Susan Harkins

Most of the Office applications let you insert shapes. One shapes is a line; however, laying a straight line can be tricky. Test it for yourself. In any application, display the Drawing toolbar by choosing Toolbars from the View menu and then selecting Drawing. Click the Line tool, click anywhere, drag a few inches and …

Outlook comes with two types of built-in command bar objects, the Menu Bar and toolbars. Only one Menu Bar is allowed, but you can customize both it and the built-in toolbars.

To address a new e-mail message, you may click the To button to display all your contacts. By default, Outlook displays the names in alphabetical order, by first name. If you have many contacts, you might prefer to see the list in last-name order. Fortunately, it isn’t that difficult to make the switch. To display …

I love it when I find a keyboard shortcut that eliminates menu choices. Office is full of them and I’m still discovering them. Just the other day I discovered a couple that have been available for eons, I just wasn’t aware of them. There are two shortcuts for applying line spacing. Typically, most of us …

When you publish an Access report to Word, you’ll lose any check boxes the report contains. Luckily, you can take advantage of a couple of workarounds: Either display the literal values or use Wingdings to display the check box controls in Word. Here’s a rundown of both tricks.

When you have a lot of users changing data, it’s easy for things to go wrong. But if you keep an audit trail of data input changes, you’ll be able to determine which operators are consistently making mistakes (or not). You can also quickly fix problems before erroneous data wreaks havoc. This easy-to-implement solution will help you monitor who’s changing data and when.

Microsoft Access lets users print data while browsing records in Form View, but it prints all of the records in the underlying recordset, not just the current one. By adding a command button and the subprocedure presented here, you can give users an easy, one-click tool for printing only the current record.

Wildcards come in handy when you need to locate records with similar data or you’re trying to track down a specific record based on limited information. But if you don’t use the right wildcard characters the right way, you could wind up with the wrong data–a potentially app-corrupting nightmare. These tips will help you wield wildcards more effectively.

There’s no built-in way to generate a running total in your Access queries, but you can still get the job done if you set up your table correctly and build the right expression. Database expert Susan Sales Harkins explains the technique.

Despite the Date/Time data type and a selection of functions for manipulating date values and components, handling dates in Access is often a little tricky and nonintuitive. These tips will help you avoid the most common date-related headaches.

Arranging SQL data so that you can effectively analyze it requires an understanding of how to use certain SQL clauses and operators. These tips will help you figure out how to build statements that will give you the results you want.

Null values indicate that data is missing or unknown, and if you don’t take steps to handle them, you could wind up with runtime errors or erroneous data. These Access pointers will help you understand and effectively address null values in various situations.