Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

Using the Slide Master

April 9, 2018 – 6:34 pm

When watching a PowerPoint presentation, one of those little irritations you can get is when a logo in the corner of a slide moves around. It doesn’t need to be much, but just enough to be distracting; or perhaps it’s the Slide heading that moves a little, or is slightly smaller or further to one […]

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Accents in word

April 9, 2018 – 4:48 pm

Black country or French accents? No, I’m not referring to the mellifluous tones of my Black Country accents, here, but the little marks above letters (usually in foreign languages, but occasionally in English, too when we’ve appropriated a word – such as “Neé” to indicate a lady’s unmarried name). When I’m not helping people become […]

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A novel use of Find & Replace

April 9, 2018 – 4:41 pm

Using Find & Replace to solve a date problem Excel’s Find & Replace feature (which you’ll find by clicking on the “Find & Select” button on the far right-hand side of the Home Tab) can be used in many ways… to replace names, codes, products, etc however one use that I’ve found for it is […]

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Matching colours with PowerPoint’s Eyedropper tool

March 9, 2018 – 4:14 pm

So you’re creating your PowerPoint presentation and you realise that the colour of the text or shape that you’ve used isn’t quite the same colour as your logo and that spoils the “Corporate” effect; or, perhaps, you’d like to match the colour to a program logo if you’re writing about it (Excel Green, Word Blue […]

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Building Blocks in Word

March 8, 2018 – 4:03 pm

I suspect that we all have some “standard” phrases or paragraphs of text that we regularly reuse; perhaps hunting down the exact set of words that we want to use from a previous document and then copying & pasting into our current one. Wouldn’t it be easier if there was a quicker way to do […]

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Useful keyboard shortcuts in Excel

March 1, 2018 – 10:00 am

Excel shortcuts As we’re talking Excel shortcuts, I’ll keep this tip very short! As your spreadsheet increases in size, you’ll want to find quick ways to move around it without needing to use the scroll buttons (especially with the latest versions having 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns!), so here are a few that I regularly […]

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Creating new slides quickly & effectively

February 5, 2018 – 8:32 pm

Creating new slides can be a painless process… … if you let it! By using the basic slide outlines that PowerPoint provides you with, you can save a lot of time – especially if you need to change how it looks Œ When creating a new slide…  … consider using the preformatted slide templates […]

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Use AutoCorrect in Word to increase accuracy and speed

February 5, 2018 – 8:26 pm

How to speed up your typing with Word’s AutoCorrect feature AutoCorrect can not only speed up your typing by allowing you to create shortcuts, it can also help prevent regular spelling errors that you make. If you find yourself typing long words again and again, you should consider setting up typing shortcuts, so you only […]

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Working with Sheets

February 5, 2018 – 4:28 pm

Working with Sheets Depending on which version of Excel you use, when creating a new workbook, there will usually be either one or three blank sheets (or Tabs) entertainingly named Sheet1, Sheet2 & Sheet3. These can be added to, deleted, renamed & coloured as necessary Adding a new Sheet (Tab) By far the quickest & […]

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Avoiding Death by PowerPoint

January 1, 2018 – 9:38 pm

Avoiding Death by PowerPoint I’m sure that we’ve all suffered “Death by PowerPoint” where the presenter reads from the screen words that are so small as to be illegible; we’re woken up by “flashy” screen transitions, and by the 94th slide we’re ready for screaming! Hopefully, these notes will go some way to resolving this […]

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