Archive of posts tagged Quickie

Excel Quickie: Using mm instead of inches for margins

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Yesterday I encountered another of those pesky issues that can drive you crazy. I was working in Excel, and needed to change the margins. I wanted to use precise numbers in millimeters, so I clicked the margins button on the Page Layout tab and was confronted with a dialog screen that only showed numbers, no units:Apparently the system was using inches by default. It took me more than an hour of searching on how I could change this into mm… only to find out that you don’t define this in Excel, or in the Printer Options. Excel (and the other Office products), use whatever is specified in the Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel.

I was using the English (United States) setting, which also makes Office use inches as default units:
You can change that by clicking the Customize button, and select Metric as Measurement system:Restarting Excel gave me cm instead of inches:Apparently the same applies for Office 2003.

Word Quickie: Insert Quick Part

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If you repeatedly need to add some text in Word, the new Quick Parts button on the Insert tab will save you time.

Initially, the Quick Parts menu allows you to insert the main Document Properties, or a Field:

You can easily add items to the Quick Parts menu, by selecting some text and clicking Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery.

This will give you a dialog box, where you can add some details of the Quick Part you’re adding. Categories can be defined, and in Options you can select whether you want to Insert the content only, Insert it in its own paragraph, or on its own page:
Once defined, you can insert it with just 2 clicks:
Obviously, any other item can be saved as well, like the SmartArt about Training in the screenshot above.

To change or delete Quick Parts, open the Building Blocks Organizer. It contains your Quick Parts, and you can change the properties of other building blocks as well:

There’s a training on the Microsoft Office site that explains this in more detail.

PowerPoint Quickie: Replace Fonts

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When I started this blog a few months ago, I promised myself I would not let it die after a few weeks, unlike many other blogs. But I have to admit, keeping it alive has been more of a struggle than I thought. It just takes a lot of time and energy to regularly publish something that is worthwhile reading. I’m not running out of ideas, I’m just having difficulties finding the time to put them into quality posts.

Anyway, at least this is another Quickie for you. Sometimes, when you receive a PowerPoint presentation or some Powerpoint slides that you want to reuse in your own presentation, the fonts of text boxes don’t match. The previous versions of PowerPoint had a nice feature to replace a specific font with another one for all slides of your presentation.

PowerPoint 2007 still has that feature, but I couldn’t find it. So I went to the Office website and looked at the Interactive Guide for PowerPoint that shows where to find a command in office 2007 if you know where it was in Office 2003.
It turned out it was surprisingly straightforward: it’s on the Home tab of the Ribbon, in the Replace-button.

Don’t click the button itself, but the drop-down arrow next to it, and you’ll be able to replace fonts quickly.