Remove that annoying background from your company logo

Microsoft Powerpoint

Remove that annoying background from your company logo

Adding your company logo to a presentation seems like an easy enough task. You probably have a special graphic file that's just the logo--how hard can it be to insert it onto a slide? Inserting it isn't a problem, but getting it to look right might be.

Quite often, the logo shows up with a background, and unless the slide's background matches the logo's background perfectly, it looks awful. (Please don't flame me for the yellow background; the garish yellow makes the example easy to see.)

If your logo is a bitmap file, the solution is easy, but perhaps not well-known.

1. In Normal view, right-click the logo image and choose Show Picture Toolbar to display the Picture toolbar.

2. Click the Set Transparent Color tool (the next-to-last button). The pointer will change to resemble the transparency tool.

3. Simply click the image's background. If you're lucky, the off-white background will just disappear like magic!

If you're using PowerPoint 2007, do the following:

1. Click the Format tab.
2. In the Adjust group, choose Set Transparent Color from the Recolor drop-down list.
3. Click the image's background.

Of course, you can use this feature to remove more than backgrounds. Just click an area and it'll disappear. If you don't like the look, press [Ctrl]+Z. At the very worst, you might have to delete and reinsert the file to start over. This transparency setting works best with bitmap files. For vector files most clipart), you'll need special image editing software.

Microsoft Word

About Word's background printing

Printing can be a quick or laborious task, but either way, it consumes resources. Depending on Word's configuration, it can tie up more than resources--a print job can keep users from working in Word until the print job is complete.

Fortunately, Word supports background printing. In fact, it's the default setting. When background printing is enabled, Word sends a document to disk and from there, to print (via Windows). This configuration allows users to continue working in Word immediately after sending a document to print. On the other hand, when this option is disabled, Word stops everything to print the document, bypassing the quick disk save and sending it straight to Windows.

Enabled or disabled, there's a tradeoff: performance versus accessibility:

• Enabled, users can work immediately after printing, but long documents can take a long time to print.
• Disabled, users can't work in Word, but the document prints quickly.

How do you advise your users? Here's a simple list of guidelines for helping users get the best of background printing, most of the time:

• Unless you have good reason not to, enable background printing for most users. There are exceptions to every rule, but most users will fare better with background printing enabled. Users printing short documents won't notice much difference between enabled and disabled.
• Disable background printing for the lone user who prints lots of long documents and does little actual work in Word itself. You probably don't have anyone using Word who fits this description.
• Train users to fend for themselves. If they know how background printing works and how to use it appropriately, they can work more efficiently on their own.
• When necessary, use VBA to disable background printing temporarily.

Train users
Most users will stick with the default setting and continue to work with background printing enabled. When they need to print a long document quickly, teach them how to disable the feature as follows:

Word 2003

1. From the Tools menu, choose Options.
2. Click the Print tab.
3. Uncheck the Background Printing option in the Printing Options section and click OK.

Word 2007

1. Click the Office button and then click Word Options.
2. Choose Advanced from the left pane.
3. Scroll through the options until you find the Print options.
4. Uncheck the Print In Background option.
5. Click OK.

After the document prints, the user simply re-enables the feature. Don't worry that they'll forget. As soon as they print a document and find themselves unable to continue working, they'll remember and reset the option. Remember, an empowered user works more efficiently, and doesn't call you (at least not as often).

Use VBA to control background printing

The above guidelines cover most situations, but occasionally, you might want to take a different course of action. If you have users printing long documents, you can help them out a bit using VBA. Specifically, you can let the document disable and enable background printing. You control the settings via the document itself, and users don't have to be involved at all.

To disable background printing, use the PrintOut method as follows:

ActiveDocument.PrintOut Background:=False

To enable the feature, set the Background property to True as follows:

ActiveDocument.PrintOut Background:=True

Setting the Background property to False has one more benefit. Sometimes, users print a document and then exit Word immediately. Or they execute a macro that prints the document and exits Word. Either way, exiting doesn't always work. Word might display a warning message that exiting Word will cancel the current print job. In this case, add a statement that sets the Background property to False. VBA won't execute the next statement (the statement to exit Word) until the print job is complete.

Of course, you'll have to automate the print process via the interface somehow, instructing the user to print the document using a specific button or command instead of using Word's built-in interface. You might even disable the built-in Print commands when loading this document, to force the issue.

Microsoft Excel

Displaying percentages as a series in an Excel chart

Most of us know how to create a chart in Excel, but it's the chart with a little something extra that often does the best job. For instance, suppose you're charting product favorites by age group and you want to highlight a specific group's preference for each product. You can do so by charting a formula that expresses that preference.

The percentage adds to the story: The percentage of those who prefer a specific project and are adults (the formula in B5 is =B4/(B2+B3+B4, copied to C5 and D5).

The trick to displaying the adult-preference percentage is to treat the value as a series. But first, create the chart as you normally would (in Excel 2003):

1. Select the data labels and data. In this case, you'd select A1:D5.
2. Then, click the Chart Wizard on the Standard toolbar.
3. Choose Bar as the Chart Type, click the Stacked Bar subtype, and click Next.
4. For this chart, choose Rows as the series source and click Finish.

The resulting chart needs a bit of work. Let's adjust some of the formats to make the chart a bit more readable:

1. Right-click the X axis (the flavors), choose Format Axis from the resulting context menu, and then click the Font tab. Choose 8 in the Size control and click OK.
2. Right-click any of the values on the Y axis, choose Format Axis, and click the Font tab. Choose 8 in the Size control and click OK. (Depending on your settings, you might need to choose a smaller or larger font size.)
3. Right-click the legend, choose Format legend, click the Font tab, and enter 8 as the Font size. Doing so should display the % Adults series, if you can’t see it in the legend.

   

The next step is to expose the % Adults series, as follows:

1. Right-click the chart's background and choose Chart Options.
2. Click the Data Labels tab.
3. Check Value in the Label Contains section and click OK. Doing so displays all values for all four series, but you want to display only the values for the % Adults series.
4. You must hide the values for each series individually. Right-click the Children series and choose Format Data Series. (If you get a different context menu, try again. If you can't get the right menu, move a data label from that series to expose the actual series and try again.)

   

5. Click the Data Labels tab.
6. Uncheck the Values option in the Label Contains section and click OK.
7. Repeats steps 4 through 6 for the Teens and Adults series (but not the % Adults series).
8. At this point, you're nearly done, but the remaining data labels--the % Adults percentage--probably need to be repositioned. Right-click one of the remaining data labels and choose Format Data Labels.
9. Click the Alignment tab.
10. Choose Inside Base in the Label Position section.

    

11. If you want, click the Font tab and reduce the size of the data label.
12. Click OK.

The addition of the % Adults value tells an important story, at just a glance. Visually (see the complete chart above) you can see that the adults make up the larger portion of chocolate lovers, but you can quickly discern that 51 percent of chocolate lovers are adults, 26 percent of strawberry lovers are adults, and 14 percent of vanilla lovers are adults.

The legend continues to display the % Adults series, which is a bit awkward, but not a truly horrible offense. If the color scheme is right, you can display the data labels in a matching color, making the relationship between the legend item and the values obvious. Or display the legend key in the series. Another solution is to just delete the legend.

This technique is a combination of charting the right expression to support the chart's purpose and exploiting a few chart properties to display that supportive information in a meaningful way.