Reflection of the A to Z blog Challenge

I enjoyed participating in the A to Z blog challenge. I would recommend it to anyone who blogs.

This was my first time and I loved it. My purpose for doing this challenge was to populate my blog with more training. I accomplished that goal.

I followed the recommendation by asked people, who had done this before, for some pointers. Here are the three and they are great.

1. Write all posts ahead of time.
    It was too late when I asked. I will do this next time.

2. Visit as many A to Z bloggers as possible.
    If the posts had been done I would have had more time to do this. I loved the ones I visited.

3. Leave a comment on blog entries with your blog address.
   I did this but not enough. Again, I ran out of time.

I was only able to participate in one chat. My suggestion to others would be to participate in the twitter chats.

I enjoyed getting to know other bloggers throughout the world. The variety of blog topics is exciting!

I will have more time next year by being more prepared having the posts all ready before April 1st.

My A to Z blog list index

Thank you for organizing this challenge each year.

See you next year!

I survived the 2016 A to Z Blog Challenge

I survived the blog challenge. I posted 26 blog posts.

Each post contains instructions on some item in MS Office or Google. Check them out.

I have an index of all the posts
A to Z Blog Index

Z is for Zoom

When MS Office 2007 came out I was very excited for the change to this item.

Instead of having to go into a menu item and remember if I wanted to Zoom to 200% or 50%, I could now just slide along a bar in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Called the Zoom Slider.




In the middle of the horizontal line is a small vertical bar.
Click on the bar and drag the bar to the right. The text on the screen gets bigger.
Drag the bar to the left and the text gets smaller.
This does not effect the size of the text when it is printed. The font size does not change.

- + 

Click on the minus sign and the % will decrease by 10%
Click on the + plus size and the % will increase by 10%

Click on another location along the slider and the vertical bar will jump to that percentage.

Mouse
The zoom can also be changed by holding down the CTRL key and moving the roll bar on the top of the mouse. Rolling the bar one way will increase the zoom while rolling it the other way will decrease the zoom.

Y is for Yellow

Yellow font or yellow fill or yellow highlight

Font Color
To change the color of the font:

1. Highlight the text you want to change to the font colour yellow.

2. On the Home tab, in the font section, click on the drop down arrow beside the A with a red line under it. The mouse note indicates it is the Font Colour. 

X is for X Delete

X is seen all over the place in MS Office and other programs. The X stands for delete.



The X is a fancy X and when it looks like the one above, it always means delete. Most prominent in Outlook. It is used to delete an email.

W is for Workbook: Excel

 W is for Workbook

An excel file is called a Workbook.

Within a Workbook can be more than one worksheet.

Think of a worksheet as a piece of paper in a pad of paper. The pad of paper is the workbook. Each piece of paper in the pad of paper is a worksheet.

Worksheets are the tabs at the bottom of the screen.

Before the 2013 version of Excel, there were always three "sheets" provided for you. You could always add more or delete the ones you didn't use.

In 2013 each workbook is created with only one worksheet.

For more information on tabs, click here for T is for Tabs

V is for View tab

Along the ribbon in MS Office programs is a tab titled View. It has many very important features.

Switch Windows
On the right side of the ribbon in the Windows section is Switch Windows. Click on it, and of the open files of the program you are in will appear in a drop down list. This allows you to switch between the files easily.

1. View | windows section
2. Switch windows.
3. Click on the file you want.

Show
The show section has three options.

U is for Underline

Underline is not used today. This may or may not be something new to you.

Years ago in the past we would use underline for titles, subtitles, heading, and words or phrases that we wanted to mark as important.
A business communication class will tell you that that is no longer correct.

The only items underlined in any document, whether in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Outlook, Google docs, etc., is a hyperlink.

Hyperlink is a link to a webpage or an email address. Those are the only items we should see underlined in any document.

Word
We can use a border to identify areas within a document such as below. The line/border goes from one margin to the other border as shown below. No lines directly under letters.

---

Excel
We use borders in Excel under headings and numbers, not underline.

T is for Tabs: Excel

Tabs allow users to have multiple pages in an Excel file.
Each tab is called a worksheet.
The whole file is called a workbook.

