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Microsoft Excel is a commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. With its powerful functions, Excel has been a very widely applied spreadsheet in many fields, this article shows some example on What is Microsoft Excel really used for?

1. Manage data records like name list

The commenly useage of Excel is to manage data records and name lists. You don’t have to plan in advance on how the table should look like, as the preset layout alllows you to create the tables on the fly, just fill in the information, the table is developed on the go. Another more attractive point is that you have the ability to sort the list and filter the listing like a database tool. You can download the sample of name list.

2. Used as an analytical tool

Besides the good use on managing data, Excel is a great analytical tool for business. With the pivot tablecontained within Excel, you can easily analyse a large number of data, as the pivot table can automatically sort, count, and total the data stored in one table or spreadsheet and create a second table displaying the summarized data. It has gone through many revision. In each revision, we see its power being enhanced. In the latest version of Excel 2010, there are many new features added: It added almost six new caculations, a ‘Show Value As’ function and some great visual tools. Download this sales anylitics if you need.

3. Corporate Budgeting

A major business application of Excel is in corporate budgeting. Many companies, from big corporations to small companies use Excel for their budgeting. Despite numerous calls by suppliers of Business Performance Management Systems (BPM) to move away from Excel as a budgeting tool, 70% to 80% of all corporations still use Excel as their primary budgeting tool. This is a marketing budget plan from Microsoft website.

4. Finding Profit Breakeven

Finding breakeven is never easy without using Excel. To manually find out the breakeven for a project, you have to perform many calculations using different numbers as it’s inputs. And the calculation becomes even more complex if the components include fixed cost and step up cost. But with the goal seek function in Excel, this task can be completed in a few seconds. This template is for breakeven analysis, you can download it for use.

Of course, Microsoft Excel also provide more features than above listed, if you find others, you can add it in the comment and welcome to replensih:D

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Even PowerPoint 2007 and PowerPoint 2010 have been released for years, there are many Office users are accustomed to the classical PowerPoint 2003. To ensure that you can open your Office PowerPoint 2007 or PowerPoint 2010 presentation (.pptx) in an earlier version of PowerPoint (.ppt), you can easilyconvert pptx to ppt that is compatible with PowerPoint 2003 or before version.

The process is exactly same as to convert docx to doc and to convert xlsx to xls.

Step1, open the PowerPoint document.

Step2, press the Office button on top left, go to Save As and choose PowerPoint 97-2003 Presentation.

Step3, enter a new name at the File Name position or just use the same name as original .pptx file.

Step4, click Save to convert pptx to ppt slides, in seconds, the file will be viewed in .ppt format after the conversion is finished from PowerPoint 2007 to PowerPoint 2003 or Word PowerPoint to PowerPoint 2003.

Here are pptx sample and ppt sample for reference.

This way I show above is to convert PowerPoint 2007 to PowerPoint 2003, it’s a bit different to save PowerPoint 2010 to PowerPoint 2003, and you can read how to convert docx to doc to see the difference. And there is the other way to save PowerPoint 2007 to PowerPoint 2003 from step2, if you want to have a try, you can go to how to convert xlsx to xls for detail information, see tips 1.

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An article from Techcrunch indicated some features of Windows 8 Tablet, “The next Windows 8 is, in one way, nothing like the Windows versions that came before and, in other ways, an iterative improvement over what we know as the Windows Desktop.”

The prototype Windows 8 Tablet is from Samsung and it seems a bit bulky, but this is part of the compromise when you make something that essentially doubles as a PC.  The tablet device came with 64GB of storage, 4GB RAM and an Intel Core i5 processor.

As a new and historic product from Windows and Samsung’s cooperation, the Windows 8 tablet has many wonderful features.

There is no post-PC world. It’s right that everything runs on Windows 8 is a PC, so, you can view this tablet as a PC. And this “PC” views have two affects. One is to help Microsoft to invigorate the faltering desktop market, I think this is the mainly reason that Microsoft release this Windows 8 tablet; the other is to allow the company to avoid the argument of “Better than iPad”.

The cloud is serious. Microsoft has invested quite a lot of time and money into their cloud systems. For example, chats held in Microsoft Messenger can be persistent from one computer to another.  With the cloud service, you can simply log in with a Windows Live account and easily synchronize with your Windows Phone.

Windows isn’t huge anymore. Because of the cloud, Windows can actually boot off of a USB key. Obviously there are some very specific reasons to boot off of a USB drive, but it’s cool because it can.

