Technology made practical for home
Latest Windows
10 features
Managing “choppy”
justified text in Word eLearning sites for
students (young & old)
Customizing Excel
Chart Elements
Use the Operating
System better with the
The Chart Styles (Paintbrush) menu lets you quickly change the format of your chart, from a bar chart to a different chart type. You can also select color themes using the color tab. The Values (Funnel) menu allows you to select (or deselect) the data values used in the chart. Just check the boxes of values you want or uncheck those you don’t.
The Chart Elements (Plus Sign) menu contains a list of the major chart elements that you can add or modify. To add an element to your chart, click the Chart Elements button to display an alphabetical list of all the elements, Axes through Trendline. To add an element, select the element’s check box. To remove an element, uncheck it.
To add or remove just part of a specific element or, as with the Chart Title, Data Labels, Data Table, Error Bars, Legend, and Trendline, select the desired option on the element’s continuation menu (the arrow on the right). For example, to reposition Chart Title, click the continuation button and select from Above Chart or Centered Overlay Title to reposi- tion the chart title.
When you select More Options, a Format Chart Title task pane will display on the right side of the window where you can use the Fill & Line, Effects, and Size and Prop-
erties buttons under Title Options along with Text Fill & Outline, Text Effects, and the Textbox buttons under Text Options. You can modify almost any aspect of the title format. In Excel 2016 the Chart Elements, Style and Values buttons (the plus sign, paint brush and
funnel icons) display on the right of a selected chart. These buttons allow you to manage and modify the elements of any chart. For this exercise, build a worksheet as shown, select the data and create a bar chart. Now click on the chart to see the tool icons.
Excel has excellent standard charts that can be
quickly created from the Charts area of the Insert tab.
You simply highlight the cells containing the chart
data and pick a chart type for your new chart. But
sometimes what you get isn’t quite what you want.
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Customizing Excel
Chart Elements
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Use the Windows Taskbar
to improve productivity
Move your Taskbar
To move the Taskbar to a different location on your screen, right-click it and uncheck the Lock All Taskbars option. You can now click and drag the Taskbar to the top or sides of your desktop. Some of us prefer the taskbar at the top, but consider moving it to the right side and making it larger than normal.
The Taskbar on your Windows desktop has seen signif-
icant changes over the years and today there are many
ways to use it to be more efficient in PC computing. The
taskbar can reduce search time —to reach apps, set-
tings and websites—and cut your mouse clicks in half.
Use the Taskbar to do more than open apps or find out what time it is. Make it look the way you like, manage a calendar, pin your favorite apps, or move the taskbar to where you want it to display. You can even specify how the taskbar buttons group together. Let’s look at customizing taskbar features to help improve workflow and productivity.
Create More Space.
If you use the Taskbar a lot, you can clean it up and create more space. The Cortana search box takes up
space and you can shrink it or hide it complete- ly. You can also hide the Task View button, unpin icons you rarely use or hide system icons in the notification area. Click or right-click areas to clean up or delete.
The Data Labels option labels the data points used to graph the data. Check this and select its continuation menu to see numerous ways to position and format the data labels, including Data Callout, which establishes a callout box for each data point. Check More Options to open the Format Data Labels task pane for Excel formatting tools.
Sometimes data labels can cover data in the chart. To move these, simply select an the label and move it out of the way (a line will connect the data to the point it references). In some charts, you can select the Chart Elements Data Table continuation menu, then More Options. Checking the Leg- end Key will put a data table at the chart’s bottom.
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Enable Desktop Peek.
If you have many windows open but just want to get a quick look at what’s on your desktop, hover your mouse in the lower-right of the Taskbar—all the way to the right. To enable this in the latest Windows 10, right-click the Taskbar, select Settings and if necessary, Taskbar settings on the left. On the right, turn on the Peek option.
Taskbar Settings.
While Microsoft has moved most of the Taskbar options to the new Settings app, you can quickly view them by going to Settings, selecting Personalization, then Taskbar. A series of simple switches will turn the Taskbar features on or off or you can automatically hide the Taskbar, make it smaller, clear the Jump List, manage multiple displays, and more.
Create and View Calendar Events.