The tabs are located at the bottom of the Excel window.

2013
Beginning with 2013 only one tab, called Sheet1, automatically appears at the bottom. Earlier versions had three sheets.
Only one tab is nice for those of us who always deleted the unwanted sheets to make the file look neat and tidy.

S is for Small Caps

Small Caps is a formatting style for fonts. It makes all the letters capitalized but those who are not capitalized become small caps. A smaller version of capital letters.

This can be used for titles, subtitles, section titles. Since we are not supposed underline any titles according to business writing this gives us another choice.

R is for Record in Databases [Access]

Database terminology

Before starting to learn Access a knowledge of the terms in essential.

Database
A database is a collection of related data.
Examples of databases are client list, employee list and information, inventory, and students information.

Record
A record is one item in that database.
Each employee and their information is one record.
You in a telephone book is one record.
Each inventory item is a record.
If the database is listed in table format then each row of the table is a record.

Field
A field in a database is the information we store for each record.
Examples of fields in an employee database would be:
    Employee Name
    SIN
    Home Phone Number
    Cell Phone Number
    Address
    City
    Province/State
    Pay
If the database is listed in table format then each column of the table is a field.

Q is for Quick Access Toolbar

Quick Access Toolbar

For many previous versions we have been able to edit the toolbars but not many knew that was possible and it was not an easy process.

The Office 2007 was the first to provide a Quick Access Toolbar in the top left-hand corner of the screen, as shown to the right. The toolbar is still available on the 2010 and 2013 versions.

The save, undo and redo are the default icons on the toolbar.

We can add the icons of the items we use most often.

This will save you time. Items that are in dialogue boxes [several clicks to get to it] are faster to get to if they are on the Quick Access Toolbar. This is new to 2013 and beyond.

P is for Pictures Google

Insert a picture into a Google Document

Problems
Documents are more exciting with a picture.
Many documents need pictures or diagrams to enhance the information.
A logo at the top of documents is important.


1. Position cursor where you want the picture to appear within the document.

O is for Online Pictures

O is for Online pictures

Online pictures used to be ClipArt. The ClipArt was not business like. Very cheap and not well done. Microsoft has improved these and combined them with Online Pictures.

To insert a picture into a Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Outlook.
Please note the Copyright notes at the bottom.


1. Click where you want the picture to appear within your document.




2. Click the INSERT tab.


3. Click Online Pictures in the Illustrations section of the INSERT tab.

N is for New Comment

N is for New Comment in Excel

Examples of use:

a. You need to remember to check on a value, or do something in the document. Adding a comment is like putting a sticky note in that cell.

b. If you are creating a document with someone else or for someone else and they want to make comments about the document; items that they want you to change.

c. If you create a document and someone else is editing it. This gives them a way to make comments inside the document.

Note: Comments do not print.

M is for Margins: Excel

M is for Margins in Excel

1. Click on PAGE LAYOUT tab.



2. Click on Margins.

L is for Line and Paragraph Spacing

Line and Paragraph Spacing in Word

How to change the spacing between lines in a Word document.

Sometimes when writing a small letter you want to extend the letter to take up more room on the page. Adding spaces between the lines will extend the letter to take up more room.

#NoTears

1. Click on the HOME tab.

K is for Keyboard

K is for Keyboard

Qwerty

Your keyboard is a QWERTY keyboard. It gets its name from the six letters starting in the top right-hand corner of the keyboard. Q is just to the right of the Tab key. To find the rest of the word go towards the middle of the keyboard. 

Have you ever wondered why the letters are organized the way they are? Why aren't they in alphabetical order?

J is for Justify

Justify, in word processing, defines the alignment of text along the right and left borders.










Justifications are located in the paragraph section of the Home tab

I is for Indent: Excel

Indent in Excel

When creating a budget or Income Expense statement you usually have the title Income and the title Expense. Under each of these titles are the itemized items for each category.

To make the individual itemized items stand out a little bit we make the title bold and/or italic. Another way to have them stand out is to indent those cells. Looks great.

Years and years ago we would go into edit mode, hit home, hit the spacebar a couple of times and then hit enter. We would repeat this for each line we wanted indented. Today it is very easy!

#NoTears