a new free application that will remind you if you planned on attaching a file to your email, but forgot to.

The program will basically search for words like attachment, attached, etc and if they exist, will then check to see if any files are attached. The cool thing about the program is that it lets you manage the words to look for.

So if you don’t use the words attachment or attached, you can add those into the program and it will check for them.

The program works with Office 2007 and Office 2010. It currently does not work with any version earlier than 2007, but may support them in the future.

The only requirement for the program is that you have .NET 3.5 installed since it was written in Visual Studio 2008.

If you like the program, make sure to write a review of it on the authors website because he is making lots of changes and adding many new features. Since it’s still in beta, you may come across some bugs too, so report those.

Also, check out some of my other articles about Outlook, such as how to set an away message in Outlook, how to export contacts from Outlook, how to create a secured Outlook data file, and how to fix Outlook errors. Enjoy! [via Life Rocks]

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Why is this and how can it cause problems? For the most part, it’s not a big deal and doesn’t bother most Excel users. However, it is a real pain when working with many spreadsheets and they are treated as a group.

For example, let’s say you decide to calculate everything on one spreadsheet. Well, if you have others open, Excel will recalculate all of them too as if they are somehow related. If this is what you want, great, but if not, there’s no way to stop it!

That is until now! Luckily, there’s a nice registry hack for Excel 2007 that will let you open each workbook in a new instance. This is also really great if you have multiple monitors and want to have multiple Excel workbooks open on different monitors. Right now, all of them show up in one Excel application like below:

However, it’s much easier to work with when you have separate instances for each workbook:

Finally, if one Excel spreadsheet crashes and burns, none of the others will be affected since it’s running in its own instance. You can easily get this functionality using registry editing files already created that will add a context menu to your right-click menu.

You can download this ZIP file that includes five different files: one to add the option and make it default, one to just add the option, one to just make it default, one to remove the option, and one to remove making it default. Note that these files only work for Excel 2007 running on a 32-bit Windows platform.

All of the files are TXT files and in order to use them, you have to just rename them to .reg files. After that, just double-click on the one you want to use and click OK when the prompt appears.

Also, you can run the files in any order you like, so you can add the option to the context menu, then make it default, etc.

The other thing to note is that you might have some issue with copy and paste because advanced formatting can only be done between workbooks in the same instance. So if you need to copy and paste something between two workbooks that has advanced formatting, open them in the same instance using the normal Open command.

If you have any problems, etc, post a comment here and I will try to help! Enjoy your new freedom! [via ExpertsExchange]

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In the technical preview of the incoming MS Office 2010, there is built-in capability to remove the background of an image so that the subject of the portrait will be the only thing remaining.

First open your favorite Office application like word or PowerPoint.  In PowerPoint or Word you can use the Insert menu to insert  a picture to your document.

Click the image inside the document to select it.

Click the Picture Tools button on the top right part of the window.

Click the background removal button:

Wait for a few seconds.  The picture will appear with the background highlighted with a saturated color.

Click anything outside the picture. The image  is now without a background!

The feature is not that perfect, the end result came out with some parts of the penguins omitted (maybe considered as part of the background image by the program).

It wasn’t able to distinguish the back of the neck of the penguin on the left from the background clouds.

This new capability from Office 2010 is great for quick and dirty background removal tasks.  Maybe the accuracy will improve as it nears the release date, but for now, it seems ok enough for casual Office users.  I’m sure for images with a distinctive background and subject contrast, the program will not have a hard time distinguishing the background from the subject.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Well, the Office developers are aware of that, so they provided a way for users to quickly choose from several predefined styles and apply it to their own document.

To use the “Quick Styles” feature, select the slide where you want the style to be applied.   Use the thumbnail navigation at the left side to select the slide.

Once the correct slide is selected, select the part of the slide where you want to apply a style. In the example below I selected the title.  Choose from any of the predefined styles that you want to be applied on the selected title.

In the example below I chose a light green background so now I have the title having that effect:

To apply styles to the other sections like the bulleted texts, select them and click the quick style button again.  I would suggest that you hover the mouse over the different styles so you can see the preview on the document before you click the style that you finally choose.

The document now looks like the one below with the title having a different style than the lower main content section.

With Quick Styles, you won’t have to spend time figuring out how to make a slide look better.  All you have to do is click the portion of the slide that you want to design and then choose from the predefined styles.

Make sure to visit us here regularly because later we will show you how to add your own styles to the quick styles menu. We will also show you more exciting features of the new Office 2010.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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There are actually two ways to insert an Excel object into Word, linking and embedding. When you embed an Excel worksheet, the worksheet will not be updated when you update the main Excel file.

When you insert a linked worksheet, whenever you open the Word file, the linked Excel sheet will update it’s values to match the main external Excel file.

