User Tips |
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Since I didn't start out to make a spreadsheet that would be used by so many others, it stands to reason that so many others are coming up with tips and tricks that I didn't think of during the design. Here is a sampling of the tips I have received in the past few weeks. Quatro Pro problemsOne of my frustrations is that I cannot adequately support spreadsheets other than Microsoft Excel because I don't own them, and other spreadsheets may not recognize the formatting options available to me in Excel. Several Quatro Pro users have written me to let me know of a workaround for Quatro Pro 9. Quattro Pro 8 opens my spreadsheets fine, but for whatever reason, Quatro Pro 9 doesn't like them. If you are a Quatro Pro user you can get by this problem by opening the spreadsheet in Quatro Pro 8, saving it in Quatro Pro format and then opening it in Quatro Pro 9.Printing 1880-1920 worksheets on 8.5"x 11" paperWhen I was designing the spreadsheets I had no choice but to set up for 8.5" x 14" paper for census years 1880-1920. I wanted forms which faithfully represented the actual census films and I just couldn't fit all of the data fields on regular sized paper. Since I was designing the spreadsheet for my personal use, I wasn't concerned about having to print on larger paper since I don't intend to ever do that. There are a lot of people though who like to use my spreadsheets as a handy way to print off blank extraction forms. Being able to print 1880-1920 on 8.5" x 11" paper would be a handy trick. Well...here's how. These instructions are set up for Excel 97. The procedure for other spreadsheet programs should be similar. Open the spreadsheet to the worksheet you want to print. Click "file" in the top menu bar and select "page setup". On the "page" tab there is an area labled "scaling" and a field labled "adjust to". Change the field from "100%" to "77%". If you use the arrow buttons the number will change by fives. If you highlight the number you can type in whatever value you want. Now print the worksheet page. What you should see is the entire spreadsheet worksheet printed on a single 8.5" x 11" piece of paper! If that's not what you see then tinker with the "adjust to" setting until it looks right. The trick is to get the setting low enough to display the print the entire worksheet without getting an extra column of empty cells on the right side. It might take a few tries to get the setting right for each of the worksheets from 1880-1920, but once you get it right it should always be the same for each census year. You will notice that the bottom 1/4th of the printed page is empty. That is because the entire worksheet has been scaled down by about 25%. It is normal for this type of printing. |
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1. News from CensusTools 2. How CensusTools Got Started 3. The CensusTools Drawing Board 4. Digital Census Images - the Next Wave of Census Research 5. Letters of the Month 6. User Tips 7. Links of the Month 8. A Request for Your Support |