Do you have a spreadsheet that spans multiple pages, with a descriptive header at the top of the sheet? If you do, you probably want to have the header print at the top of each page. The easiest and fastest way to do this is by setting the Print Titles in the page setup options.

This one comes up all the time. You have data in a cell in Excel, and you want to get it to wrap to another line within that same cell. You're tempted to hit [Enter], just the same as you would if you were using Word or some other text editor. The only problem is that doing that will just take you to the next cell. Instead, you can place a hard return within a cell by holding down [Alt] key, and then pressing the [Enter] key. This will force a new line within that cell.

Word templates, often mentioned yet seldom utilized, a true time saving weapon that every computer warrior needs to have in their arsenal. You have to think about 'time saving' exercises within the context of the task itself. If you have a task on which you spend, say, 1 hour per year, it hardly seems worthwhile to invest in a time saving exercise for that task that will itself take several hours to undertake.

On the other hand, there are some tasks which we do repetitively and consistently, on which a time saving exercise can be incredibly worthwhile, even if you need to invest some time initially to set them up. If you can save even a few seconds on these types of tasks every time they are undertaken you may finally be able to have enough time to kick back and enjoy that Starbucks Marble Mocha Macchiato you've been thirsting for. Word templates are just such a time saving weapon, and the good news is that they take hardly any investment in time to get set up in the first place.

Do you remember way back when, in the early days of getting your first computer, it was actually fun to get e-mail? I do, but I have to tell you it seems like it was a long time ago. If you're like the average computer user these days you have multiple e-mail accounts, receiving dozens or even hundreds of e-mails every day. This on top of instant messaging, cell phones, PDA's, and the myriad of other communication marvels that numb our senses on a minute-to-minute basis. It's no wonder we're having trouble keeping up. The good news is, if you're a Microsoft Outlook user, you can set up 'rules' that will help you regain control of your e-mail.

You've got a spreadsheet with a ton of data in it, organized by years. You want to be able to selectively filter by various years to be able to get a better picture of the data. How do you do it, without creating a slew of ranges or lookups? Simple, Autofilter to the rescue.

How many times have you needed to select a whole page of cells in Microsoft Excel, selected all of the data in the first row, then dragged, and dragged, and dragged to get to the last row of the data. Then, just as you get close to the last row with data it goes 'whoosh', and you find yourself 20,000 rows down. So you try to go back up the page, then go past the end of the data, then back down, then back up.... Well, you get the picture. There's a fast easy way, using a couple of shortcut keys.

I know that Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 preview has been out for awhile, but I just got around to installing it and I thought I would take her for a little test drive. I'll include the relevant links at the bottom of the post, but before you rush out and install it remember that this is a beta preview, so at this stage it can still be tough to tell the difference between the bugs and the features. According to Microsoft this preview will only load on computers running Windows XP with service pack 2 installed, although they say that the production version will run on Vista (the next OS due out later this year), Windows XP Pro x64, and Windows Server 2003 in addition to XP. It's not going to run on anything prior to XP with service pack 2, so you may be looking at an OS upgrade if you've got an older OS.

I think that it's easy to tell from looking at it that Microsoft has heard the footsteps of other browsers coming up from behind, and has tried to take the best features from some of those other browsers and incorporate them into this version. Some of what they've done will be old hat for users of the more advanced browsers, but it looks like they're trying out some new things, too. They get an advantage with the hooks they can build into the OS, and they've already got the installed base. They flip the switch on it and they instantly get market dominance, it's a good place to be. Still, it's good to see that some good old-fashioned healthy competition can make the giant jump.

There is a great article posted today over at Lifehacker on how to reformat your hard drive and install Windows XP.

As someone that has had to do this on more than one occasion, it is not a trivial undertaking. However, Gina does a great job walking you through the process, you might want to bookmark their page for future reference just in case :) Step one is about backing up your data, there's more information about that here.

This is part 4 in a 4 part series

• << Part 1
• << Part 2
• << Part 3

This is the fourth (and final) article in this series, in the first article I showed the data that we would be working with and gave an overview of the normalization process. In the second article I went through the process of actually pulling this duplicate data into its own table. In the third article I looked at how to add the new foreign key values to the original table, and then delete the original column that held the offending duplicate data. In this article I will create a permanent parent-child relationship between the two tables and explain referential integrity.

This is part 3 in a 4 part series

• << Part 1
• << Part 2
• Part 4 >>

This is the third article in the series, in the first article I showed the data that we would be working with and gave an overview of the normalization process. In the second article I went through the process of actually pulling this duplicate data into its own table. In this article I will look at how to add the new foreign key values to the original table, and then delete the original column that held the offending duplicate data. In the final article I will create a permanent parent-child relationship between the two tables and explain referential integrity.