Where'd they hide that thing?

Wondering where your favorite Word 2003 commands are located in the new Word 2010 interface? Or just want to explore the rich, new design with a little guidance?

... rest the mouse pointer over a Word 2003 menu or button to learn its new location in Word 2010. To see an animation of the location of the command or button in Word 2010, just click it.

Labels: General, Reference, Ribbon, Tips

Edit toolbar

You'll many times want to change blocks of code to comments in VBA modules; temporarily convert a block of VBA code to comments so that it's ignored during a trial run. Inserting an apostrophe before each line of code is a bother. Office 2000+ simplifies this task by letting you convert a block of code to comments with a click of a button.

Open any module in the Visual Basic Editor (VBE), and then choose View>Toolbars and choose Edit from the menu bar to display the Edit toolbar.

Select the lines of code that you want to turn into comments. Then, click the Comment Block button on the Edit toolbar (it's the sixth button in from the RIGHT end of the toolbar).
Each line of the selected code is now preceded with an apostrophe.

To convert the comments back to executable code, select the appropriate lines and click the Uncomment Block button, which is immediately to the right of the Comment Block button.
This, of course, works in any application that uses the VBE.

It's been suggested that two or three apostrophes (sometimes called inverted commas) be placed around existing comments. When the Comment Block is used, the original comments will not be removed.

See all Topics excel

Labels: VBA

Ways to look closer

Professional statisticians typically have powerful software at their disposal to perform advanced analyses and create slick graphs. But many professionals in the quality field don't enjoy that luxury.

Faced with a limited budget, they must be resourceful with the software they already have. Besides, not everyone needs the capability to perform nonlinear regression with custom loss functions for maximum likelihood!

Fortunately, many occasional data analysts already own a versatile software capable of providing most basic quality analyses -- Microsoft Excel.

• Shewhart control charts
  
  
• Pareto charts
  
  
• Simple box-and-whisker plots

See all Topics excel

Labels: Charts, Customize, General, Tips, Tutorials

When to use one or the other

Use Access when you:

• Require a relational database (multiple tables) to store your data.
  
  
• Might need to add more tables, in the future, to an originally flat or nonrelational data set.
  
  
• Keep a very large amount of data (thousands of entries).
  
  
• Keep data that is mostly text.
  
  
• Rely on multiple external databases to derive and analyze the data that you need.
  
  
• Need to maintain constant connectivity to a large external database, such as one built by using Microsoft SQL Server.
  
  
• Want to run complex queries.
  
  
• Need many people working in the database and you want robust options that expose that data for updating.

Use Excel when you:

• Require a flat or nonrelational view of your data (that is, you do not need a relational database with multiple tables).
  
  
• This is especially true if that data is mostly numeric - for example, if you want to maintain a financial budget for a given year.
  
  
• Want to run primarily calculations and statistical comparisons on your data - for example, if you want to show a cost/benefit analysis in your company's budget.
  
  

See all Topics excel

Labels: General