Workspaces in Excel

Do you find that you often have a need to work on two Excel files at one time? Are you opening both files every time you do it?  Well, you don’t have to.  You can save the files as a “Workspace” and they will open together every time you want to use them.

Here’s what you do:

Open Excel and open one file.  Now, with that file open, Open the second file.  Go to the Window menu and select “Arrange”, then choose “Tile”.  You see both of your spreadsheets open side by side.

This is real convenient for dragging and dropping or copying and pasting information from one to the other.  It is also an easy way to compare the data in one to the other.

Now comes the cool part.  Go to the File menu and choose “Save Workspace”.

You will see the Save Workspace dialog box come up. Name your file (see it is being saved with an .xlw extension instead of the usual .xls extension given to Excel files) and save it in the same location where the original two files are located.

Now, whenever you want to work on these two files together, you can just open up your .xlw file and they will both open side by side.

And the really great thing is you still have the individual files so you can work on them separately any time you want and the changes made in the individual files OR from within the workspace file will be made to both.

Understanding Tables of Contents in Word

Tables of Contents in Word are one of the more commonly misunderstood features.  To understand them, you must first understand Heading Styles, because Tables of Contents are produced from Heading Styles.  If you are trying to add a Table of Contents to an existing document that does not use Heading Styles, you must go through the entire document and add them manually.  However, if you add them as you produce the document in the beginning, the Table of Contents will be a snap to produce. 

Try this.  Open a blank new document and go to the Style box at the left end of your Formatting toolbar (the toolbar that includes your bold, italic, and underline buttons).  The Style box, by default, should say “Normal”.  Click on the dropdown arrow at the right end of the box and choose “Heading 1”, then type a word or two.

 

Hit the Enter key on your keyboard and go back to the Style box.  This time choose “Heading 2” and type another word or two.  Now, hit Enter again and go to the Insert menu and choose Break.  When this box comes up, make sure Page Break is selected and click OK.  You should now be at the top of Page 2.  Choose “Header 1” again from the Style box and type a word or two.  Hit Enter and add another Heading 2 entry, then hit enter and add a Heading 3 entry. 

Now, hold your Control key down and hit your Home key to move you back to the very top of your document and go to the Insert menu and choose Index and Tables.  Click on the tab at the top that says Table of Contents, accept the default settings and click OK. 

View Conversations

Outlook 2003 lets you view messages by thread, which is a convenient way to scan your in-box much faster. Just choose View | Arrange By | Conversation to see your mail arranged this way. If you have the reading pane on the right, you can get to this setting faster by clicking on Arranged by at the top of the message list. You’ll find that if each message contains the earlier messages, you can read just the latest message in the thread instead of working through each one, so you can easily clean out your in-box by deleting earlier notes and keeping only the latest one.