Helen Bradley

There are two ways to create a great PowerPoint presentation — the smart way and the long way. Using the tools in PowerPoint in an ordered and planned way can save you time when creating your presentations. We’ll show you a structured workflow for PowerPoint 2007 that will ensure you get your presentation complete and […]

PowerPoint presentations are a simple way to display information at a tradeshow or to entertain and inform visitors in your company’s reception area. Creating a PowerPoint presentation that runs itself without requiring any user intervention is no more complex than creating the presentation itself. I’ll show you how configure your presentation to run automatically and […]

With an outline in place, you can click the + and – markers to display or hide parts of the worksheet data When you have a lot of data in an Excel worksheet it often becomes necessary to summarize the information to get to the crux of what it is telling you. There are a […]

Often during the day you’ll get a feeling of déjà vu that tells you that you’ve done some task before. When it’s a document you find yourself creating time and again, perhaps it’s time to turn the original document into a reusable template. In this article I’ll show you how to create templates from standard […]

When you’re working as a team on a document, Microsoft Word has features you can use to make editing the document an easier process than it might otherwise be. Using the tools built into Word, anyone can make changes to the document, review and comment on changes made by others, and update the document to […]

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application that you can use to record data, make calculations and create charts. In this article I’ll introduce you to the basics of working in Excel. We’ll look at how to create, format and print a simple worksheet and how to chart the data in it. Enter this sample data […]

One nice thing about Microsoft Office applications is that they’ve been designed to talk to each other. For example, you can take an Excel chart and place it in a Word document to illustrate a report. While the process of putting an Excel chart in a Word document is simple, there are three ways that […]

The basic forms and reports that Access creates automatically make a good starting point for your database projects. It is, however, likely that you’ll want to improve them so they look better and are more functional. In this article I’ll show you how you can use Access Design View to add additional efficiency to forms […]

As I showed in my first Excel functions article, the serious meat in any spreadsheet is the formulas and functions that perform the calculations. Excel offers functions that you can use to make the process of computing the results simpler for many standard calculations. In this article I’ll show you some useful examples; I’ll tell […]

Some of Word’s most powerful features are hidden from view, and one of these is field codes. While you may have encountered field codes when using mail merge, that’s not the only task you can accomplish with field codes. In this article we’ll look at how you can use field codes by themselves and in […]