Do you like those inspiring combinations of words and pictures you see on many social media sites?
Photo courtesy of National Archives of Canada. Children Reading Art books 1931-1959. Quote courtesy of ebookfriendly.com
You can use PowerPoint to combine pictures and words and then use the Save Ascommand. Select the JPG type. Perfect for uploading to your social media feeds. Here’s a sized for Twitter pictures I used to create the picture above. You are welcome to download and use it.
Since Excel 2007, the Filter tool has been on the Home ribbon, under the Sort and Filterdrop-down. The Filter tool can be applied to any spreadsheet where every row is a new record. Excels’ guesses about what and how to filter will be more accurate if the data has a header row. Your (human) life will be easier if you give that row a little formatting to make it stand out from the data.
If your data has gaps, select all the data (including the header row) and apply the filter. Once the filter has been applied, little triangles will appear beside each header label.
Filtering Drop-Down panel
Now you can use each header to filter the data. Click on the filter drop-down and the panel will open as you can see in the picture above. Clear the check boxes beside the entries you don’t want to see. Then click the OKbutton. You can spot filtered data, because the row headers will be bright blue (and row numbers will be missing as data is filtered out). The columns where filtering is applied will have a filter icon (circled in red in the picture).
Filtering Applied
Once the filters are in place, I can filter out blanks or filter blanks in to find openings in our social media schedule. I can quickly look for Posts and Tweets with images, to ensure the image information is present. I can filter down to a single subject. All of these filters make managing my posting schedule MUCH easier.
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
When building my Social Media spreadsheet, I want to enter my subject keywords and trigger keywords consistently. Minor typos can make it difficult to find all the relevant posts and worse; prevent scheduled posts, tweets and pins from being published on time. This is why I find the Data Validation feature in Excel so useful. As you can see in the picture above, once Data Validation is in action, my data entry is restricted to a preset list of options.
Find the Data Validation tool on the Data ribbon
Since Excel 2007, the Data Validation tool has been on the Data Ribbon. Simply select the cells you want to apply Data Validation to and press the Data Validationbutton and select Data Validation. Then the Data Validation Settingsdialogue box will appear.
Data Validation Settings
To keep the active sheet “clean”, I use a named range on another sheet as my data source (I’ve talked about that previously). Here you can see it’s called PostTypes. But you can enter short lists directly into the Source box:
Data Validation Settings
However, I find in the long run (especially for long lists) keeping the list source on another sheet makes maintenance easier.
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
As I’ve worked more with scheduling posts, tweets and pins, I’m trying to make the most of the Subject line used by Google Calendar.
Google Calendar Subject line
I’ve found that if I combine a meaningful keyword describing the post(or tweet, or pin) plus the phrase that triggers the IFTTT action, then managing the scheduled posts once they are uploaded into Google Calendar is a bit easier. It also makes it easier when I’m filtering and managing the spreadsheet too.
In my spreadsheet I use a separate column each for subject keyword and for subject trigger phrases (actually I’m paring those down to keywords too). But I want them joined together to create the actual subjects. To do this, I use the Excel CONCATENATION function. Which is most simply represented by the & symbol. In the example at the beginning of the post you can see the formula:
=B103& ” ” &C103
In this case I’m using the & symbol to join the values of cells B103 and C103 together with the string ” ” in the middle to create a nice space between words. This allows the subject phrase to be created automatically once I’ve selected the subject and trigger keywords.
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
In my Social Media spreadsheet I want to add 30 minutes to the starting time for the post. Why 30 minutes? That’s the default scheduling time in Google Calendar.
To do this, I use the TIME function. The TIME function has 3 arguments; hour, minute and seconds – all three arguments are required. So my formula would look something like this:
=F2+TIME(0,30,0)
So, I’m adding 30 minutes to the value from cell F2. Easy!
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
The latest version of PowerPoint allows you to export your presentation as an animated GIF. Animated GIFs are great for catching the eye on social media.
Redcliff Library Board Member Promotion – as an animated GIF
There are of course, lots of animated GIF sofware packages available, many are free. But none are as useful as PowerPoint when it comes to incorporating imagery that you already have on hand. Remember to keep the size of the file down, as Twitter limits animated GIF size to 5MB.
If you want a little more room or sound, remember that you can export your PowerPoint presentation as a video in mp4 format.
You notice some differences between the video and GIF versions of this little social media piece. This is to optimize file size for the animated GIF.
The beauty of creating this in PowerPoint is that it is easily accessible for updating by the client.
Like what you see? Drop me a line, and lets’ make something fantastic for your next social media promotion. A reusablesomething fantastic!
Music:
Path Of The Fireflies by AERØHEAD | https://soundcloud.com/aerohead
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
In a previous post I showed how I entered a column of repeating dates when building my Social Media spreadsheet. The next thing I like to do, is colour code those dates so that I can see at a glance when the weekend dates are. For this I use the WEEKDAY function in Excel.
Weekday Function Example
Point the WEEKDAY function at a date and it will return a number from 1 thru 7 indicating what day of the week the date is. In this case the formula reads =weekday(A2,2)
The 2 in the above formula is the return type, and here indicates that the week starts on Monday. This means that Saturday and Sunday will return values of 6 & 7.
This is perfect for using with conditional formatting.
If I plug the following formula into the conditional formatting dialog box
=(WEEKDAY(A2,2))>5
I am testing for values above 5, namely the weekend. So I can use this to put a colour fill in those dates so that they stand out.
Weekday function with Conditional Formatting
Obviously, the Results column isn’t needed because the formula is actually residing in the Edit Formatting Rule dialog box.
This is the second post discussing using Conditional formatting with a Social Media spreadsheet. Check out this previous post for another example of using conditional formatting.
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
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
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 Fillmenu on the Hometab.
Finding the Fill Series Dialog
To use the Fill Seriesdialog, 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 Fillbutton and choose Series.
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
