Mercer County Library Blog

PowerPoint presentations can easily go awry, especially if the slide show becomes distracting and detracts from the central message of your presentation. After all, PowerPoint is supposed to support your presentation, not lead it. PowerPoint offers many great tools that allow you to emphasize points made, as well as related graphics that reinforce your message. One of these tools is animations. Animations are a set of effects that you can apply to the text and graphics, like pictures and charts, on a slide. Animations can make the information more memorable for your audience, and they allow you, the presenter, to control when and how the audience views a particular bullet point or related graphic. So, let’s say a slide contains five bullet points. Rather than having all bullet points show up at the same time, you can, through the use of animations, introduce each bullet point one-by-one. This strengthens the connection between your verbal speech and the slides you’re showing. It turns...

Since this is my last blog, as the Office Guru, on all things Office, I want to share a few of my favorite, and absolutely indispensable, Office tips. All the tips presented here deal with Word and Excel since those are the two most utilized programs. Read on and, hopefully, you will find tips that will save you a lot of time and frustration. Added an extra page in Word which refuses to go away? That can seem plain sloppy but when it's a blank page at the end of your resume that claims you are proficient in MS Office then say goodbye to that interview call! So how do you get rid of that superfluous page? Try clicking on the blank page and then use the Delete key. Several times if required. Yes, it's that simple. Unless, of course, you have a table on the preceding page in which case you will need to reduce the size of the table and your unwelcome page will automatically disappear. Hate the extra spacing between the lines in your Word document? Use the keys Ctrl + A...

Your business card is an essential and necessary marketing tool.  A good business card not only projects the right image about you and your company to potential clients; it's a convenient way to offer your customers your contact information.  You can create a terrific and professional looking business card using Publisher. Open Publisher. From Publication Types menu, click and select Business Cards . A variety of pre-designed templates will appear under the Business Cards category.  They are further categorized by Newer and Classic designs; you can scroll to check out all the templates or just click on the links to see the newer or the classic designs. If you are a novice then I suggest staying away from using the Blank category. Unless you are a design guru and know the perfect design you want for your business card, it's always a good idea to begin with a pre-existing template. The templates provided in Publisher are created by professionals so you have access...

PowerPoint presentations are ubiquitous!  How many of us have sat through excruciatingly boring, not to mention outright bad, presentations? Slept through any presentations? Walked out of a presentation thinking it was a complete waste of time?  So what can you do to avoid similar predicaments when creating your own PowerPoint presentation?  Read on for some helpful tips on ways to create a dynamic and professional presentation that is easy to understand and conveys your message effectively. Before you start planning your presentation, know your audience! Are you doing a presentation to a group of seniors about the benefits of exercise? Or, are you trying to get support for your proposal from your bosses and other company bigwigs? Or, are you simply trying to motivate your team to excel in a project that's close to your heart? Whether you are trying to promote a cause or sell a product, the key element is to know your audience so that you can tailor your content and yo...

As I have written in a previous blog, Table it! Inserting a Table in Word , there are numerous benefits in using a table to display your data.  Whether the data is in a Word document or in a PowerPoint slide, displaying it in a table is a great way to organize your information. Moreover, displaying your data in a table makes it much more accessible to your audience.  Say you are presenting key financial information about your business to a group of investors. You have done your research and have all the necessary data which clearly indicates that your cookie shop is a thriving business. You can communicate this fact by putting all the numerical data in a table format thus displaying your information to its best advantage. If you already have all your data in an Excel spreadsheet, you can simply copy the table and paste it on to a PowerPoint slide. Then you can format the table and make it look pretty. Or, you can simply open your PowerPoint and then from the Ribbon ...

So you have created a terrific presentation with PowerPoint that you know will impress your audience. But being realistic, you know the audience, upon walking out of the presentation, will forget almost everything you talked about! Did they even get your contact information, you wonder, in case they have questions later on? How do you ensure that the audience will retain some significant portion of the information that you just imparted? Clearly, you need to create handouts so that long after your presentation is over, the participants will have all the data they need or want! You can use PowerPoint to create a handout or use the tool in PowerPoint to create a handout in MS Word. It’s easy and quick, and you don’t have to spend hours generating handouts: PowerPoint does most of the work for you! Here’s how: To create a handout in PowerPoint: After you have finished creating your PowerPoint presentation, click on the Office button and then click on Print . From the Print dialog box ...

