pc support newsletter Systems Development The University of North Carolina at Charlotte August 2006

Contents Word: Making revisions to the spell check dictionary Opening Word or Excel from a Powerpoint presentation Excel: Custom views Excel; Zero padding numbers WindowsXP: Grouping taskbar items Outlook: Saving portions of email

Word: Adding, removing, words in the spell checker dictionary

What to do if you have added a misspelled word to the spell check dictionary? In Word, select Tools, Options, Spelling and Grammar. Click on Custom Dictionaries. Make sure CUSTOM.DIC is checked (in most cases, this will be the only dictionary listed). Click Modify.

If you want to add a word, type it in the Word field, and click the Add button. You can remove the misspelled word by selecting it and clicking the Delete button..

Opening Word or Excel from a Powerpoint Presentation

If you are running a Powerpoint presentation and need to open a Word or Excel file from the presentation, click here to see how to do this.

Excel: Using Custom Views

You can use Excel’s Custom Views feature to create different worksheet view. For example: A worksheet may contain sales and commission information, however, different individuals need to view different calculations.

• Some need to view the entire worksheet
• Some need to see only the total sales for each region
• Some need to see the only the total commission for each region
• Some need to see only the commission for each individual

All of this can easily be accomplished by creating Custom Views of the worksheet. Click here for details.

Excel: Zero Padding Numbers

When exporting an Excel worksheet to a text file, it is sometimes necessary that a numerical string contain a fixed amount of characters, requiring that the string be padded with zeroes. For example: You might have a dollar amount that needs to contain 8 characters, so that 90000 would need to be converted to 00090000. Excel has a custom number format that easily accomplishes this. Click here for details.

Windows XP: Grouping Taskbar Items

Windows XP can group related items on the taskbar. For example – if you have minimized 3 Outlook items, only one Outlook icon displays on the taskbar and you click that icon, then select the item you want to work with. To group similar items, right click on a blank area of the taskbar and select Properties from the shortcut menu. On the “Taskbar” tab, select “Group similar taskbar buttons”, click Apply, then click OK.

Saving Pieces of Email

There may be times when you need to save a portion of an email for future reference – for example, a confirmation number, login information, a web site to visit for assistance with an account. You can, of course, write the information down, but it is easier to just select the portion of the email you need to save, and drag it to the Notes icon on the Outlook bar. The selected text is then saved as an Outlook note.

Questions or comments? Contact jtfreed@email.uncc.edu