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Tag Archive for Microsoft Excel

Mystery of the Disappearing Watermark

Originally, watermarks were faintly visible images or impressions manufactured into paper that identified its maker and/or quality. Today we use digital watermarks to provide an indelible message or identifier on electronic documents. Watermarks are useful because they are subtle and integrate with the contents of the document page. If you simply type the word “Confidential” in a page header or footer, the word can be digitally removed. However, if you apply a watermark of the word “Confidential” as the background on document pages, removing this classification becomes virtually impossible.

You can add a watermark to the pages of an Excel worksheet by inserting a picture field in the center section of the page Header. Sometimes, however, the watermark does not display in Print Preview or when the document is printed. You confirm that the picture field (&[Picture]) is in the page Header, so why doesn’t the watermark appear on the page?
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Contemplating Templates

January 17, 2012 / C. Blaise Mitsutama / Comments Off

Have you ever seen a child about to put something in his mouth? His mother rushes to stop him and says, “Don’t put that in your mouth. You don’t know where it’s been.”

I feel the same way about using old documents as the starting point for new projects. It’s tempting to use a document with existing text, formatting, images, and other components to reduce the work required to create a document from scratch. But no matter how clean a document looks, it can contain hidden problems that add time and cost to a project. Similar problems can occur when multiple authors work on the same file because each author may have different, possibly incompatible, ways of achieving a desired look-and-feel.

You can, and should, still use templates for efficient document production, and here are some suggestions to help you decide what works best.
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Print-to-PDF Doesn’t Work. What?!

January 15, 2012 / C. Blaise Mitsutama / Comments Off

Adobe® Acrobat®’s printer driver is frequently used to print files to PDF format. Usually, this is a reliable, quick, and easy way to create PDF files. Every so often, however, the resulting PDF just isn’t right. Text may wrap incorrectly around an image in Microsoft Word or may overlap a neighboring cell in Microsoft Excel, as shown in the figure below.

There is a relatively simple solution.
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Finding Commands on the Ribbon in Office 2007 and Office 2010

January 9, 2012 / C. Blaise Mitsutama / Comments Off

While many users of Microsoft Office have finally come to terms with the Ribbon interface, it can still be a challenge to find commands that you don’t use often or that have been moved to new locations. Okay, I agree that an ideal software interface should not require a tool to help you find commands, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint do have a lot of commands. On top of that, a command may not be called what you think it should be called. Like regional differences in naming (e.g., “soda” vs. “pop”), if you come from a different software environment or from different industries, the feature names that Microsoft chose may not be what you’d expect.
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