Windows 10 now lets you easily view and create calendar events using the date and time Taskbar notification. Click the clock/time area on the taskbar to see the basic calendar. Click the
+
icon to add events or click on a specific date to see what you have noted for that day, including any Cortana Reminders. Pin websites to the Taskbar.If there are websites you regularly visit, you can add them to the Taskbar for a one-click launch. In Microsoft Edge, open the site you want, select Options (the …) and then Pin this page to the taskbar. You can pin Pandora, Outlook.com, or The Oxford English Dictionary to the taskbar and they work like web apps. Bring back the Quick Launch Bar.
The old Quick Launch bar is not included in Windows 10, but you can add it by right-clicking an empty area on the Taskbar, selecting Toolbars, then New Toolbar. Copy and paste %appda- ta%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch into the address bar, and click Select Folder. It will now appear in the Taskbar.
Pin apps to the Taskbar.
Pin, or unpin any application to the Taskbar for quick access. You can do this from Start or the Jump List (the list of short- cuts to recently opened files and folders). Right-click the app and then click More and select Pin to taskbar. To unpin any app on the Taskbar, click Unpin from taskbar.
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To add applications to the Startup folder, click the Windows Key + R to bring up the Run dialog. Type: shell:startup and click OK. Now go back to the Run dialog and type: shell:apps- folder and click OK. You should have both the Applications and Startup folder open. You can now easily drag applica- tions directly to the Start Up folder.
Select an application you want to automatically open at Start Up and drag it from the Applications folder to the Startup folder. Windows will create a shortcut for each app you drag in. If you have an app that isn’t in the Applications folder, find it, create a shortcut for it, and drag the shortcut to the Startup folder.
In this way you can add shortcuts to files, folders, and web- sites to the Startup folder. If you work in a Word document every day, right-click the file, create a shortcut and drag it over to the Startup folder. When you’re finished adding items, close the Startup folder. The next time you boot your PC these apps and files will launch automatically.
You can set items to launch minimized or full-screen by right-clicking the shortcut and selecting Properties. Then, under the Shortcut tab, change the Run drop-down to what you want. While adding start up items will slow down your boot time, you won’t have to launch them by hand (which takes longer). Delete these start up items at by selecting them, right-clicking and deleting.
Startup
Folder Applications
Folder
Opening applications and files after you start up your PC adds another layer of time and mouse clicks to your daily routine. Wouldn’t it be nice to launch them and have them ready to use when you start up?
Here’s how add these items to your Startup menu so they’re ready to use as fast as your machine can start.
We all have applications, files, or folders that we use
nearly every day: the household budget; a primary
scheduling calendar; or a critical to-do list that needs
to be addressed and updated. You can save time by
launching these files or apps—automatically—at Start Up.
Launch apps or files
(automatically) at Start Up
First, review your text. Be sure you have no unnecessary hard spaces or hard hyphens as these force Word to treat adjacent words as a single item, creating awkward end-of-line adjust- ments. Replace them with regular spaces and hyphens. Turn on the ¶ function on the Home tab to see these better or use Find and Replace to clean these up.
Turning on hyphenation or doing manual hyphenation on offending lines will also reduce awkward line breaks. To turn on hyphenations, type “hyphenation” in the Tell me what you want to do area. Select the Automatic or Manual options, then review the Hyphenation Options. You can automatically hyphenate the entire document and limit the number of hyphens in consecutive lines.
You should use a font size to suit to your line length, or vice versa. Larger fonts need longer lines for smooth spacing; smaller fonts can better justify on shorter lines. With these techniques completed, you can now format the actual text. Select the text being justified, right-click it and open the font dialog box (Font…). Now click the Advanced tab.
In the Character Spacing group, you can set the Scale to 98% to make the letters thinner and put more characters on each line. If this doesn’t create better spacing, select 97% or even lower. These are small adjustments in the width of font letters and most readers won’t notice. However, the effect on your text flow can be dramatic, especially for long paragraphs.
Managing “choppy”
justified text in Word
When you justify text in Word, you may not get the
best results. Depending on the text characteristics
you may have lines of too few words, or just a general
“choppiness.” There are techniques to make justified text
look good and be more readable.
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When you justify text in Word, the software expands the text on each line by adding space between words and letters. This can result in very odd-looking text if the number of characters per line is too low and you’ll need to make some adjustments to get better-looking text. Here are some options to “smooth” out your text.
STEP 3
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Ransomware protection. Ransomware is everywhere and it’s difficult to stop. A new feature in Windows Defender called Controlled Folder Access prevents programs from making any change to files or folders that are set as protected. This includes system folders, documents and other media. Con- figure Controlled Folder Access in the Virus & threat protection area of the Windows Defender Security Center.
