A very nice email, from someone who visited the Contextures website, made me think about how long I’ve been using Excel. My guess was that I’d started around 1987, so I fired up the old Mac laptop, and dug some old floppies out of the storage cupboard.

The laptop is a Mac PowerBook 170, from late [...]

When sharing an Access database, you should have the data in one file (the back end) and the queries, reports, forms and modules in a separate database (the front end).
Give each user their own copy of the front end, linked to the shared back end.
Keep a master copy of the front end file, tucked away [...]

You don’t have to put all your lists in Excel – Word has a Sort feature too. And Word has an extra feature that makes it easy to sort a book list.
For example, in this list, several of the book titles start with “The”. When sorting the list, I’d prefer to ignore that word, and [...]

Occasionally you might get an email in which the sender mentions someone else. In the example shown below, the client promises to ask Xavier to contact you. That name sounds vaguely familiar, but perhaps you can’t remember exactly who Xavier is, or what role he has in the client’s company.
If you’re using Outlook 2007, it [...]

I’ve got a few different Signatures set up in Outlook 2007. Most of the time I use my business signature, but occasionally I’d like to use one of the others. Usually I use the Ribbon commands, but I’ve just discovered a mouse shortcut that makes it much easier. I’ll be using the shortcut from now [...]

Did you know that you can create a new Outlook email message by dragging some text off of an existing message? I discovered this tip by accident, but it would be useful if you’re sending an email to someone, and a slightly different version to someone else.
To create a new email from existing text:

Create [...]

While viewing a Word document in the Print Preview window, you might notice a typo, or something else that you’d like to fix quickly, before printing. However, the pointer is a magnifying glass, and when you click on the page you just zoom in or out.
To edit the document, you can turn off the magnifier:
In [...]

I’ve been using Microsoft Word since 1985, starting with Word for Mac and eventually moving to the Windows version for Word 6.0. As with other Office programs, some great new features have been added, and other features, that were working just fine, have been removed or changed.  Don’t get me started on Word’s numbering.
Most of [...]

In Outlook, as you start typing a name in the To box, a drop down list may appear, showing names of people to whom you’ve previously sent an email.

Sometimes those names are out of date, and the list includes old email addresses.
In my Outlook drop down lists there are multiple entries for some [...]

I’ve been reviewing Word documents recently, and sometimes I’m halfway down the document and have to check on something that was in an earlier part of the file.
I could scroll up, to check the text, then scroll back down to the current spot, but that’s not too efficient.
It’s easier, and more efficient, to split the [...]