Saturday, August 07, 2010

Building a Simple Web Site with FrontPage

Dick Evans has just released a new book called Quick and Easy Web Sites.



It is a simple approach to building sites using HTML and FrontPage and applications that come with Windows. There are plenty of screen shots and step-by-step instructions to walk you through the techniques I use. You will be creating great looking sites in no time.

Buy the book or download and print your own.

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Excel - Changing Case

Ever had a group of items you pasted into a worksheet and they were all UPPER case? What you copied was a list of names and you really want only the first letter of each name upper case. This a tedious change if you have to do it by hand, but you do not. Excel has functions for changing case.

Open a new workbook and enter the following in cells A5 down:

GEORGE SMITH
MARY JONES
HARRY HAPPY
SAM SPADE
JOE GERARD

Let’s say the names came into cells A5 down. Insert a new column between A and B assuming B is already occupied. Then, in B5 enter =PROPER(A5) and press Enter. The result is the name from A5 with only the first letter of each name capitalized. Point to the fill handle in B5 and double-click. The formula is propagated down through all cells adjacent to active cells in column A.

The fill handle is that square in the lower right corner of the active cell. As you mouse over it the white cross of the mouse pointer changes into a black plus sign. While it is a plus sign is when you double-click it.

Click on B5 to make it active. Scroll down to the row containing the last cell used in column B. Hold down the shift key and click once on that last used cell in B. You have just used the shift-click method to select all the cells from B5 down through the last used cell in B. Then Ctrl+C to copy.

Right-click A5 and select Paste Special > Paste Values. The properly formatted names now appear in column A. You may delete column B.

The resulting cells in A5 down now contain:

George Smith
Mary Jones
Harry Happy
Sam Spade
Joe Gerard

Two other case changing functions may prove useful as well. UPPER and LOWER. The former converts the text to all UPPER case and the later to all lower case.

Monday, August 02, 2010

Free Tape Calculator

I know, a great calculator comes with Windows. Just click Windows+R, type calc, and press Enter. It does all the basics and has a scientific mode and converts decimal to hex to octal to binary. What it does not have is a tape. So when you have added a column of numbers, you have no way to prove your work.


Enter the Moffosoft Free Calc. It has all the basics as well AND a visible and printable tape displaying all the entrees. So now you can add up a column of numbers and check your work before using the answer.

Check it out at http://www.moffsoft.com/