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Microsoft Office Suite TechGuides

Address letters in a snap with Word's Insert Address toolbar button

By Mary Ann Richardson, Special to ZDNet Asia
Thursday, June 21, 2007 02:15 PM

When writing letters in Word, stop interrupting yourself to look up and insert addresses from your Outlook address book. Mary Ann Richardson describes how you can add a button to your Word toolbar that will allow you to easily reference your addresses.

Microsoft Word

Address letters in a snap with Word's Insert Address toolbar button

When you write a client letter, you probably have to open up your Outlook address book to find the client's name and address and then copy and paste the address into your document. You can simplify this process by adding a button to your Word toolbar that will let you find and insert the address without leaving your document. Follow these steps:

Go to Tools | Customize.
Click the Commands tab.
Select Insert from the Categories list box.
In the Commands text box, click and drag the Address Book command to the Standard or Formatting toolbar.

Now click in the Word document where you want the address to appear and then click the Insert Address toolbar button. A dialog box will open and allow you to search for the client in your Outlook address book. When you locate the name, click on it, and then click OK. Word will insert the name and address in the document at the insertion point.

Microsoft Excel

Turn off gridlines in your Excel applications

Your users may find it easier to work with your worksheet applications if they can't see the gridlines. For example, let's say you developed a worksheet that displays a new chart that compares monthly sales figures for the department each time a salesperson enters his/her monthly sales figures. Your worksheet includes instructions for using the spreadsheet, a bordered cell where they are to enter their data, and the changing chart.

To prevent the salespeople from working with the other cells in the worksheet, you can turn off the gridlines in Excel 2003 or Excel 2002, by following these steps:

Go to Tools | Options.
On the View tab in the Windows section, clear the Gridlines check box.
Click OK.

To turn off the gridlines in Excel 2007, follow these steps:

Click the View tab.
Clear the Gridlines check box in the Show/Hide section of the ribbon.

Microsoft Access

Use Access' Where clause to calculate query totals for specific conditions

In addition to letting you total, average, count, and perform other calculations on entire columns of data, the Total cell in Access' Query Design window allows you to perform those same calculations on only those records where the data meet certain conditions. For example, suppose you would like to know how many Microsoft-certified employees were hired from January 1, 2001 to the present. To create a parameter query that can answer this question, follow these steps:

Open the Employees database.
Click Queries under Objects in the Database window.
Click Create Query in Design View.
Select the Employees Records table, then click Add, and then click Close.
Double-click EmployeeID in the Field list.
Right-click the Sort cell under the EmployeeID Field cell and select Totals.
Click the drop-down arrow of the Total cell and select Count.
Double-click Certified in the field list.
Clear the check mark from the Show cell.
Enter Microsoft in the Criteria cell for the Certified field.
Double-click HireDate in the field list.
Click the drop-down arrow of the Total cell for HireDate and scroll to and select Where.
Clear the check mark from the Show cell.
In the Criteria cell for the Hire Date field, enter: >[Enter Hire Date].
Close and save the query.

When you run the query, you will get a message box that will let you enter the hire date from which you want Access to total the number of Microsoft-certified employees hired. For example, if you enter 1/1/2001, Access will count all the records that have dates later than 1/1/2001 in the Hire Date field and return the total amount of records that satisfy that condition in the query results.