Computer Mentor – Healthy Computer

Posts Tagged ‘computer software’

In this article, we will look at Excel selection techniques which involve using the mouse in conjunction with the keyboard. One of the easiest and most useful is click followed by Shift-click. This is particularly handy for highlighting large ranges of data since it allows you to simply click on two opposite corners of the rectangular range of cells which you want to select. To perform this technique, first click in the top left cell of the range you want to select. Next, make sure that the bottom right cell of the proposed range is visible. Finally, holding down the Shift key, click in the bottom right cell. All the cells between the two clicks will then be highlighted.

Whenever new cells are inserted into a worksheet, existing cells have to shift in order to make room to the newly inserted cells. When you insert entire rows or columns, the direction in which data will be moved is predetermined. If you insert an entire column, existing data is shifted to the right. If you insert an entire row, any existing data is shifted down. However, when you insert cells rather than entire rows or columns, Excel will always ask you in which direction we want the existing data to be shifted: to the right or down.

To insert a row of cells, begin by selecting the cells above which you would like the new cells inserted then choose Home – Cells – Insert – Insert Cells. Excel will then display a dialogue box asking you to specify what to do with the existing data and, naturally, you should choose “Down”. When you click OK, the existing data moves down and a range of cells is inserted matching the size as the range that was highlighted.

When formatting text within an Excel worksheet, you have the choice of working at the cell level or at the text level. If you wish to work at the cell level you simply highlight one or more cells and choose your format settings. Any formatting that you choose will then apply to all text within the cell or cells.

For example, if you wish to change the font size of your data in Microsoft Excel, you can of course use the drop-down menu next to the font name and choose one of the preset sizes. Another method of changing the size is to use the Grow Fond and Shrink Font buttons located on the right of the font size. These two buttons simply use the same preset sizes available on the preset size drop-down. Having activated the font size text box, you can also use the cursor keys on your keyboard to move through different sizes. Yet another method is to enter a particular size then press the enter key. When you do so, you are permitted to enter decimals, such as 10.5.

The alignment section of the Home Tab of the Excel ribbon contains a number of options relating to the way in which your data is position within the cell. Perhaps the most familiar and the most frequently used buttons in this section are the three relating to the horizontal position your data: left, centre and right. However you’ll notice that when you click in the cells of an unformatted worksheet, none of these three icons is highlighted, which indicates that none of them is the default. The reason for this is that Excel treats data differently depending on the data type.

If you type text in a cell, your text is aligned on the left; if you type a number, the number is aligned on the right; if you type a date, it is also aligned on the right. To change the horizontal alignment, either select a range of cells or click on a column letter to highlight the entire column then click on one of the alignment icons.

A typical Photoshop file consists of three colour channels: Red, Green and Blue. However, in addition to the colour channels, Photoshop can also use channels to store information used in the process of selecting and masking different parts of an image. To distinguish them from the colour channels, these channels are normally referred to as alpha channels. Alpha channels are a huge topic in Photoshop since they can be used in all sorts of very creative ways. However, in this article, we will focus on just two techniques both of which cause alpha channels to be created automatically: the Save Selection command and QuickMask mode.