Get Excel to read your data back to you July 16, 2008

It’s always such a nightmare entering loads of figures into an excel spreadsheet and then having to try and check the figures are right, isn’t it?

Did you know Excel can READ the data (numbers and words) back to you so you can manually check the original data? Nor did I until I read the latest tip from tech-recipes.

Here’s what they say to do:

1. Open Excel 2007 and go to the Quick Access Toolbar at the top of the window.
2. Click the downward point arrow to the right of the toolbar and select More Commands.
3. From the dropdown menu, select Commands Not in the Ribbon.
4. Scroll down the list and find Speak Cells, Speak Cells — Stop Speaking Cells, Speak Cells by Columns, Speak Cells by Rows, and Speak Cells on Enter. Add each of these by selecting them one-by-one and clicking the Add button. Click OK after all 5 commands have been added.
5. Now go to your spreadsheet and select the cells you want Excel to read by performing a simple click and drag. Once the data is selected, go to the Quick Access toolbar and select either Speak Cells by Columns or Speak Cells by Rows. When you are ready for Excel to begin reading off the data contained in the selected cells, select Speak Cells and Excel will begin reading out the data to you.
6. If you need Excel to stop reading, simply select Speak Cells – Stop Speaking Cells.

Admittedly having all those items on your quick access toolbar is a bit clunky, but you can always remove them, I suppose?

Remove the URL from printed web pages July 11, 2008

I’ve been wanting to know how to do this for ages. And now the How-to Geek has told me how. Who knew it could be so simple?

I use Firefox, but he also deals with IE7. What a guy!

Check out his post here.

Now if he could only tell me how to open a bookmark in a new tab in Firefox 3 without having to right click, open in new tab…. or get that new tab to open on the page of my choice rather than a blank one…. Boy, do I miss TabMix Plus

‘Search commands’ for Office 2007 July 10, 2008

I have been using the Microsoft Office Labs ’search commands’ for a while now and it’s a pretty useful tool when you just don’t know how the heck to do something in Word, Excel or PowerPoint 2007.

You can download an additional tab for your ‘ribbon’ that gives you a search box to type in your query and it magically tells you how to do what you need to do. Just click on the result you want and it does what you need it to do.

Problem is, it doesn’t tell you HOW it did it, so you don’t get to learn anything. Can’t have everything, I suppose.

Simply go to the Office Labs search command page and download the .msi file, run it and next time you open Word, Excel or PowerPoint the last tab on your ribbon will be the ‘Search commands’ tab.

Search command from Microsoft Office Labs

How to… change a ‘tag’ name in Google Reader July 8, 2008

I thought I was going crazy. There seemed to be no obvious way to change a tag’s name in Google Reader.

And I was not wrong. You need to follow 6 steps, according to Googlified’s post on how exactly to do just this.

To reiterate the 6 steps:

1. Go to your Google Reader Settings page and click the ‘Subscriptions’ tab at the top
2. Find the input box called: “Filter by name, tag, or URL”, top right, and enter the tag name you want to change
3. Click “Select: All {number} subscriptions” (left side of the page)
4. Under any one of the feeds in the “Change folders” drop down box, find “New folder…”, and enter the new name for your tag
5. Go to the “More actions…” drop down box and choose the tag you just created under “Add tag…”
6. Go to “More actions…” again and click the old tag that you don’t want, under “Remove tag…” to remove the tag

Settings page

There’s even a handy video in Googlified’s post showing you how to do it.

Matters are not helped by the fact that Google calls the same thing a tag and a folder. A rose by any other name….

If anyone has a quicker method, just let me know.

Change your keyboard language July 1, 2008

Now, I found this out quite by accident.

I was changing my batteries on my cordless keyboard and I must have pressed some random keys because when it started working again my ‘@’ button was giving me speech marks and Shift+3 produced a ‘£’ instead of the ‘#’ symbol. I was most confused.

I guessed it was the keyboard language that had somehow switched to UK, rather than US English, as I had both set up. So how did I change it back?

Press the left Alt key and Shift.

How to Chill a Drink Quickly this Canada Day July 1, 2008

Forgotten to chill those beers this Canada Day?

Super chill them with this handy tip found on ‘How To Of The Day‘

more about “How to Chill a Drink Quickly – wikiHow“, posted with vodpod

Selecting tip for Word June 13, 2008

I can’t believe I’ve only just found this out, but did you know that you can select words and paragraphs in a Word document THAT AREN’T NEXT TO ONE ANOTHER by using the CTRL key?

So, in the example below I double clicked ‘providing’ then held down the CTRL key and double clicked ‘engineering’.

Now you can do what you like with them: delete them both at the same time, change the font, make them capitals…you name it. And it works with whole paragraphs too.

This works for Word 2007. Not sure about earlier versions.