SAD stands for 'Shift Alt Down' and it's the favourite keyboard shortcut for editing in Word.

Highlight your text and use this shortcut to quickly move text up (Shift Alt Up arrow) or down (Shift Alt Down arrow) in paragraphs, bulleted or numbered lists, even tables. Much quicker than cut and paste.

On the MAC try Ctrl Shift and arrow keys (not quite so easy to remember ;)

Watch this short video...

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Ever find yourself writing the same email over and over? A quotation for a customer, a supplier enquiry, a feedback request? If so, you should be using Outlook templates. When you create a template in Outlook, standard text and even attachments are stored so that they can be easily re-used at a point in the future. Here's how...

1. Create a new message containing the text you want to store along with a subject line and any file attachments.
2. From the File menu select Save As
3. Change the Save as Type drop down to Outlook Template
4. Give it a file name and click Save
5. To access the template you will need to add the Choose Form button to the Quick Access Tool bar, to do this, click Home, New Items, More Items and then right click Choose Form, select Add to Quick Access tool bar
6. The button is now added to the Quick Access Tool bar in the upper left corner of the screen
7. Whenever you want to use the template, click the button and select User Templates in File System then select the template you require

Copy any text to your clipboard, then in Outlook press Ctrl-V. Outlook creates a new message (or note or whatever item, depending on the folder you're viewing) with the text already pasted.

So instead of creating a new item in Outlook, and then copying and pasting text in, you do both in one step.

Look forward to seeing you soon,

Anita Lund
Owner and Founder of Trainers Direct Pty Ltd (Sydney)  
On Site MS Office, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and computer training courses and workshops in Sydney
www.trainers-direct.com.au
​& Storm Training & Solutions (UK) www.stormtraining.com

I don’t like Conversation View and how it groups emails together as it requires additional clicks to get to a specific message within a conversation.  It's particularly common if you're using the web app version of Outlook. 

Also, it makes it difficult to find a message. I couldn't find a message which I received last week and then discovered it under “Yesterday” under a different “From” name of someone who replied later! I'll show you here different ways to de-activate this and how to do the same on your I-Phone too.

In Outlook on the Web, you’ll find a drop down link at the top right of your message list. When you click on this link, you can select various filters and sorting methods.
At the bottom of this list, you’ll find a section where you can choose between “Messages” and “Conversations”. Select “Messages” to turn off Conversation View. The screen shot below shows Outlook 2013 which is similar.

To quickly sort by a column click on its heading to sort ascending and then again to sort descending. You can also remove a column by dragging it away from the title row and Arrange By to group emails together.

A really useful button to add to the quick access toolbar in Outlook is the Advanced Find button. A normal search in Outlook will only search the email subject by default so if you want to search the message body or search against other criteria such as importance, from etc you'll need to add this button.  

1. Click in the Search box just above the received column, a new Search tab will appear at the end of the ribbon.
2. Click the Search Tools button
3. You will see Advanced Find in the list.
4. Right click Advanced find to add it to the quick access toolbar.
5. The next time you want to use advanced search criteria, simply click the button which will have been added to the end of the quick access toolbar in the top left hand corner of the screen.

The next time you receive an email from someone and you want to add them to your contacts...

• Click the email in your Inbox to highlight it (don't double click to open it).
• There email address will be displayed in the preview pane to the right or at the bottom.
• Right click on their email address and choose Add to Outlook Contacts.

For those of you who are already familiar with using Pivot Tables, this is a really useful tip. If you want to combine data from more than one sheet, use the short cut key Alt D and then press P (Alt D is the old Data tab command and P is Pivot Table). This launches the old user friendly pivot table wizard where you can choose to add 'Multiple Consolidation Ranges'. You can then select more than one data source for your report.

Check in again soon for a short tutorial to guide you through those steps.

Look forward to seeing you soon,

Anita Lund
Owner and Founder of Trainers Direct Pty Ltd (Sydney)  
On Site MS Office, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and computer training courses and workshops in Sydney
www.trainers-direct.com.au
​& Storm Training & Solutions (UK) www.stormtraining.com

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"I need that report by..." 5 words that create panic in the work place when you have a list that's a thousand lines long, you need to summarise it and just don't know where to start. 

Chances are if you are doing lots of filtering, sorting and subtotalling on your Excel data lists, you're wasting a lot of time repeating tasks. If  you want to save yourself a stack of time, the tool to use is a Pivot Table.  This feature can be found under the Insert tab on the ribbon.

Select a populated cell in the list you want to analyse and click the Pivot Table icon. This will highlight the entire list including headers, and the Pivot Table analyses the data on a new sheet where you can manipulate that data in a variety of ways (see below).

Here's an example (you can download the file to practise yourself! or play the video tutorial at the end of this post).

Watch a short video tutorial here...

Look forward to seeing you soon,

Anita Lund
Owner and Founder of Trainers Direct Pty Ltd (Sydney)  
On Site MS Office, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and computer training
www.trainers-direct.com.au
​& Storm Training & Solutions (UK) www.stormtraining.com  

1. Use F4 to make a cell absolute instead of typing $ when creating a formula (press F4 multiple times to make only part of the reference absolute)
2. Use Name Ranges in formulas? Press F3 to paste a name into a formula
3. To wrap text in a cell press Alt Enter e.g First Alt Enter Name would wrap First Name to display on 2 lines
4. To edit the current cell press F2
5. To jump to the top or bottom of a sheet press Ctrl Home or End
6. To select to the end of a list, position the active cell where you want to select from and press Ctrl  Shift  End
7. To view formulas on a worksheet press Ctrl and the key immediately underneath the Esc key on the keyboard
8. To insert the current date press Ctrl ;
9. To create a chart, highlight the data and corresponding column/row labels and press F11
10. To quickly copy a sheet, hold down Ctrl and drag the sheet and drop it immediately to the right

Look forward to seeing you soon,

Anita Lund
Owner and Founder of Trainers Direct Pty Ltd (Sydney)  
www.trainers-direct.com.au
​
& Storm Training & Solutions (UK) www.stormtraining.com 

Look forward to seeing you soon,

Anita Lund
Owner and Founder of Trainers Direct Pty Ltd (Sydney)  
www.trainers-direct.com.au
​
& Storm Training & Solutions (UK) www.stormtraining.com 

Look forward to seeing you soon,

Anita Lund
Owner and Founder of Trainers Direct Pty Ltd (Sydney)  
www.trainers-direct.com.au
​
& Storm Training & Solutions (UK) www.stormtraining.com 

In the first of our 2 minute tutorials we show you how to create a chart in Excel 2013 with 2 data series, and plot the second data series on a secondary axis. This is useful if you have a large variation in values. Yes, all in 2 minutes, it's that easy!

Look forward to seeing you soon,

Anita Lund
Owner and Founder of Trainers Direct Pty Ltd (Sydney)  
www.trainers-direct.com.au
​
& Storm Training & Solutions (UK) www.stormtraining.com