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Are You A Teacher?

If so, you should check out The Teacher's Toolbox! I'm a high school teacher, so I know that keeping everything straight can be a challenge sometimes. Well, this program is a solution I highly recommend! It will make your life a LOT easier! Here's a description:

The complete personal teaching assistant for today's educators!

Teacher's Toolbox is designed to help teachers save time on routine tasks such as calculating grades and generating attendance and performance reports. It also allows the teacher to easily import and export information to and from Microsoft Word and Excel and other database programs, and to help organize lesson plans and seating charts while making administrative tasks easier.

You can customize periods, categories of grades, and weighting of various components of each overall grade, and create your own grading system (numbers, letters, etc.). The program calculates average and median scores for each assignment, and updates assignments and due dates with a single click. You can also automatically perform such functions as curving grades and dropping the lowest score.

The lesson plan organizer allows you to schedule activities by day and period, while the test library allows you to create quizzes and exams using a customized database of test questions, with separate answer keys. The many reports (progress, performance, progress) that Teacher's Toolbox can generate can be automatically translated into HTML and uploaded to rSchool.com. You'll create passwords for students or parents to safely access individual records and chart progress.

The price? Only $14.95 and US Shipping is FREE! This retails for $49.95 (Amazon has is "discounted" for $29.95 - plus shipping) so our price makes it an incredible deal! Oh, and if you want to order 5 or more copies for you and other staff members, be sure to contact Rose (rose@worldstart.com) for information on quantity discounts.

OK, enough chatter. Here's the link:

http://www.worldstart.com/store/teacherstoolbox.htm

PS - Don't miss out! It's crazy to go through another school year without this - especially at this price!

MS Office 101

Let's do a quick update to the Change Case tip from last week.

I received several emails from readers giving me a keyboard-shortcut version of the Change Case feature. I thought the rest of you might like to hear about it.

This shortcut will toggle between ALL CAPS, all lowercase and Sentence case. (For the other options of title case and toggle case you'll still need to use the Format menu, Change Case choice.)

To Change Case you first need to highlight the text to be changed.

Then hold down the Shift Key and hit the F3 key. Each time you hit the F3 key the highlighted text will switch, cycling through the three choices (ALL CAPS, all lowercase and Sentence case).

Viola! Change Case made even easier!

Thanks to those who emailed!

Office Tip of the Day

More Printing Power in MS Excel

Have a really big MS Excel worksheet? Wish that you could figure out how to print the column and/or row titles on all the pages automatically? (Of course you do. Nobody wants the hassle of setting up the titles over and over again within one worksheet or the nightmare of always flipping back to page 1 to try to find the row or column title.)

Well - wake up from your nightmare - the solution is here.

Much like last week's tip on freezing panes so that you could continually display column and/or row titles, you can set Excel to print the titles on all printed pages.

So, now that you know what we're trying to do, let's do it.

The first step, as always, is to decide what information needs to be printed at the top of each column or at the left of each row.

Once the decision is made it's time for some mouse action.

You will need to go to the File menu, Page Setup choice. In the Page Setup window go to the Sheet tab.

"Print titles" is the second section. This is where we'll tell the program what titles to print on every page.

There are two sections you can choose to work with, row titles and column titles. (You can choose either one or both.) I know of two ways to input the rows or columns you wish to designate as titles. One way is to type the information directly into the box. The other way is to use the highlighting option.

To type the information into the box you will need to know the proper formatting. Basically you will type three things: the starting row or column preceded by a $, a colon, and the ending row or column preceded by a $.

For example, to print rows 1 through 3 as a title on all pages you would enter $1:$3 into the data box.

Columns work the same way except you will use column letters in place of row numbers.

If you wish to use only one row or column as a title then simply use the same information for beginning and ending. For example, to print only column A on all pages enter $A:$A

What about the times when your titles are in separate (not consecutive) sections? Is there any help for those situations?

Well - as you're expecting - there is a way. To enter separated sections insert a comma after the first section and then type the information for the second.

For example, if my titles are to be rows 1-2 and rows 4-6, I would enter $1:$2, $4:$6

This could be an easy method if you're good with Excel jargon and can remember all that - but what if you can't? Then what?

Fortunately for all of us who forget these things, Excel has a highlighting method to save the day. (That rings faintly like a cartoon superhero…)

Look to the right of the information box for each title choice.

See the little button at the end that looks like a miniature worksheet with a red arrow in it? That little box is your shortcut around the Excel jargon.

Click the button and it will take you back out to the worksheet with one small difference. You should see the worksheet as you left it with a very small window floating above the worksheet area.

To enter the rows or columns to be printed on all pages simply highlight the area. (This isn't a traditional highlight, it's just a chasing dotted line.)

When you've got the area highlighted you should see the corresponding Excel jargon in the small floating window.

If you need to highlight two non-consecutive areas then hold down the control key while you highlight.

When you finish your highlight hit the button at the end of the data line that looks like a little window with a red arrow. This takes you back to the Page Setup window.

You will probably notice that when you choose the row option the highlight will only highlight rows. The same goes for the column choice so be sure to pick the correct choice from the Setup window.

No matter which method you use for entering the information, once it's done you're ready to click OK.

There you go. Now regardless of how huge that worksheet becomes you're set with titles for all the printed pages. Keep in mind this is a setting for each worksheet of the workbook so if you need it for more than one worksheet you'll need to set them up independently. (We've got to make things easy - but we wouldn't want them to be too easy now would we?)