In this article, I will show you how to do it using both methods.

Insert Excel Worksheet into Word – Linking

There are actually two ways to insert and link an Excel worksheet in Word. You can either copy and paste or go to Insert on the ribbon and choose Object.

Step 1: Select the area in your Excel spreadsheet that you want to include in Word and then press Ctrl + C to copy the contents.

Step 2: Now go to your Word document and press Ctrl + V to paste the contents into the Word file. In order to link, you have to click on the Paste Options button at the bottom right and choose Match Destination Table Style and Link to Excel.

Step 3: That’s it, now your table will be linked to the original Excel file. Whenever you update the Excel file and reopen Word, it will ask you if you want to update the doc with the data from the linked files.

Step 4: Click Yes and your table will reflect the new values. If you have both files open at the same time, you’ll see the changes live.

The second way to link an Excel spreadsheet to Word is by using the Insert menu.

Step 1: In Word 2007, click on the Insert ribbon and choose Object.

Step 2: Click on the Create from File tab and click on the Browse button to choose your file.

Step 3: Once you choose the file, you will see two check boxes at the right side. If you want to link the Excel spreadsheet, you need to check Link to file. If you want to embed the Excel spreadsheet, don’t check it.

That’s it! This does the same thing as the first method I described. Like I said, if you want to embed the worksheet, just don’t check the box. Enjoy!

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To use this feature, start by entering the initial values of the row.  In the example below, I entered a date for column A and a numeric value for column B.  You can use Excel to autofill dates, numbers, and characters.

Select the initial values and drag the black corner at the lower right portion of the selected cells.  This is called the Fill handle. Drag this to the 10th row of the sheet.

The output will be a progression of dates from 5/1/2009 to 5/10/2009 and numbers from 1 to 10.

On column A, the values are iterated by 1 day.  Column B on the other hand is by 1.  Columns 2 to 10 are automatically filled by serial values.  This is much easier than typing manually isn’t it?  Excel, by default, adds one unit to a series.  This works for data types like dates and numbers.

Now what if you need to iterate it using another value?  For example, what if we want to iterate by month and by number 2?  The trick here is to “train” Excel by feeding it 2 initial rows so it could determine the amount of iteration used.  See the example below:

Column A is iterated by 1 month while Column B is iterated by 2. If you select both rows and drag the Fill handle downwards you will see a series like below:

The 1 month and 2 series iterations are automatically detected and it was able to populate the other rows.

I hope this simple yet effective Excel AutoFill tip helps you get your tasks done quicker and easier.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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A macro is a series of Word commands and instructions that you group together as a single command to accomplish a task automatically.  Since not all of us are programmers who can write code in Visual Basic, I will show you a way to create macros without even writing code.

First open up your Word document then click Tools > Macro > Record New Macro

According to the help document the macro recorder in Word acts like a tape recorder. It records your deliberate keystrokes and mouse button clicks … when you record a macro, you can use the mouse to click commands and options, but not to select text.

You must use the keyboard to record these actions. For example, you can use F8 to select text and press END to move the cursor to the end of the line. Remember that it records keystrokes and mouse clicks only.

When you record a macro it will ask for a macro name so assign it a descriptive macro name.  After that click the OK button to record the macro.

Once you see the recording toolbar, enter the keystrokes that you want to record.  In the example below I indented the first line of the paragraph(TAB) then I selected all (Control-A) then I applied the bold format(Control-B).  After this I stopped the recording of macro by clicking the stop button.

The macro will be saved and you can run it by clicking the run macro command (or Alt-F8) from the Tools menu.

Before the macro run:

After the macro run:

Now that you know how to make macros by recording keystrokes and mouse clicks, apply this tip on your own repeated tasks.  This will increase your productivity and also you quality of work.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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First, make a backup.  Fire up Excel and backup your file by clicking Save As then enter a file name for your backup.  After making a backup, click the section at the left side of the first row and column.  This will select all cells in your sheet.  You may also use Control-A to select all cells in an Excel spreadsheet.

Having everything selected, click the Data menu and then click Sort…

Enter the column names that you want to use as sorting variables.  In the example, I have I used the column SEQ and DATE_TIME columns.  I also chose the Ascending option to sort the the data by ascending SEQ and DATE_TIME data. 

Click OK to sort the data.  You should see the sheet sorted out on the chosen column names.

Excel automatically determines the data type of the columns – whether they are numbers, dates or strings – and will sort them for you.

As you can see, the steps for sorting data in Excel are fairly simple.   The important step is to make sure everything is selected before you run sort.  If you selected only one column, it will prompt you for with a Sort Warning. 

If you chose to continue with the current selection, the selected column will get sorted but the other columns will not. Make sure you know that this could happen before you continue after seeing the Sort Warning screen.  This is the reason why I always create a backup before I use advanced operations like sort.