Anyone can be a programmer. You can build a usable app in HTML5 and Javscript that will run on Windows 8 and, presumably, Windows Phone. Like iOS, Windows is the DNA of a new breed of device, one that uses the core code that we’re used to and expands – or contracts – it as usual.

There are other ways to work. Windows 8 supports pens, handwriting, touch and, presumably, voice, dance, and song as inputs. You can, for example, add a mouse and keyboard and have a great PC or you can carry the device around for Windows on the go. The device we tested, obviously, has a huge, weirdly-sized screen but otherwise it is a perfectly serviceable workhorse.

Of course, there are many excellent products and services that Microsoft will provide in future, and from Microsoft Build 2011 Conference, we can forsee this point. It’s said that there will be a Windows App Store, this will be another chance for those software developers.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to Window 8’s coming. How do you think?

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Months ago, I wrote an aricle on how to convert Docx to Doc, today, i want to share some tips to save Xlsx to xls.

Many Excel 2007 users sometimes meet this problem: you saved a large number of data in an .xlsx file and sent it to the clients, but your clients haven’t upgraded Excel to version 2007 or 2010, they can’t open .xlsx files in Excel 2003 or before version. So what’s to be done now? Either he or she upgrades Excel to 2007, or you convert xlsx to xls before sending it. Actually, it’s realy easy to convert Excel 2007 to Excel 2003 or Excel 2010 to Excel 2003.

It’s just the same as to convert Docx to Doc, and you can follow below steps to save Xlsx to Xls,

Step1, open the Excel document.

Step2, press the Office button on top left, go to Save As and choose Excel 97-2003 Workbook.

Step3, enter a new name at the File Name field or just use the same name as original xlsx file.

Step4, click Save to convert xlsx to xls, seconds later, the Excel file will be opened default in .xls format as soon as the conversion from Excel 2007 to Excel 2003 or Excel 2010 to Excel 2003 is finished.

It’s really easy to convert xlsx to xls. Here are the xlsx sample and xls sample for reference.

Tips: 1. from step2, you can also click Excel Options to save xlsx to xls as below.

2. I am using Excel 2007 and what I show above is the normal process to convert Excel 2007 to Excel 2003. As I know, there is a bit different to save Excel 2010 to Excel 2003, you can read how to convert Docx to Doc for reference when you have to convert Excel 2010 to Excel 2003, it’s same as to convert Word 2010 to Word 2003 at the bottom of the article.

3. And you can use the same process to convert Pptx to Ppt if you need to save PowerPoint 2007/2010 to PowerPoint 2003.

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Recently, my friends ask the same question: how to merge two Word files or more to one PDF? Some of them want to merge their books of each charpter into one PDF for easy reading; some have to insert a Word file into another. Anyway, I have tried many ways and would like to share my experience to merge two or more Word files into one, and when further need to convert Word to PDF is required, you can try below methods.

1. Free merge two Word files or more to one PDF

It’s simple!

1st, open the Microsoft Word document on your computer that you want to merge with another Word document;

2nd, click on “View > Outline” -> click on the “Show Documents” in “Master Document” field;

3rd, click on the area in the document where you want to add another document. The best place is at the end of the document or at the end of a paragraph, but you can add anywhere.

4th, click on the “Insert” option. Locate the Word document that you want to merge with, and then click on it so that it’s highlighted.

5th, click on the “Open” button and the two documents will then be merged with each other. Then you can save the two merged Word files in one Word document.

In this way, we can merge two Word files together as one and use a free PDF creator to convert it to PDF format if you want.

Of course, you can use this way to merge more Word files into one PDF, but it is not an easy thing in case there are a batch of Word files, as you need to add one by one, takes time to do this. You may as well try below direct and convenient way.

2. Directly merge two Word files or more to one PDF

If you used Simpo PDF Creator Pro, you should have found that it provides an excellent feature to combine multiple files into one PDF.

How to use it to merge two or more Word files to one PDF? Just follow me. If you haven’t used it before, you can click here to download and install it for a try.

1st, add Word files. You can import all the Word files need to merge together to the interface at a time.

2nd, click on “Merge all files to one pdf file” option. After customizing this setting, Simpo PDF Creator Pro will merge the added Word files to one PDF for you.

3rd, merge Word files to one PDF. Click “Convert” start the combination of two or more Word files.

All the things are just simple! With several clicks, you can merge two or more Word files to one PDF in seconds.

Now, you can choose a suitable way to merge two Word files or more to one PDF. If few Word documents, the first way can meet your need; otherwise, the second is better to solve the problem of merging many Word files.

