At The Business Brickyard site, you can download a free copy of president Howard Mann’s book, Your Business Brickyard (download link is at the bottom of the page).
The book is short, and to the point, with no fluffy filler. It covers twelve points that will help you focus your business on the basics, rather than [...]

Filed under: Books, Business, Excel | No Comments »

It’s interesting that Microsoft is using an Excel Add-In, NetMap, to analyze newsgroup structures. The researchers found at least three types of participants: Answer People, Reply Magnets and Discussion People. Hey, I know a few of those “Answer People.” No mention of trolls though — maybe they’re in the Discussion People group.

Somewhat related, but [...]

Filed under: Excel, Internet | 2 Comments »

Instead of typing long phrases in Word or Excel, you can create AutoCorrect entries for those items. For example, if you type your name or company name several times a day, create an AutoCorrect entry in which you type your initials, and your name is automatically entered.
Don’t create too many entries, or you’ll have a [...]

Filed under: Data Entry, Excel, Word | 2 Comments »

The Bits du Jour web site offers one discounted item per day (2 on Tuesdays and Thursdays) — either Windows software or a web service. You can see the upcoming deals, and download a trial version, to see if it’s worth buying when the discount day arrives. You can also read comments from other users, [...]

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If you’re visiting my blog from the Blog-to Show at the Successful Blog, thanks for stopping by. And everyone else, thanks to you too!
The blog has new posts Monday to Friday, with the occasional weekend post, such as this one. Today’s post is a summary of Excel comments found in Twitter yesterday, and as usual, [...]

Filed under: Excel | 4 Comments »

Many programs use the Windows Common dialogs which you’ll see when you Open or Save files in those programs. For example, in Notepad, if I select File►Open this dialog appears. The bar at the left is the Places Bar, and it contains 5 standard icons.

Not once, in my entire computing life, have I used that [...]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows | 2 Comments »

One of the most popular downloads on my web site is an Excel file that uses Data Validation to assign players to a position each inning in a ball game. After a player’s name has been selected for an inning, that name disappears from the inning’s drop down lists. For example, in the screen shot [...]

Filed under: Excel | 2 Comments »

I don’t reboot my desktop computer too often, but when I do, it takes extra time because of all the programs that have elbowed their way into my Startup folder. The system tray fills with the icons for these programs, and I manually disable them, which takes even more time.
After every reboot, I promise myself [...]

Filed under: Excel, Productivity, Windows | 4 Comments »

Last week I listed a few tricks with the Shift key in Excel, and in the comments, Jon Peltier mentioned a trick he’d discovered with the Ctrl key. Here are a few more things you can do with the Ctrl key in Excel.
There are many other Ctrl tricks, so if you have favourites, please [...]

Filed under: Excel, Keyboard Shortcuts | No Comments »

If you use Styles in Word (and you should), did you know that there’s a Style Area at the left of the screen, where you can see the Style names? This can give you a quick overview when you’re formatting a document, and will help you apply the Styles consistently.
If you don’t use Styles, you [...]

Filed under: Excel, Word | No Comments »