Sunday, April 15, 2007

Excel 2007 Default Template (Updated)

This is an update to a former post of the same title.

Remember at the end of my first post on Word 2007, I promised some information on Excel 2007. This is it.

I had the same kind of issue with Excel 2007 that I'd had with Word 2007. That is the default formatting uses the Calibri font that users without Office 2007 probably won't have.

Fortunately, it's easier to solve in Excel than in Word.

Just click on the Office button, click on "Excel Options" near the bottom right and choose "Popular."

Go down to the "When creating new workbooks" section and find the "Use this font" drop-down box. Change this to Arial and click Ok.

Restart Excel and you're done.

Many thanks to Helen Bradley for setting me straight.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

PCs for Seniors

In the spirit of my previous post on DVDs for Seniors, this blog post inspired me to write this post.

One problem I've had to overcome is that they kept moving the icons all over the desktop. I found a program called IconLock written in 1999 by PC Magazine. The article is still available. You can download it here.

While the article says "IconLock runs under Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4," I've found that it runs fine under Windows XP. Do be sure that you exercise all the desktop and Start menu items that they'll need to use as you can't completely lock it down or they won't be able to launch items on the desktop or even from the Start menu.

One other tip. I setup a Blogger blog that I set as the homepage on their Internet Explorer. With that I can add links to their homepage from anywhere and all they have to do is close and reopen Internet Explorer and the new link will be right there in front of them!

As I mentioned earlier, I use LogMeIn for remote control. Works perfectly and the price is right!