By the way, you can also convert images to PDF ebook with Simpo PDF Creator Pro.

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Google is updating its sign-in page, and users are now able to preview its brand new look.

If you go to the Google sign-in page (you’ll need to sign-out first if you have checked before the “Stay signed in” box), it may look as normal at the first glance, but if you look at the bottom of the sign-in page, there should be a note that says, “Coming soon: A new sign-in page! Preview it Learn More“. Just click the “Preview it” and the new sign-in page shows as below:

More simple and make it feel better when seeing this page, doesn’t it? I like the new grey band across the top of the page, rather than seeing a “Sign in with your Google Account,” and the gap between the sign-in dialogue box on the right and Gmail, other Google products listed on the left seems is reduced a lot, so the whole page looks more centralized and better. How do you think?

But it’s not immediately clear when the new log-in page will permanently replace the old one.

By the way, you can also go back to the default sign-in page by clicking “Back to old page” at the bottom.

Have a try of the new version.

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There are some situations that we need to modify PDF text on Mac: you just received a PDF form and want to fill it in digital PDF format, don’t want to print it out and hand write; you would like to insert some images into a PDF file to make the whole PDF seem picturesque; or you want to add some notes to your PDF files to make it clearer in case you look back this PDF file in future, etc. You will always come across to modify PDF on Mac someday in the daily life and work, so, that how to modify PDF text on Mac may be a problem bothered many Mac users.

Actually, there is a simple solution – Mac PDF to Word converter, with which you can easily Convert PDF to Word on Mac and then edit PDF in Word effortlessly. Easy follow the steps to make it possible to modify PDF on Maac.

Step1, download and run Mac PDF to Word converter

Click to download the Mac PDF to Word converter and launch it by double clicking the shortcut icon on your desktop.

Step2, import PDF files you need to modify

You can import PDF files in two ways: a. Click the “Add PDF” button to add PDF files, if you want to import a batch of PDF files, you can press the “Ctrl” button on the keyboard, or use method b; b. Directly drag and drop a batch of PDF files to the interface with mouse to save time.

Step3, convert PDF to Word

Press the “Convert” button, seconds later, the PDF file is converted to Word format.

Step4, modify PDF text on Mac

After convert PDF to Word, now you can modify PDF text in the converted Word on Mac.

Tips: 1. At the bottom of Mac PDF to Word converter, you can select another file folder to locate the converted Word documents; 2. If you want to modify PDF text on Mac with specific pages, you can choose these pages to be converted to Word, just click the icon in Page Range field, you will see a pop-up box as below and enter page number to choose.

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When we read a paper book or newspaper, sometimes we add comments or notes to some important paragraph and sentences. This can be easily archived in a PDF document on a computer, and it’s much easier when you are using a Mac, as the Preview, which is default installed on all Macs, also allows users to add comments to PDF (which is a popular format for electronic documents sharing and archiving) or add notes to PDF to call attention.

To add comments to PDF, you can follow the steps below.

Step1, click Tools button > choose Annotate Tool > choose Tools > Annotation > Text Annotation;

Step2, drag in the document until the note is the size you want > Double-click the note to add notes to PDF;
Step3, when you’re done, resize the note to make sure you can see all its text, and move it so it doesn’t cover any other notes;
Step4, select another tool, and when the process to add comments to PDF is done, you can directly save the PDF now.

Tips: Before you save the PDF, you can also edit or delete the PDF comments. To move or resize the comments box, just choose Tools > Annotate Tool; to edit the comments’ text, choose Tools > Annotate Tool, and double-click the note; to delete the note, choose Tools > Annotate Tool, select the note, and press Delete. After you save a PDF, the contents, size, and position of any notes you added cannot be changed.

By the way to add notes to PDF document, you can provide feedback or point out something you want to remember. It’s much easier to add notes to a PDF document:

First, click Annotate in the toolbar and choose Note;

Second, click the spot where you want to add PDF notes;

Third, enter your note’s text. The note is to the left of the icon, beyond the edge of the page. You may need to scroll to see it.

You can also change the note’s icon and color if need: choose Tools > Show Inspector > change icon and color.

In fact, Apple’s preview has some other features, allows users to annotate PDF on Mac, add text to images, add bookmark to PDF, merge many PDF files to one, print multiple images on one page, etc.

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It’s really easy to combine PDF files on Mac OS X. Both Leopard and Snow Leopard have the ability to move pdf pages around and even merge two pdf files together. What’s more, the Preview is built right in all Mac OS X – you don’t even need a third party software to combine PDFs on Mac OS X.