Deep PC & phone integration. Microsoft is keeping it’s promise to make PCs and phones work better together. If you have an Android phone, a new Phone section in the Settings app allows you to push websites and files from your Android to your PC. You can see your texts on your PC and reply to them from within Windows.
Troubleshooting. The latest Windows 10 added a helpful touch for distressed PC users. The operating system has consolidated all of its troubleshooting tools in a single location. If you run into a problem, click the Start menu and type “Troubleshoot”. You will immediately be directed to the central Troubleshoot menu to select your problem area and, hopefully, fix it.
Spatial sound. Windows Sonic for Headphones can make the audio signals coming from your headset more atmospheric and pleasing, especially if you have a high-quality headphone. Right-click the speaker icon in the system tray and click Spatial sound. From the drop-down menu, select Windows Sonic for Headphones and apply. On some headsets you may hear little difference in quality, but it’s worth a try.
New features and tweaks to Windows 10 arrive twice a year.
Some of these features unlock system functionality and
others let you control the Windows 10 interface to
make it work the way you want. Here are some of
the most useful new features.
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Latest Windows 10 features
In the January 2018 Upskill issue, we covered two of these new Windows 10 features: the Night Light that blocks blue light at night so you can sleep better; and the ability to pin individual Settings (or applications, files and folders) to the Windows Start menu. Here are a few more new features to help make your computing experience more productive.
Convert a PDF to Excel
When you receive a PDF document with
data charts or spreadsheets you would
like to use in Excel, it will save time and
frustration to simply convert that PDF
document to an Excel spreadsheet.
However, this can be a challenge.
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If the PDF is made from scanned images of text, you could print and re-scan the document into an RTF file—then convert it to a text file and bring it into Excel, but what a lot of work. Thankfully, there are several ways you can get Excel data from a PDF file that don’t take a lot of time and effort on your part.
If you have one of the latest versions of Adobe Acrobat, like Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, you can export the PDF file to an Excel format. With the PDF open, click Tools, then Export PDF and select Spreadsheet in the export options. There are several other PDF readers that will export directly to an Excel spreadsheet. Here are a couple.
A-PDF is a free PDF program, but only extracts text. If you only need text from a PDF, or are confident you can place text into Excel, give it a try. The A-PDF to Excel version is relatively inexpensive and is a fast way to extract and con- vert any PDF data (like an invoice or statement) to an Excel document or CSV file format. See a-pdf.com.
The CometDocs desktop app works in The Cloud and con- verts PDFs with just a few clicks. Right-click on any docu- ment to see the file conversion options for that document type. Once you have chosen your conversion option, the file will be automatically converted and downloaded to your computer. You can also convert files in The Cloud and store them. See cometdocs.com.
The tools above can also export a PDF to a Word document. Getting a file into Word can often make editing and remov- ing extraneous characters easier. When you’re done cleaning up, copy the text from the Word document and paste it into an Excel worksheet. Remember, when you use any conver- sion program, you’ll want to double check the spreadsheet that is created.
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Text-to-speech (TTS) lets computers use written text to provide spoken words. Depending on configuration and installed TTS engines, you can hear most of what appears on your screen in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote. If you’re using the English version of Office, the English TTS en- gine is automatically installed. You must reset your language to use text-to-speech in a different language.
To use Speak, we’ll add it to the Quick Access Toolbar. These instructions will work for Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote. At the top of the Ribbon, click the arrow next to the Quick Access Toolbar and select More Commands. In the Choose commands from list, select All Commands, then scroll down to the Speak command. Select it, click Add, then OK.
[email protected] | upskillhub.com The available digitized voices aren’t dramatic, but they work well when you want a break from reading out loud yourself. It’s not obvious how Speak is enabled, but a simple trick can turn Microsoft Word into a convenient document reader, and there are third-party apps can read text pasted into them. Here’s how to set up Speak in Word.
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After you have added the Speak command to the Quick Access Toolbar, you can quickly hear single words or blocks of text read aloud. Select the text you want to hear and then click the Speak icon (the “speech bubble” with an arrow) all the way to the right. If you have text with foreign language words, they will likely be mispronounced.
Having text read aloud provides a better PC user experi- ence for people with learning disabilities, visual impair- ments or those who have literacy difficulties. Speak is particularly useful for people who speak a language but do not yet read that language. For the rest of us, just listening to content instead of reading it lets us do something else at the same time.
