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Microsoft Word has a little feature called 'Track changes', which allows for collaborating with colleagues on documents. When enabled it will keep a running history of changes made to a document, kind of like a built-in version control. Add to that the ability to accept/reject changes, highlight text and add comments and you've got quite a nice little document collaboration package.

An important fact that you need to remember, however, is that this history lives with the document. This is an obvious necessity when you start passing it around to various colleagues as part of your work/review process. However, it is surprisingly easy to forget that this change history and comments still live in the document when you've got the feature turned off. And if you're not careful you may be setting yourself up for some embarrassing moments (or worse) if you send this marked-up document out to a customer or client.

My sister-in-law is a certified Excel genius. Back in the early 90's, when I was just getting interested in IT, she was writing programs in Excel running on DOS(6, I think?) that were being used to simulate nuclear meltdowns at actual nuclear power plants here in the states. They would enter in the baseline parameters, programmatically create a failure in some internal system, then run the simulation and 'see what happened'. They actually somehow linked it with the internal systems at the facility, right down to the sensors, alarms, monitors, etc. Really wild stuff. Whenever she would change some of the formulas she would wait until the weekend and then have their brand-spanken-new 486 DX2/66 with 8 mb of ram (8 mb of ram cost north of $2000 back then) chew on the spreadsheet for 3 days to finish the re-calculations. I've probably just violated a whole bunch of national security guidelines by writing this, so if this site's gone next weekend and you never hear from me again [hey, did I just see a black helicopter?!!?]...

Anyhooo, I remember her saying to me "You want to be a programmer? Start by figuring out a lookup function in Excel. If you can get your head around that then you 'may' just be smart enough ..."

Funny how things change. What was once the lofty domain of the geek elite is now common ground for every weekend warrior with a beat up computer on their desk. These days I see formulas in Excel from computers on our plant floor, written by grandmothers, that would have knocked me off a chair 10 years ago. Lookup functions fall firmly into this category - it just ain't rocket science anymore.

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So you've been toiling for a week over your latest and greatest Powerpoint presentation, and you're sure it's going to get you booted right into that corner office you've been drooling over. Just to make sure you haven't misspelled the new CEOs name, you decide to e-mail your creation to a trusted co-worker for proofreading. That's when you discover it: You've created a 50 mb monster! The last thing you want to do is to delete that cherry graph showing your main competitor's tanking stock market valuation. But you need to get it under your company's 2 mb e-mail attachment limit, and you don't have time to burn it to a CD and FedEx it. What's a wannabe-executive to do?

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I received a call from one of my co-workers in the UK the other day, looking for some help with a quick, down-and-dirty database to help him track company assets held by employees. Just something to track the details on all of the computer and peripherals, phones, cars, things like that. He already had it started, and just needed a little help getting the report built and formatted. So, being the nice guy I am, I say 'Sure, zip it up and send it to me, then I'll give you a call back'.

A minute later I had it opened up and was looking at the tables. He actually did a pretty good job, and had the different 'objects' in their own tables. He had a user table, a phone table, a car table, and an IT table. He had, however, fallen into a typical trap that novice database developers often fall into. He had set up a 'name' field in the user table, then had used that name field for the linking fields in the other tables. So what's wrong with that, you ask?

A week ago or so E happens to mention a project that she has taken on at work. It was fairly complex, and for one part of it she needed to be able to dynamically update a row with the date for the end of the month, for the next 12 months. She wanted to be able to enter in a starting date, then have the adjacent 12 cells fill in automatically with the last day of the month for the next 12 months. I knew this could be done with a fairly complex formula, and certainly with some VBA code. But it seemed to me I had run across an end of month function previously in Excel, and with just a little bit of investigation I found it. Strangely enough, it's called EOMONTH, and here's how you can find it and use it.

So I happen to be looking around over at eLearningSource (another great learning resource on the web) the other day and come across a little article with information about a plug-in for PowerPoint 2003 called Producer, which allows you to add multi-media (video and audio) to your Powerpoint presentations, then post that information on the web. I have to confess I got very excited when I first looked at this, it is certainly something for which we have a tremendous need at my real job. We have hundreds, if not thousands of presentations locked away in our internal servers, containing a wealth of technical, sales and corporate information, information that we should be sharing with our customers, partners and even ourselves. What we really need is a simple way to get that information into something that is easily viewed in a web browser.

Unfortunately, after downloading and looking at this package I can see that we're not going to be doing it using Microsoft Producer.

Once you start getting into some of the more advanced functions in Excel you're going to want to start defining and naming ranges. Doing so makes your functions much easier to write, and much easier for someone else to understand. All that you're doing when you define or name a range in Excel is to select a cell, or a series of cells, and assign a meaningful name to those cells.

In a recent article we looked at how to create your own custom template to use in Microsoft Word. One of the things I find very handy is to print the name of the file in the footer of my Word documents. How many times have you looked at a letter, fax, or any kind of printed document and found yourself thinking "I wish I could remember what I called this file, it sure would make it easier to find". You can set up Word to automatically print that information in the footer of every document you save, and it's easy!

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.