Powerpoint User? Have you tried googling for some really interesting backgrounds for your presentations? Try “powerpoint templates (your_area_of_interest) free” eg “powerpoint templates weddings free” brings up several really professional templates.

Dragging an e-mail that requires action to the Calendar in Outlook makes it a breeze to follow-up an appointment.

• Click on the email and drag to calendar tab on bottom left – the email is copied into the details part of the appointment
• Update the date, time, colour code etc and you have the email ready with the appointment.

This same actions can also be used with Outlook Tasks

This month’s tip is a bit of fun – a reminder about checking work carefully.

The spellcheck is not 100% reliable!

Our brain also tricks us to reading errors correctly!!!!!!

 If you are having problems with this in your company,

I do have a session on proofreading I can run with a small group or individuals.

 Eye halve a spelling chequer

It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh –
My chequer tolled me sew!
                               
- Alan Richards, BBC Lancashire

If you have upgraded to Windows 7 you will have “lost” the Show Desktop Icon – annoying isn’t it!

Well I have found it is still there – go to the far right of your bottom task bar and you will find a grey strip – click it and all programs are minimised to you have access to your desktop.

 If you had left some windows open (maximised) click the show desktop bar again and they will come back as they were.

Where you would normally click and drag the fill handle to copy the same Rates figure in this example, try a double click on the fill handle to have it automatically fill the cells below that Excel "thinks" it should fill!

Aligning data in Excel is straightforward. You can use the Alignment buttons on the toolbar or ribbon. In fact, you might think it is elementary information. However, there is much more to aligning the data in your worksheet than this. Check out all of the alignment options Excel offers. 

To begin, select the cell or cells with the data you want to realign or rotate. Right-click and select Format Cells. Go to the Alignment tab of the dialog box.

If you want to change the horizontal alignment, click inside of the Horizontal box and choose a selection. General is the default, but you can opt for Left, Center or Right, which align the data just like they say they do. You can use more settings with these, though. Did you notice that Left and Right both say (Indent)? Just to the right of the Horizontal box you will also see an Indent list. Choose a number in this list and Excel indents the data the number of times you selected.

The next option you can choose is Fill, which repeats the data as many times as necessary to fill the cell. In addition, if you apply the Fill alignment to blank cells to the right of the data, Excel fills them as well.

Justify, the next option, aligns the text to the right and left of the cell. This alignment really only works if you have multiple lines of text or data.

Center Across Selection is a handy one. With this option, you can center data across two or more cells without actually merging those cells.

Using the Distributed Indent option allows you to distribute the data evenly across the cell.

You can use the options in the Vertical alignment box to align the data at the Top, Bottom or Center of a cell. In addition, you can justify vertically to add spacing between text or data. You can also choose Distributed and select Justify Distributed to distribute the data vertically as well as horizontally.