Enhance your Word documents with easy column formatting
Thursday, May 29, 2008 02:19 PM
Find out how to columnize any text in just two clicks, instead of applying column format to the entire document.
Microsoft Word
How to create columns in the middle of a Word document
Columns, or specifically, newspaper-style columns, are common in newsletters and reports.
The good news is that they're easy to implement and you don't have to apply the column format to your entire document; you can columnize any text with just two clicks.
In version 2003 and earlier, select the text you want to display in column format and click the Columns tool on the Standard toolbar. Doing so displays a palette-type drop-down list of columns.
Highlight the appropriate number of columns (watch the bottom text update as you select columns to keep up with how many columns you're creating) and then click. It couldn't be simpler.
In Word 2007, select the text and click Columns in the Page Setup group on the Page Layout tab. To remove columns, select the text and chose one column from the Columns drop-down list.
Microsoft Access
Create an Access form with no focus on opening
You've created a read-only form, yet the first control is highlighted when the form is opened. To prevent users from trying to enter data, you'd like no focus placed on any of the form controls. One way to do this is to create an unbounded text box, resize it so it's barely visible, and then place it first in the tab order.
Follow these steps:
- Open the form in Design view.
- Click the Text Box control tool.
- Click and drag to create a small text box control below the last control in the form.
- Delete the text box label.
- Right-click the text box and select Properties to display the Properties box, if necessary.
- Click the Format tab in the Properties box.
- Click in the Width property box and enter .00001.
- Click in the Height property box and enter .00001.
The resultant text box is shown below.
- In Access 2007, click the Arrange tab in the Form Design tools group.
- In the Control layout group, select Tab Order. (In Access 2002/2003, go to View | Tab Order.)
- Under Custom Order, click to select the text box and drag it to the top of the list.
- Click OK.
Now when the form is opened, the focus will be placed on the unbounded text box, which is too small to be visible.
Microsoft Excel
Let Access take care of name changes for you
When you create a bubble chart in Excel, you do not select the labels, as Excel would not know what to do with them. Instead, you need to add the chart labels after you create the chart. Adding the x-axis and y-axis labels can be done in the usual way. However, Excel has no specific tools for adding individual data labels to each bubble. You will need to add each data label separately.
For example, say you have just created the following bubble chart from the range B2:D7.
Follow these steps to add the employee names as data labels to the chart:
- Right-click the data series and select Add Data Labels.
- Right-click one of the labels and select Format Data Labels.
- Select Y Value and Center.
- Move any labels that overlap.
- Select the data labels and then click once on the label in the first bubble on the left.
- Type = in the Formula bar.
- Click A7. (A7 is the name of the employee whose current Salary is represented by the bubble.)
- Press Enter.
- Repeat Steps 5 through 8 to add the name of the employee whose salary is represented by the bubble.
The completed data labels are shown below.
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