Quickly find and replace symbols in Word

You're almost at the end of drafting your new client's contract when you realize that you used the registration symbol (®) throughout the Microsoft Word document instead of the copyright symbol (©).

You would think you could simply go to Edit | Find and replace all instances of the ® symbol with the © symbol; unfortunately, it's not that easy.

The problem is that when the Find And Replace dialog box is open, Word's menus and toolbars are unavailable, making it difficult to find and replace symbols in your document. And, you cannot use Insert | Symbol to enter the actual symbols in the Find What: text box.

If a symbol has a shortcut key combination assigned to it, you could enter the symbol’s shortcut key in the Find What: text box but not all symbols are assigned a shortcut.

To work around this problem, follow these steps:

1. With the Find And Replace dialog box open, select the Replace tab.
2. Select an instance of the specific symbol in your document and press [Ctrl]C.
3. Put your cursor in the Find What: text box and press [Ctrl]V.
4. Select an instance of the symbol with which you want to replace the current symbol and press [Ctrl]C.
5. Put your cursor in the Replace With: text box and press [Ctrl]V.
6. Press the Replace All button and close the dialog box when all the symbols have been replaced.

This simple trick can save you loads of time when you need to make a change to the symbols in your document.

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel 2003's List feature provides you with a quick way of analyzing different views of your data. For example, suppose you have a worksheet that lists sales of three products over the last three months. You need to report on the total quarterly sales for one of those products, say Product A. After sorting the data by Product, select only the rows that pertain to Product A. Then, follow these steps:

1. Go to Data | List and choose Create List.
2. Click Toggle Total Row in the List toolbar.

A new row is appended to the list of data for Product A. You'll notice that the cells in the Total row display drop-down list arrows. To prepare your summary report for Product A, simply click on the drop- down arrow in the Sales column and select Sum.

Microsoft Access

By default, when you press [Tab] in the last field on a Microsoft Access form page, the focus moves to the first field of the next record. However, forms used mainly for data analysis, or simply to search for a specific record, should not force users to move to the next record after tabbing out of the last field. The forms should allow the user to determine where they should go next.

To set the tab stop property so that the focus moves back to the first field of the current record when [Tab] is pressed in the last field of the record, follow these steps:

1. Open the form in Design mode.
2. Double-click the form selector.
3. On the Other tab, click the Cycle property box.
4. Select Current Record.

Now you can control how Access behaves after the last tap stop.