Category: MS Office

MS Word: “An Enemy of the People”?

by admin, posted in MS Office

The Guardian’s Jason Wilson has joined has joined the large chorus of critics and commentators who have condemned Microsoft Word as a tool used by students, journalists and writers of all types. Rather grandiloquently, not to say prematurely, he has declared that “we” are winning the war on Word.

He makes some entirely reasonable points.  The success of Microsoft Word owes more to its ubiquity as a key element of the dominant MS Windows platform during the PC explosion of the late 80’s and 90’s than demonstrable advantages in design or end-user responsiveness. As a long-term Word user, I’m well-acquainted with the frustrations of “feature bloat” wherein the newer versions contain features that replicate or supersede existing features (i.e Quick Parts vs AutoText), and yet the superseded features are still retained to keep faith with existing users.  The result is that Word can seem at times an unwieldy beast that has far outgrown the needs of most writers, stacked with metadata, invisible code and largely redundant features that can distract and antagonise the average user.But the bile and invective in Wilson’s piece seems hyperbolic at best. True, Word’s intuitive features such as the (in)famous AutoCorrect and autoformat, that attempt to second-guess and interfere with the “pure” writing process, can be maddening. But they can readily be inactivated with a few moments’ attention. If this need is irksome. the Windows environment contains scaled-down, stripped back apps such as NotePad and WordPad, that surely satisfy the need for a more pure, text-based environment.  Wilson’s protestation that the inclination to search for solutions on Google, inevitably leads the writer to the myriad distractions of the internet, seems to me more of a comment firstly on of the user’s inadequate training, and secondly, frustration with their own writing process.  Word itself is a convenient, inanimate target for writers, tormented by the tyranny of the blank page, who, in a former age might have shattered their tablets on the ground, snapped their quills or consigned their parchment to the flames.

Thus, Wilson would do well to be wary of declaring “victory” in this way. Such a victory is likely to be Pyrrhic at best.

Making an Excel Page “Really” Hidden

by admin, posted in MS Office

A common gripe from many Excel users is the harm, inadvertent or otherwise, caused by workplace colleagues with whom they share their carefully constructed and designed spreadsheets.

In particular, you might well go to great lengths to set up the (confidential?) source data used by the functions and formulas in one spreadsheet. and to keep it secure, store them separately in another sheet in the same workbook. You can, of course, simply hide this sheet via a simple right-click on the sheet tab and choosing the “Hide” command.  This can be an effective strategy with many users who don’t know Excel to any great degree of sophistication, and are hence unlikely to invest much time looking for sheets that they can’t see anyway and of whose very existence they are unaware.

Problem is, any mildly curious or relatively “savvy” colleague can easily “unhide” the sheet via the same simple pathway used to hide it i.e right-mouse click. Thus, this is not by any means a secure means of hiding a sheet and hence might mayhem, and in extreme cases, fisticuffs ensue.

However, despair ye not, Excel brethren.  For the truly savvy, there exists a more impregnable way to make a sheet “really” hidden; a method far less likely to be rumbled by inquisitive workmates.  It involves going “backstage” In Excel and visiting the Code window, again by right-clicking the intended sheet tab and selecting the “View Code” command.  You might imagine that this environment might necessitate a knowledge of the arcane world of VisualBasic programming, but happily, no such knowledge is required.  The Code window should display two window panes on its right-hand side – the Project Explorer and the Properties pane. (If it does not,these panes are easily available via the View menu.)

In the Properties pane, you will find a comprehensive, alphabetic list of the current sheet’s properties, the last of which is  “Visible”. The menu on its immediate right contains three choices, the last of which rejoices in the name “VeryHidden”,  (By the way, the second option”Hidden” is equivalent to the “Hide” command on the right-click menu.)  If you choose “VeryHidden” in this menu, the sheet tab will disappear from normal view, and the “Unhide” command on the usual right-click menu will also be greyed out and hence unavailable.  Therefore, this particular stratagem is far more secure than the aforementioned default “Hide”command.

Of course, the obvious loophole is that another suitably savvy Excel user could also reverse-engineer this method. But you might consider that while another user could randomly discover the default “Unhide” command, the average user is far less likely to know about the Code window and the “VeryHidden” property.  By this means might you better safeguard your crucial spreadsheets from your colleagues’ sabotage, be it inadvertent or deliberate.