OneNote: Stop Automatically Inserting Long Printouts on Multiple Pages

OneNote 2013 has the ability to automatically insert printouts onto multiple pages for you. It's a handy new feature that could be useful in some situations, but for me it's just not a setting that I like. If you want to stop OneNote from doing this automatically and to get it to ask you each time whether you would like it on one or multiple different pages, just follow these steps:

1. Click on the 'File' tab on the ribbon, and then choose 'Options'.
2. In the 'OneNote Options' window that will appear, choose 'Advanced' from the menu on the left.
3. Scroll down to the bottom. The second-last option is 'Insert long printouts on multiple pages'. Clear the checkmark from this box.

Word: Use Directory Grouping Features in Letter Mail Merge

This post is about an interesting problem that came to me by e-mail about a mail merge problem in Microsoft Word.

Someone from a training company wanted to send out summary data about in-progress courses to every student by e-mail. As every message would require a number of different records, it seemed logical to use the 'Directory' option. That wasn't a good solution, however, as the sender wanted to be able to use the e-mail integration features of the 'Letter' option. Here's how to use some 'Directory' features using 'Letters'.

1- Start a mail merge document using the 'Letters' option, and set up everything in your letter (including the data source).

2 - Go to the Insert Field dialog box (not a mail merge field, but just the regular fields) and choose 'Database' from the categories. Click on the 'Insert Database' button.

3 - Click on the 'Get Data' button, and choose the same data source that you used for your mail merge.

4 - Click on the 'Query Options...' button. Go to the Select Fields tab and make sure the right-hand list contains only those fields that you want to see in the table.

5 - Click on the 'Filter Records' button, and set up a criteria for the UserID field to be 'Equal to' arealuserid (choose any existing UserID and put it here - you will change this later, so it doesn't matter which one you pick). Click the 'OK' button.

6 - Click on the 'Insert Data...' button, and place a checkmark in the 'Insert data as field' checkbox. Click the 'OK' button.

7 - Now you should be back in your document, and you'll see a table there that shows the records for the UserID you chose. Press Alt+F9, and you'll be able to see the field codes. It will probably look like a mess. That's a good thing.

8 - Look right near the bottom of all of that code, and you will see a SELECT statement. In this statement, highlight where you had entered a random UserID, and now go up to your toolbar and insert the UserID mail merge field. What you're doing is setting the criteria to be equal to whichever UserID is currently being used for the mail merge. Make sure you keep the single quotes around the mail merge field and are only replacing the actual UserID.

9 - At this point, you might want to hit Alt+F9 again to stop seeing all of that code. Try to finish your mail merge, and you should see separate tables for each individual letter.

Happy New Year!

It's been a while, hasn't it? I'm excited to announce that tomorrow I will have a shiny new post for you all. In the meantime, I just want to wish you all a very happy New Year! 2012 brought us some very exciting advancements in technology, and I'm excited to see what 2013 has in store for us.

To my fellow Microsoft Office addicts, please note that I am now using Microsoft Office 2013 and therefore my screenshots might look a bit odd to you if you're using earlier versions. As always, I am tagging my posts with the version of Office that I'm using because I don't maintain my older posts.

Keep the e-mails coming, I love to get your questions and feedback.

Visio: Increase the Number of Times You Can Undo Actions

By default, you can use the 'Undo' button up to 20 times in a row in Microsoft Visio. After that, you're out of luck. If you're like me though, and enjoy being able to time travel a bit more, you're going to want to change that setting to the highest number possible.

To change the setting, go to the 'File' tab, and then click 'Options'. In the 'Visio Options' window that will appear, choose 'Advanced' from the menu on the left. Now, in the first section, 'Editing Options', the 11th option from the top is 'Maximum number of undos'. Go ahead and change the number in the listbox to any number that is equal to or less than 99.

You could also reduce the number of times that you can undo actions, but why would you want to do that? The only real advantage is that it reduces the amount of extra data sitting in memory... but that shouldn't be too much of an issue unless you're using an ancient computer.

In any case, it's up to you - and you're free to change it any time you feel like it. Happy drawing!

OneNote for Android

It’s been a few months now since Microsoft released their official OneNote app for Android, and I’ve finally taken the time to install it on my Samsung Galaxy S II. Why did it take me so long? Well, you can probably see from the lack of frequent posting lately that I’ve been a bit busy.

In any case, the app is fantastic. If you’ve read my previous post about how much I love OneNote, then you might not be surprised to find out how excited I am about the mobile version. Between university, my full-time job, and a handful of side projects, I keep pretty busy and I’m often on the go. Being able to access my notes from any device I happen to have on hand makes keeping up with my studies very easy to manage.
Setting it up was a breeze, as my phone immediately knew to connect to my SkyDrive account and to give me access to my notebooks that are stored there. I was happy to see a setting that forced synchronization to only happen when connected through Wi-Fi.

Given the freeform nature of notes, I was really curious to see how the app would display them on my phone. I have a lot of images and handwritten items scattered throughout, and I play around with different widths for my text boxes. Unfortunately, the handwritten items aren’t visible, but the app does a really clean job of displaying the text and images on the screen in a way that doesn’t have me zooming and panning like crazy.

It’s certainly not as rich in features as the client version or the Web app, but I give it top marks for having a simple interface and for bringing my notebooks to my phone.

If you’re late to the party like me and haven’t yet given it a shot, go check it out on Google Play. The first 500 notes are free, which will give you the chance to play around with it and decide whether or not you want to fork over some money for unlimited use.

Excel: Hide the Contents of a Cell

Trying to hide the contents of a cell by simply changing the fill colour of the cell and then matching the font colour so that it blends in perfectly is sometimes an acceptable solution, but you can run into problems when you start highlighting cells or applying conditional formatting. Something like adding in row striping can cause any cell values that you've tried to hide to suddenly be revealed.

Yes, there's a more elegant way to hide the contents of cells. You can do it without messing around with the font and fill colours, and you can do it without hiding entire rows or columns.

First, select the cell or range of cells that you would like to hide. Right-click and choose 'Format Cells...'. Now, make sure you're in the 'Number' tab of the 'Format Cells' window that pops up. From the list on the left hand side, choose the very last option, 'Custom'. Now, to the right hand side of the window, type in three semicolons in the 'Type' text box. It should look like this:



Click the 'OK' button when you're done, and you'll see all of the values of the cells that you selected will have disappeared.

How does it work?

Custom number formats allow you to choose how you’d like the contents of a cell to be displayed. There are four different sections to a number format: positive numbers, negative numbers, zero values, and finally text values. When you specify a custom number format, you separate these different sections with a semi-colon. I’m not going to go into detail about how to set different number formats in today’s post, but the reason why the values are hidden when you enter ‘;;;’ as a number format is because you’ve told Excel to show nothing for positive numbers, nothing for negative numbers, nothing for zero values, and nothing for text values. The result is a cell that looks completely empty despite containing a value.