Case 1, combine two PDF files on Mac

To combine two or more PDF files together using Preview (the standard PDF viewer in all Mac OS X),

First, simply open the PDF file in preview;

Second, open the thumbnail view (Shift-Command-D)

Third, drag a second pdf file ON TOP OF the existing page thumbnail. NOTE: The second opend PDF file must be on top of the first opened thumbnail. If you drag it into the sidebar but not on top of an existing page the new file will be added as an external link – not merged into the original pdf document.

Fourth, combine two PDF files into one.

Case 2, merge many PDFs on Mac

To merge more PDFs on Mac OS X, you can follow below simple tutorial step by step:

Step1. Open the PDF documents that you want to combine in Preview.

1. Step2. Show the sidebar in each Preview window. If the sidebar is not showing, click the Sidebar button in the Preview window’s toolbar, or choose View > Sidebar > Show Sidebar.
2. Step3. Verify that the sidebar is configured to show thumbnails (this the default view). If the sidebar is not showing thumbnails, choose View > Sidebar > Thumbnails.
3. Step4. Drag the thumbnail of one PDF (source) over of the thumbnail of the other PDF (destination) and release the mouse or trackpad button when the pointer shows a Green Circle with a plus symbol in it. This will copy all pages from the source PDF and add them to the end of the destination PDF.
4. Tips: 1) You can merge specific PDF pages with another PDF document, select only the pages you want to copy and drag them over the destination PDF document’s thumbnail.
5. 2) If the destination PDF has multiple thumbnails showing in the sidebar, you can also add specific PDF pages to any part of the destination PDF, just drag the copied pages to the precise location where you want the pages added. And a blue bar will appear between the pages where the copied pages will be inserted.
6. Step5. If the pages in the destination PDF are shown in the wrong order, click the gray circle containing an arrow that appears over the PDF document’s thumbnail, so that the arrow points to the right, and drag the thumbnails of the individual pages into the desired order.
   Step6. After the destination PDF contains all of the pages you want and the pages are in the correct order, you can select File > Save As to save a new PDF document containing all of the combined pages, or you can select File > Save to replace the original version of the destination PDF with the version containing the combined pages.
7. Tips: The Save or Save As commands will only save the document currently being viewed in the window, not all documents shown in the sidebar.

Just repeat above process to combine many PDFs on Mac OS X.

Actually, Preview can not only combine PDF files on Mac, but also highlight text in PDF, add bookmarks, comments or notes to PDF on Mac OS X, you can even annotate PDF text with Apple’s Preview.

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It’s a shame to waste a lot of paper printing a handful of pages one to a paper.  And sometimes, people may want to print multiple pages on a single page from a PDF, ie: pages 1 and 2 onto a single page, pages 3 and 4 on another single page etc. But if you’re using Mac OS X,  Preview application, installed on all Macs, has a printing trick that supports to print multiple pages per sheet automatically.

First, open the PDF in Preview window.

Second, set up options. To print multiple pages per sheet, first select the Layout option from the Print dialog. It is part of the menu marked “Preview.”

Third, choose the number of pages which should be printed on one side of a single sheet of paper. You can also optionally set the layout direction, and whether a border should be printed around each individual page. In this example, there will be two pages printed on a page on each side, for a total of four pages on a single sheet of paper when duplexed. If you want to print two pages per sheet on one side and leave it black on another side, just uncheck the box before “Two-Sided”, and your PDF file will be printed out as you want.

If you need to print multiple images per page, the Preview also can do this for you.

First, put all your images in a single Preview window. If you already have one image open, display Preview’s sidebar and then drag the other images from the Finder to the sidebar. If you don’t have any images open, you can open them at once by dragging them all onto Preview’s icon in the Dock or in the Finder.

Next, select all the images in the sidebar by clicking on one and then pressing Command-A. Now choose File: Print Selected Images, or press Command-P. In the dialog box that appears, choose the number of images you want on each page from the Images Per Page pop-up menu. (Don’t see this? Reveal more options by clicking on the disclosure triangle to the right of your printer’s name.) You can choose to have multiple copies of each image if you check the Print N Copies Per Page option; otherwise, each image is printed once.

Of course, the Preview application can fulfill the basic need to print multiple images per page with normal view. If you want to print multiple images per page with different style, you can use this Collage Maker. It provides other view styles, classic, heart and free.

Classic style:

Heart style:

Free style:

Enjoy! Thanks for your reading.

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