I hope this tip helps you get more productive with Excel. If you want more Excel help, read my posts on how to use data validation in Excel, how to use the Conditional Sum Wizard, how to make a chart or graph in Excel, how to use VLOOKUP, and how to insert a image in an Excel header. 

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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My first try only printed the header on the first page but I wanted to have the header printed on all the pages.  I will show you how to do this properly without pasting the header on every page break.

First open a new workbook in Excel then insert your choice of picture or image by clicking on the Insert Tab then click Picture

· Browse to the location of the picture or image and then click Insert.

· After the picture or image has been inserted, resize it to your preference.

· After resizing the picture or image, click on the Page Layout tab then click Print Titles.

· In the Page Setup window, choose the Sheet tab then click the icon of Rows to repeat at top.  This is the most critical step since now we are telling Excel to print a repeated title on every page. 

· A small arrow will appear.  Use this arrow cursor to determine the location of the page header.  Select the start and end rows of the graphic.  In the example below I chose rows 1 to 4.

· You will see on the dialogue box $1:$4 because the image occupies cell 1 to 4. After selecting the cells occupied by the image hit enter then click ok on page setup window.

· Click Print > Print Preview to see the graphic header. The header will be displayed on every page of your worksheet.

· The figure below shows the example preview of each page in the workbook.

This is cool for corporate people who work with Excel workbooks a lot and have to present data to other team members or supervisiors because you can add a little bit of flair to it by adding the company logo or something similiar. Enjoy!

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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The trick is to find the right template that will match your requirement. Usually the templates are good enough for generic database requirements. In some cases, a little tweaking is involved to suite the client’s need.

For beginning MS Access users, below are steps for creating a new Access file from templates. First click Control N to create a new Access file, then choose from the template categories.  The local templates include some interesting templates that you could choose from.

Choose a local template that fits your requirement.  In the following example, I chose “Contacts” so I could show you how to customize a contact database.

Give your tracking file a name, by default it will be named according to the template type.  Click the Create button to create the Access file.

The database should come up.  You will see a tabular Excel-like interface where you can do operations like adding a new contact entry.  

If you click the add new contact button it will open a new contact form where you can type in a contact detail. 

Now what if you need to update this form’s layout and labels?  It’s simple, just right click the form’s name at the left hand side then choose Design View:

With the design view, you can update the form’s layout and content.

You can also go to a table object’s design view to edit the fields of the table.  The example below is for the contact’s table:

Here you may set the fields along with their corresponding data types.  Make sure to use the appropriate data type for a field or else you could end up with an inefficient Access file.  For example, use only the memo data type if you know that the field will take a longer than usual single line of text like for addresses or messages.

Also, set the right field size according to the maximum number of characters that you expect on a field.  Do not use 100 characters for an email address field. 

I hope this little introduction to Access templates will get you started with your small data driven projects.  In the next posts I will show you how to display data from Access using a PHP web page.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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To import data from Excel, click the Data menu > Import External Data > New Web Query:

Enter the URL on the address bar then click go to display the page on the window.  Click the arrow next to the table that you want to import then click the import button:

Enter the worksheet where you want the data to appear then click OK:

Presto! You’re done and should be able to see the tabular data appear on the sheet you specified above:

If  you need to re-synch the data with the page contents, just click Data > Refresh Data:

This is way better than a simple copy-paste, isn’t it?  Here are some benefits of using this method over copy-paste:

1. the formatting is stripped out
2. the importing is error free and you won’t worry about accidentally missing a row or a column
3. you can refresh or synch the data by a click of a button

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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First, open Word 2007 then click New Document.  Choose New blog post as a template:

On first use, it will ask you to setup your blog account.  Enter the following information: Blog Post URL (i.e. this should be your own blog account’s URL, for example www.wordpress.com or www.blogger.com), user name and password.  Check the remember password if you want this to be saved for your future blog posts.  If you have many blog accounts, you can add more later.

If you entered the right information above, you should see the blog post editor like the one below:

After you are done with your blog post, you can post it to the host by clicking the publish buttons on the blog post menu:

You can choose from two options:

1. Publish – this will publish your post straight for public viewing
2. Publish as Draft – use this if you need to have it edited before publishing

To edit an existing blog, click Open Existing:

It would query all of your posted blogs from your provider:

You can choose from any of your posted blogs then click OK to open that post for editing.  You will only be able to see posts under your account.

For users with more than one blogging account, click manage accounts to enter the account manager window:

Click New then enter the blog provider:

Then enter the user credentials:

If you entered the right credentials, you should be able to post new blog posts and pull up an existing post. 

I hope this post about Word 2007 helps you with your blogging.  It is good to know that you can use a very familiar tool like Word for blog editing.

Ben shows you how it’s done.

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