microsoft: 2009-03-08

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Daily Tips and Tricks Special Delivery

Making tomorrow more productive than today

Generating an Efficient Frontier
You can assess your selected project portfolio against the Efficient Frontier. (Note: These steps assume you have already run an optimization scenario.) Here's how:
1. Right-click an optimization scenario, and then click Insight Analysis from the Advanced Analysis commands.
2. Wait while the Efficient Frontier is generated.
3. Analyze the constraints (in the right panel) that are prohibiting the portfolio from reaching the Efficient Frontier.

Quickly Switching to Inbox or Outbox
To jump to your Inbox, press CTRL+SHIFT+I. To jump to your Outbox, press CTRL+SHIFT+O.

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Friday, March 13, 2009

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Daily Tips and Tricks Special Delivery

Use Conditional Formatting to Highlight Data Trends
Conditional formatting can help you highlight trends in your data. First, either open a fully populated Microsoft Office Excel file, or start with an empty document and fill its cells with some values. To apply conditional formatting:
1. Click the Conditional Formatting button on the Home tab of the Ribbon.
2. On the menu that appears, try selecting Data Bars, Icon Sets, or Color Scales and pause over the options. Your data is partitioned according to the rules you set, and it instantly displays visual cues that will aid understanding of the data.
3. If you don't like the options available, you can create your own rules, use your own colors, and establish your own thresholds. Better still, you can reuse your rules each time for consistent and clear presentation. All of these options are available on the Conditional Formatting menu.

Insert Pictures
To insert a picture in your notes, click Insert, click Pictures, and then click either From Files or From Scanner or Camera.

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Thursday, March 12, 2009

[+/-]

Daily Tips and Tricks Special Delivery

Multiple Level Undo, Change Highlighting, and Task Drivers
In Microsoft Office Project Professional, project managers can visualize the effects of changes and trace back their steps. To turn the Change Highlighting feature on or off, click the View menu, and then click Hide Change Highlighting or Show Change Highlighting. While the feature is enabled, all levels of tasks affected as a result of a change are highlighted with a color as a visual indicator. By using this feature together with the Multiple Level Undo feature, project managers can do what-if analyses by trying a set of changes and then reversing unwanted changes.

If further analysis of a task's schedule is needed, the project manager can use Task Drivers on the Project menu to determine the factors—such as task dependency, calendar constraints, schedule date, or vacation time—that are driving a task's start date.

Search All Folders in a Mailbox
You can set Microsoft Office Outlook to automatically search across all your folders at once. Here's how:
In Outlook, click Tools, click Options, and then click Search Options on the Preferences tab. In the Search Options dialog box, if you click All folders, you can search all folders instead of just the selected one.