Helen Bradley

Do you find yourself typing in the same familiar text into your business documents again and again? Whether it’s boilerplates, executive bios or directions to your store, two tools in Microsoft Word — AutoCorrect and AutoText – can help you to insert text into a document with minimal effort. While the two tools look very […]

In business, spreadsheets are most often used to make financial calculations. Financial worksheets that contain errors could cause financial embarrassment to the business, but unfortunately spreadsheets are susceptible to errors simply by their inherent design — information is hidden in formulas where it cannot easily be seen or checked for accuracy. While a mistake in […]

Whatever tools you can find to speed up your day’s work are tools well worth owning. PowerPoint has its share of features that reduce the time it takes to create and format a presentation, but some of these are well hidden. For example, PowerPoint masters can help you control the look of the slides in […]

When you incorporate charts into a PowerPoint presentation the simplest way to do so is with the software’s chart tool. However, sometimes the presentation lends itself to charts that are less formal and less businesslike in nature. In fact, what you need in these cases is something more like an illustration than a chart. New […]

There are lots of situations where you will want to create a database to store business data. It might be you need to record your assets or perhaps a list of customers or contacts. At first glance Access might not seem like the go-to tool of choice; it looks more complicated than it is to […]

There are lots of times in Excel when you find yourself entering the same data over and over again. When you do, ask yourself if you can’t do the task more efficiently another way. For example, if you repeatedly type the days of the week you could, instead, use the built-in fill list feature to […]

Word is a great editing tool to use when you’re working with others on a project. It has features that allow you to manage everyone’s changes and contributions to the document. Using these, you can view the changes that have been made and who made them, and you can easily accept or undo them as […]

When you create a PowerPoint presentation to play on a computer, it makes sense to take advantage of all the tools that you have at your disposal. One of these is PowerPoint action buttons. Action buttons let you add interactive elements to your PowerPoint presentations with very little effort. You can use action buttons to […]

Photos and other images add visual variety to your Word documents. You can use them as decorative features to break up large pieces of text, and they play an important part in delivering your message to your reader. Word offers handy tools for working with images in your documents and, in this article I’ll show […]

Word tables provide a simple way to present information in a small space and in a readable format. After all, we’re used to reading table data in everything from train timetables to bank statements. Tables are a key feature of Microsoft Word, which includes lots tools that help you add functionality to your tables and […]

Styles are a key tool in any word processing program and Word 2007 is no exception. Styles allow you to quickly format your text and tables in a consistent way. They reduce the time it takes to format a document and the time spent making changes when you determine that, say, Calibri isn’t the font […]

There’s a scenario that occurs across the country every day. You create a complex worksheet, and when you print it disaster strikes, and your office printer ejects half-printed pages at an alarming rate. To save your sanity – and some trees – take a few minutes before you press the Print button to ensure that […]