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January 2023 Teaching Schedule

 Foxit: PDF Editor Medicine Hat College Continuing Studies
January 18-19, 2023

When Adobe moved to a subscription model for all its products, other businesses moved in to offer their stand alone software. One of those products is Foxit’s PDF Editor. What is PDF Editor Software? With a PDF Editor you can edit the contents of a PDF; changing text and images, reordering and deleting pages, create forms, add and update headers and footers, add and update watermarks, assemble new PDF documents from multiple sources, and redact documents. There is a lot you can do with a PDF editor, so much that it required a TWO day course to cover it all.

Microsoft Excel: Formulas and Functions Medicine Hat College Continuing Studies
January 27, 2023

Need to feel more confident about building formulas and using common Excel functions? Try this one day course. Among other topics, you’ll learn about absolute and relative references.

This course will also run in June.

 

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Upcoming Course Trailer

I’ll be teaching the Formulas and Functions course at Medicine Hat College for Continuing Studies on Friday, January 28, 2022.

Absolute and Relative References are just one of the topics we’ll cover that day.

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Get More From PowerPoint with the Medicine Hat Chamber of Commerce

Join me in this webinar, hosted by the Medicine Hat Chamber of Commerce

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “Zoom Fatigue”. The trailer above is one way to combat fatigue. Creating trailers for your presentations allow you to shorten the presentation by introducing information ahead of time. Like a movie trailer; your talk trailer tells your audience what to expect and allows you to cut your talk time down.

And why limit yourself to a single trailer? For longer and more complex materials, you might want to create multiple trailers that can prepare your audience properly for your talk.

Creating your trailer in PowerPoint allows you to easily reuse elements in future trailers. This saves time and strengthens your brand presence.  You can bet I’ll be reusing the little animated stars on this slide that act as an attention getter for keywords.

Showing elements to be reused.
These little purple star animations pull the eye to key words

Like the idea of saving time? Drop me a line, and lets’ make something fantastic for your next presentation. A reusable something fantastic!

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Excel: Sequential Dates in Multiples

The Fill Series Dialog

When I’m setting up my Social Media spreadsheet in Excel, I like to limit the number of scheduled Facebook entries per day. Over time, I’ve come to think that 4 Facebook entries per day is a reasonable maximum. This lets the librarian post “live” when things are happening in the library without clogging up our follower’s feeds.

So I want to create a column of dates that looks like this:

Each date is repeated 4 times
Each date is repeated 4 times

The quickest way to do this with minimal typing is to use the Fill Series dialog box. Since Excel 2007, you can find it under the Fill menu on the  Home tab.

Finding the Fill Series Dialog
Finding the Fill Series Dialog

To use the Fill Series dialog, select the range of cells you want your dates to be entered in. Make sure the first cell in the range has the starting date. Then select the  Fill button and choose Series .

The Fill Series Dialog
The Fill Series Dialog

Enter a  Step value. In this case, because I want 4 repeats of each date I’m using .25 as the Step value. If I wanted 5 repeats, I’d use .20 (and so on).

If you don’t feel like calculating how many cells to select when doing this for a date range that spans a couple of months; try using a  Stop value . With a  Stop Value, the series will stop at the first instance of the date entered into the field. Otherwise, the series will fill the entire selected range. ( In the picture above the full date is not displayed in the field, it was actually 06/01/2016.) Using a <em><strong>Stop Value</strong> </em>allows you to make a rough selection (say 500 cells) and Excel will stop when the series runs its’ course.

This post is originally from 2016, however Filling a series is still as useful in 2020 as it was then.

If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca