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Use Autofit when tables exceed Word page margins

By Mary Ann Richardson, Special to ZDNet Asia
Thursday, February 14, 2008 11:55 AM

Cut and paste tables from Excel to Word? Here's how to find the missing text.

Microsoft Word

Use Autofit when tables exceed Word page margins

You paste a table from Excel into your Word document and notice that half of it is cut off at the margin. Where did it go?

Your first instinct may be to change the page orientation to landscape or change the width of your margins to fit it on the page, but that would adversely affect the rest of your document. The next step may be to use the mouse to click and drag the column borders until all the columns fit across the page.

The real problem is there is too much content to fit across the page. You can correct this situation with a few clicks of the mouse. First, change to Autofit to Window by following these steps:

Select the table and right-click it.
Scroll to Autofit and then select AutoFit to Window.

If the table width still exceeds the margins, change the font size by following these steps:

Select the table.

Press [Ctrl]< to reduce the font size.

Double-click a column border to autofit the columns to the new reduced size.

Repeat steps 2 and 3 with the table selected until the entire table is visible between the margins.

Microsoft Excel

Use pictures to highlight data points in an Excel 2007 chart

Excel 2007 lets you highlight a particular data point in a chart simply by pasting a picture on the data point. For example, suppose you want to highlight the support center with the highest ranking to date. After you create a line chart that charts each center and its corresponding customer satisfaction rating, follow these steps:

Click the Insert tab.
Select Clip Art.
In the Clip Art Task pane, enter People in the Search For box.
Click Go.
Scroll to and click the Businesswoman clip art arrow and select Copy.
Right-click any cell outside of your chart and select Paste.
Resize the clip to about 1/2 inch square.
Right-click the resized clip and select Cut.
Click on your chart.
Click on the Data Series line and then click on the highest customer satisfaction data point.
Press [Ctrl]V.

Now the clip art pasted on the chart’s data point emphasizes the center with the top customer satisfaction rating.

Microsoft Access

Collect data for an Access 2007 database through Outlook e-mail

Most of your tech support personnel work offsite. They call in or fax their hours to the HR department, and then someone manually enters the hours into the Payroll database. Access 2007 can shorten this long and error-prone process with its new Collect Data Through Outlook E-mail feature.

For this feature to work, you will need to configure Outlook 2007 to receive e-mail from either your internal Exchange server or from Internet e-mail. You will also need a table in your Access database to store data sent to you through Outlook. For this example, create a table called Hours Worked For November, which includes three fields: Employee ID, Week Ending, and Hours Worked. To create the e-mail for each tech support person to collect his or her data for the month of November, follow these steps:

Open your Employees Database.
Click on the Hours Worked For November table in the Navigation pane.
Click the External Data tab.
Click Create E-mail in the Collect Data Group.
Click Next.
Click the >> button.
Click Next.
Click to select Automatically Process Replies And Add Data To Hours Worked For November 2007.
Click Next three times.
Click Create.
Add the e-mail address of the first employee to the To: field.
Click Send.

When the employee receives the e-mail, he or she clicks the Reply button, fills in the data for the three fields, and then clicks the Send button. When Outlook receives the e-mail, it stores it in its Access Data Collection Replies folder. The next time you open Outlook, Access will automatically add the data from each e-mail to the Hours Worked For November table.

If you wish, you can update the table manually (rather than have Access update it) by right-clicking an e-mail message in the Access Data Collection Replies folder and selecting Export To Access Table.