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Dad wants me to work for him, need comprehensive MS Word/Excel guides!
Ant000
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey guys,
I'm currently just taking general BA courses at Uni right now, floating around the various humanities trying to find a passion but have been so far unsuccessful. Anyway, my dad works in investment advising and wants me to come work for him over the summer to see how I do and if I like it. I'm going to be taking the Canadian Securities Course and in the interim helping him with reports/presentations while I learn the ropes.
The only problem I have with that is that I basically never use those kinds of programs aside from typing essays, and although I'm pretty computer savvy -- which is why he assumes I can help him with such things, when it comes to word/excel/powerpoint, I've only got basic cursory knowledge.
The good news is I have like four solid weeks of nothing much to do, so I can bone up....all I need is some kind of comprehensive guides or tutorials that show you around and help you learn the programs.
Any help appreciated.
I'm currently just taking general BA courses at Uni right now, floating around the various humanities trying to find a passion but have been so far unsuccessful. Anyway, my dad works in investment advising and wants me to come work for him over the summer to see how I do and if I like it. I'm going to be taking the Canadian Securities Course and in the interim helping him with reports/presentations while I learn the ropes.
The only problem I have with that is that I basically never use those kinds of programs aside from typing essays, and although I'm pretty computer savvy -- which is why he assumes I can help him with such things, when it comes to word/excel/powerpoint, I've only got basic cursory knowledge.
The good news is I have like four solid weeks of nothing much to do, so I can bone up....all I need is some kind of comprehensive guides or tutorials that show you around and help you learn the programs.
Any help appreciated.
Ant000 on
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My GF is a word processor (erm, that sounds weird...). Basically she make sure all the documents/reports are formated to the company's specific format and helps correct any errors/mistakes that are on the reports.
Anyway, she told me one of the hardest things people seem to grasp in MS Word are page breaks. Like, how MS word handles a page break to number the page. I believe she mentioned there are 8 different page breaks in MS Word.
Examples would be what if you want roman numerals for the table of contents and any pages before the main part of the report. The report itself is numerical, starting from 1. Then maybe the appendices are numbered separately. That sort of thing.
Figuring out headers, footnotes, adding figures/charts with appropriate labels/titles, how to manage spacing (horizontaly and vertically across the page), and the page breaks I mentioned earlier would give a strong base for Word. Most which by just looking up in help will give enough info to figure out how to use it.
As for Excel, formulas are generally the hardest. Not necessarily what's in the formula, for someone can tell you that (show them to you, like how you would calculate interest and so forth), but finding what each function does. Like if say you need whole numbers, to find a function that rounds up or down for you (so you do not have to type them out yourself). Finding the sum of numbers/series is another.
Other things I've done with Excel is playing with drop down cells. So say you wanted to figure out how much you would spend on a new game, depending on which state you bought it, would have a different amount of tax. What total would you spend.
So you could have a field where the cost of the game is. Then you could have a drop down cell where you could have a list of several states with different tax amounts. Then you have your total cost. So you could then go through the drop down cell (think of it like a drop down menu), select the state (and %) you were thinking of, then you will see the result.
You might of course know how to do this already, it's actually not too hard. But it's just things that I've come across recently that was simple to do, but took a bit of time figuring exactly how to manage it.
I guess another idea would be to think of something, say you want to come up with a yearly budget, maybe even see what your budget will be like in 10 years, then try to think of ways you can simplify some of the methods you chose by how you figured out your budget.
Like, if say you wanted to make column A list years. Some people might just enter 2007, 2008, 2009 in each cell. Others might know you can select a series of cells and just say fill series, starting from say 2007. There might be other ways too. Just stuff like that.
Good luck.
The page numbering isn't so bad but revising pages is a nightmare really quick example.
Header pg1
Main body: stuff
Footer: Rev 0
Header pg2
Main body: stuff
Footer: Rev 0
Header pg3
Main body: stuff
Footer: Rev 0
Header pg4
Main body: stuff
Footer: Rev 0
Now that's really easy to do right? But to revise a report properly if we say change the stuff on page three we need to rev the footer to rev 1 to show that we've made changes on that page.
What you need to do then.
Insert a next page break above and below the page in question.
Edit the footer on page four first, turn off same as previous, then go into page three (where stuff has actually changed) and turn off same as previous. Then you can change the rev to what you want.
However, by turning off same as previous you've now reset all the page numbers. It now looks like this.
