mthomas.co.uk - IT Tips, Tricks & Tutorials

I was recently presented with an Excel file which displayed a message every time it was opened indicating that it contained links to other files. I was assured by the owner of this spreadsheet that all links had been removed.

Thanks to officearticles.com for helping me to solve the problem:

• Open the file with the problematic link in (MyFile.xls in this example).
• Save the file to a new name (like MyFile1.xls).
• Select Edit >Links and choose to link it to MyFile.xls.
• Save it and close.
• Delete MyFile.xls and rename MyFile1.xls to become MyFile.xls again.

Of course if you have Excel 2003 or later you can just select Edit > Links and there is a Break Link button in the dialog box!

In Word, selecting some text and pressing Shift+F3 will change the case of the selected text. It works on a cycle through the following - lower case , CAPITALS or Sentence Case.

Excel does not have this feature but you can select a cell and use =UPPER, =LOWER or =PROPER.

The format is =FUNCTION (CELL) where FUNCTION is the required function (upper, lower or proper) and CELL is the cell that contains the text.

For example, if A1 contains MIKE THOMAS, and in B1 you enter =PROPER(A1), B1 will contain Mike Thomas.

You can then use Copy and Paste Special / Values to copy the contents of B1 into A1, thus overwriting the original text.

I’ve used this feature many times for clients who have been given a list of, for example, names, that have been pulled off another system (say a payroll system) where the original data has been stored as capital letters.

Last year I wrote found a piece of VBA code (well I did find it but then adapted it so back to my original comment - I wrote a piece of VBA code) that split a Word mail merge output document (i.e. the one that is produced as a result of running a mail merge) into seperate files which could then be emailed to the recipients.

Well yesterday one of my colleagues asked me to dig out the code and apply it to his mail merge - and he’d make me a cup of his famous coffee if I could do it.

So 20 minutes later and with a few changes to the code, the job was done and I was sat back with a mug of steaming coffee.

And the code…You’ll find a downloadable zip file here.

“Excel.exe has generated an error” was the cry from the desk behind me. “I can’t open the file and it’ll take 2 days to get a restore”

Enter a knight in shining armour (or a least a shiny-screened MacBook). And what could Neo-Office (a FREE Office Suite) do that Excel couldn’t? Yes - it opened the supposedly corrupt Excel file. All that was missing was a few graphs - and they were easily re-creatable.

I’m not sure whether the young damsel in distress was more speechless about the recovery of her precious data or the shiny white laptop on my desk! Anyway, fact remains - Mac 1 PC 0.

Welcome to my blog. OK, so I started this blogging business in late 2007 but due to other commitments, posts were few and far between. So I thought I’d start again!

As my life revolves around IT it seemed only natural that my blog should be IT-related too.

So what will you find on here? I intend it to be a mixture of News, Reviews, TipsNTricks and Tutorials.

Enjoy!