22nd January 2002

Word is wonderful. PowerPoint is powerful. Outlook is outlandish. Yes, there are a few free "office" productivity applications out there, but everyone seems to compare them to Microsoft's suite. Excel is excellent, too. To launch it, you can enter "EXCEL" in the Start Menu's Run field (tap WinKey+R for quicker access). The last time you created a chart from some range of numbers, did you step through the wizard (by pressing the appropriate icon)? Next time, highlight the section and tap F11. No muss, no fuss. You can always go back and tweak the graphic's format if it's not to your liking (right-click on the newly-created chart and select the "Chart Type" option). Now, let's say you want to create a range of numbers without putting forth much effort. Start by entering something into a cell - let's go with "27" right now. Select the cell, depress the CTRL key, hover over the lower-right corner of the cell until you see the cursor change into a big plus sign with a little plus sign. Now, click and drag vertically or horizontally. Down or right will increase your initial number; up or left will decrease it. You'll have effectively created a range of scaled numbers. Run through the same task without the CTRL key to merely copy the initial cell's contents.