Header pg1
Main body: stuff
Footer: Rev 0
Header pg2
Main body: stuff
Footer: Rev 0
Header pg1
Main body: stuff
Footer: Rev 1
Header pg1
Main body: stuff
Footer: Rev 0
You now need to go into the page numbers for pages 3 & 4 and tell them to start their numbers from 3 and four respectivly.
It's an entirely over involved process that Word does not handle simply.
Excel - Well if you know the basics and can tool around with that you'll be set. You may need to write your own Macro functions but at the end of the day they are just Excel formulas with neater front ends or some really basic list stuff.
Powerpoint if you are vaugely familure with it or Publisher again it will not be difficult.
Satans..... hints.....
Other than that, just about any Word/Excel guide should work fine for keeping at your desk. MS Word/Excel for Dummies would be fine, or just check out Amazon or Microsoft's site for recommended books and guides.
It's hard to tell you what you should be doing without seeing the type of documents you'll be working on, but feel free to add to this thread with any specific questions, or you're welcome to PM me over the summer if you run into a problem. I've been doing professional document work with Word for years, so I know it very well. I suck at Excel, though.
Ng Security Industries, Inc.
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Caveat: The latest version of Office, where the help files are all hosted online or something, makes this a total chore because it's actually really hard to look anything up. I'm still using Office 2002 and things are still hunky-dory, but the newest version has always been painful for me. If at all possible, learn on a version of Office where Help still uses local files.
In general, the things that I can think of that are good to know, at least in my job:
- Keyboard shortcuts. Especially in Excel, it greases the wheels if you don't need to use the mouse all the time. It would be good to ingrain the habit of using ALT+(letter) to open the toolbar menus, as well as all the ways of using CTRL/ALT/SHIFT + cursor/numpad keys to select and jump around text or cells.
Word
- Basic text formatting: Fonts and font sizes, effects (boldface, underline, italics), colored text, text highlighting
- Character spacing to squeeze things into a line when needed
- Paragraph spacing -- basically everything in the Indents and Spacing tab is useful other than the checkboxes
- Bullets and numbering, and the formatting thereof
- Page breaks, as mentioned.
- Also section breaks. Changing header/footer formats between sections, changing landscape/portrait orientation between sections
- Columns and column breaks, adjusting the space between them.
- Page numbering, including starting on different page numbers and not putting a page number on the first few pages (after you learn section breaks)
- Tables, and all the ways in which they like to act wonky, especially when you have merged cells in there.
- Setting up a table of contents, both by setting the text style and by manually setting the section headings
- Using "Paste Special" to insert unformatted text
- Inserting an image in different formats (in line with text, in front of text, etc.)
- Protecting a document vs. setting read only status
- Tracking changes, document review options
Excel
- Logical layout. More than Word, it's important to get a feel for what Excel is meant to do. Many of my coworkers never put in the effort to do this, and they set up their tables in a way that basically makes it impossible to get the information they want.
- Formatting. A lot of people I've worked at use Excel to make pretty tables and nothing else, so you should know how to do this, too. Basically everything in the Format Cells dialog is useful and comes up all the time when making pretty tables, with the exception of Protection. Hidden rows/columns, freezing panes and splitting windows isn't exactly formatting, but another relatively basic task that seems to throw people for a loop (i.e., if nothing else, it's good to know how to fix it when someone else asks you to)
- Conditional formatting
- Along with formatting, everything in the page setup options as well
- Formulas, natch. You should be comfortable entering basic arithmetic or algebraic equations
- Functions that have always been useful in my work; not sure about other people: IF, SUBTOTAL, VLOOKUP/HLOOKUP, RAND. Find the list of worksheet functions in the help file and look through that to get a better idea of what can be done with formulas
- Pasting in data from outside sources, including Paste Special to paste unformatted text, and Text to Columns to arrange it correctly (sometimes)
- Sorting data. Adding a column of RAND() numbers and then sorting the table to do a random sort (maybe this doesn't come up often in other industries, though).
- Pivot tables are good for data analysis, kind of a poor man's database
- Array functions
- Macros, If the job involves a lot of repetition
Particularly for Excel, I'd recommend starting a few small projects to play around with the program, kind of like what Tzyr suggested. You might set up your game or music collection, a contact list, a schedule. Someone else in H/A was messing around with RPG character sheets. Dice probabilties would be good, especially if you want to learn some Visual Basic scripting and make some dippy spreadsheet-based games. My pride and joy is a flash card script that I made to help me learn Chinese. I'd post it up, but I don't think it's actually useful for learning anything about Excel other than Visual Basic.