Word is not just for creating a plain old document. Trying to read page after page of data can be tedious. Why not give your Word document a boost by displaying some of your information in a table format? Inserting a table in your Word document to display some of your data breaks the monotony of a text-ridden page and makes it easier to retrieve the information that the reader wants, quickly and easily.  Unlike columns, tables are much easier to work with: you can align data in a table without having to constantly use the tab key or the space bar. To insert a table in your word document, click on the Insert tab and then click on Table . Make sure your insertion point is where you want the table to be placed . From the Insert Table menu, scroll over the squares and, magically, a table will appear on your page. You can instantly insert a table with eight rows and ten columns by clicking on the last square on the Insert Table menu. If you know the number of rows and columns you w...

Did you know that you can add a chart – Pie, Bar, Line, etc. - to your Word document without actually opening Excel?  So if you are loath to open Excel but still want to use the chart feature then just use Microsoft Word to create a chart. Note: If your Word document is saved as Word 97-2003 document i.e. in compatible mode, then functionality of this feature will be available, but limited, and the instructions will be different. You can convert your document to the 2007 file format by clicking on the Office button and then clicking Convert. Here’s how you can insert a chart in Word: Once you open Word, click on the Insert tab. Then from the Illustrations group, click on Chart . Make sure to position your cursor where you want the chart to be placed . From the Insert Chart dialog box, click and select the chart type you want and then click OK . Instantly three things will occur simultaneously: 1. The type of chart you selected will be inserted on to your Word docu...

You can create an appealing, professional-looking, attention-grabbing chart in Excel in just a few minutes. Don’t believe me? Keep reading and find out how you can easily: generate a meaningful, 3D chart with a title and data labels and with enough oomph to make your dry as dust numbers look anything but boring!. First, I must tell you that the Excel chart wizard has long departed. And second, you cannot create a chart, interesting or otherwise, without data. After all, a chart is nothing more than a pictorial depiction of your data. So make sure your data is completely accurate. Then it’s a simple matter of selecting the data and plugging it into a chart. Here’s how: After you have checked your data for accuracy, select your data. Then click on the Insert tab. You will see a wide variety of charts in the Charts group. Make sure to pick the right chart type: the chart should reflect your data precisely and be easy to understand. Once you decide on the chart type, just click on ...

Have you ever received an email with glaring typos, riddled with spelling and grammatical errors? Struggled to decipher a poorly written email that just makes you furrow your brow in confusion? Searched in vain for that elusive email that contained some critical information?  Maybe, you deleted that all important message inadvertently? And oops! Sent an email to the wrong person? If you’ve encountered any one, or all of the above, then this blog is for you. In both our business and personal lives, email has become a ubiquitous communication tool. Whether we are using email for business reasons, or personal ones, it pays to cultivate some good email habits and follow standard, professional email protocol. Sometimes it is simply a matter of using commonsense: we all know not to reply to spam, not to send chain letters, or forward junk mail, to only CC (carbon copy) people directly involved with the given matter, etc. As I wrap up my series on Outlook email here are some obvious a...

Forgot all about that important meeting that was scheduled months ago? Feeling rushed and perpetually running late for appointments? Too many reminder notes scattered about on your desk? Then it’s time to put your Outlook calendar to use! Microsoft Outlook offers a versatile calendar that will make you an expert in time-management in no time! You can use the calendar to schedule meetings and set up reminders: never forget a birthday, a dentist appointment, or be late for a meeting again. Use the Recurrence feature to schedule an event that occurs more than once.  Assign color categories to make it easy to find an event or to indicate free/busy time. To access the calendar , click the Calendar button on the Navigation Pane .  Not only will you see the calendar but on the Navigation Pane you will see other calendar-related options such as opening a shared calendar, or finding out how to add a new group. The calendar listed under My Calendars is your main/default calendar bu...

Is your mailbox cluttered and disorganized making it hard for you to find the message you need? Outlook offers several different ways for you to organize your mailbox: you can create folders and group similar messages in specific folders, Assign a Category , or use the Flag for follow Up feature. You can also set up your Outlook to sort your messages by date, sender or file size enabling you to find the message you need quickly. Or, you can change the way Outlook displays your messages so as to make it easier to identify the required message. Create Folders for Similar Messages : you can easily create a folder for your book club and perhaps another one for your blog. Now when you get a message about your book club, or your blog, move it to the appropriate folder so when you need to see a message that is related to your book club, or your blog, you know where to look! It is easy to create a new folder – open Outlook, click on File , point to New and then click on Folder . In the C...