Microsoft Office Training London 020 7920 9500
Mouse Tips are all about the little things in life that make all the difference. Today we’re looking at resizing Keynote text boxes. I must say that I quite like Keynote, and prefer it to PowerPoint. But if there’s one thing that gets my goat, it’s those pesky text boxes!
Every time you insert a text box or copy and paste some text onto a Keynote slide you get a 2-handled text box which adjusts itself automatically to fit the text that it contains. Fine! But you can’t resize it. Only by filling it with placeholder text. And I can’t really be bothered to do that.
This is frustrating because you often need to change the dimensions of a text box. So that you can visualise how it relates to the other slide elements. What you need is an 8-handled text box.
Here’s my 2-handled text box and it’s driving me mad! Some of the slide layouts have sizeable 8-handled text boxes. Why can’t I have one too? Now, you can copy and paste the actual text box off one of these slides. But then you’ll have to copy your text into it…
Don’t despair. It’s not obvious but it’s not difficult. You need to change your 2-handled text box into an 8-handled one. Keep the text box selected and go into the main application menu bar. You need Format, Shapes and Lines, then Reset Text and Object Handles. Now you have an 8-handled text box.
Easy-peasy isn’t it? I have to confess that I hardly ever use the Keynote main menu. Like most people, I just use the shortcuts and get most things done by right-clicking.
The Keynote 8-handled text box is a magnificent thing. You can size it anyhow you like. And there’s far more formatting options compared to the other one. You can have drop-caps, text in columns, all sorts! Happiness is an 8-handled text box.
If you want to get the best out of Keynote and stop doing everything the long way round, come along on our Keynote training course.
Call 020 7920 9500 for full details.
The SUMPRODUCT function is one of those hero functions that, once discovered, you wonder how you ever managed without. It does not just do “what it says on the tin”, there’s a lot more to it than that. In particular, it’s one of the most powerful and flexible filter functions in Excel. And so much better than SUMIF or SUMIFS.
It’s easy to calculate someone’s age from their date of birth if you know about Excel’s DATEDIF function, unfortunately it’s easy to miss this function as it is not documented. Excel will not help you fill in the DATEDIF function interval values, you need to see the list here.
Our Excel double click tricks are some of those little things that make your life so much easier. You probably know most of them already. Or do you? I think that anyone who uses Excel regularly should know them.
Complicated text formulas using either ampersands and the CONCATENATE function are the bane of our life. Not any more! Excel new text functions will really help us nail those text formulas. We’ll be looking at the CONCAT function and the TEXTJOIN function.
Usually the formulas you need for percentages and differences are quite straightforward: divisions for percentages and a minus sign to take one value from another. But there are pitfalls for the unwary which we shall explore.
I think the Excel FILTER function does the filter job better than AutoFilter. It’s a live formula and an extraction, you don’t have to filter your data in place. There’s no need for that clunky Advanced Filter…