I use Microsoft Office 2008 on my work laptop. Whilst I am no touch typist; I wish I could take the productivity hit whilst I learn, I do prefer to use the keyboard for most functions, growling when I have to resort to using the mouse.
I was torn by the ribbon interface; for 80% of the things that i want to do i can find it very quickly, the remaining 20% often required a trip to help to find it. Another thing that I hated was that I “had” to use the mouse to access the ribbon features.
Then I pressed the “Alt” key !!!!!!!
This pops up an overlay on top of the ribbon interface that shows you which key to press to access each feature. Or should I say, EVERY feature. If you can see it on the ribbon, you can access it via a keystroke. I’m beginning to like this user interface.
The remaining bugbear is that I always use styles, nost commonly the heading styles and normal. In the previous version of Word I always assigned my own keystroke shortcuts to access them, but I was always over riding exisiing keystrokes and features.
In Word 2007 I have found that there are system assigned keystrokes:
Ctrl + Alt + 1 = Heading 1
Ctrl + Alt + 2 = Heading 2
etc
Strl + Shift + N = Normal
Productive typing here I come !
Had a “strange” problem last week that really stumped me for longer than it should have.
My colleague had run a query to list some data and was getting approximately 200,000 rows back. We were investigating why a unique constraint was being violated so I took his query and did a count distinct to try and find the duplicates. I got 30,000 distinct values.
This really confused me, I was expecting only a handfull of duplicates, if any. Then I noticed that the first query already WAS a distinct list !
select distinct col1_id, col2_id from tablea
select count(distinct col1_id + ‘-’ + col2_id) from tablea
I concatenated the fields together so I am counting a single field, I included the separator so that I could differentiate 1-11 from 11-1.
See if you can spot what the problem is before you read on.
Read the rest of this entry »
I have had office 2007 on my laptop for ages now. Like everyone I am still using the “old” file formats until the rest of the world catches up. On the whole I have been impressed by the ribbon interface.
I have just found my first major annoyance. Freeze Panes. You now have three options: Freeze Panes, Freeze Top Row and Freeze First Column. Freeze Panes works exactly the same as it did in previous versions, no problem there. I can just continue to use that option.
The problem is with Freeze Top Row; this option freezes the top row that is shown on the screen not the top row of the sheet. I know that’s what it does, it’s just that, it’s not what I expect it to do, and I can’t stop myself from clicking it !
