Any excel gurus?
 

I'm creating a master schedule for all the students on my caseload this year for school. It's a pretty big file, and I wanted to know how I can make it more printer friendly. I also wanted to write numerous lines in one block without making it way too big. Is this possible?

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Hmm.

It sounds like either MS Access or MS Word would be better suited for your needs.

Damn big schools.

:evil:

Know software better than 18 year olds....

Seriously. Then no worries.

I'll try and help you if you can explain a little better what you are wanting.

In your print dialogue box you can set the printing percentage to reduce it down to fit on whatever page size you are using.

As for the word wrap, you should be able to select all, right click, select cell format and find the word wrap check box. It's probably clicked off, click it on and close the box. Then change your column widths to be more narrow. The type should wrap into several lines. I'm doing this from memory, so some of the terminology may be wrong.

Oh, and you can change to paper orientation and margins from "page setup" (I think).

Go to youtube.

Seriously.

There is a tutorial for everything you could think of for MS Office products. For me, at least, it is a lot easier to see how to do things and what the results are rather than trying to have someone explain it to me in a chat room.


Edit: And Dane is right; MS Access is the way to go. You can export to excel, generate reports, etc, etc. Access lets you sort the data whereas excel doesn't.

Not trying to be smart, but why worry about being printer friendly?

Most things sent home by Teachers these days are done on memory sticks...I haven't printed out a schedule for my kids in a couple of years. We have it downloaded to a calendar that pops up on the computer each morning..

I've seen a couple of people take calendars and put them on digital picture frames....

That said, Dane is probably right...if it is that big you could use either Access or Monarch.

mmaddog
*******

Thanks guys.

I was able to accomplish what I wanted.

I need it to be printer friendly because I have to give hard copies to the teachers the students work with. It is much easier for them than having to pull it up on a computer.

Access would be overkill for this. Word...maybe. But every schedule I've seen in my line of work is done in Excel.

Pivot Tables FTW!

That may be true but that doesn't mean that it's the most efficient.

Once the tables are created in Access, queries can be written to quickly do almost anything. And as FA pointed out, it's very easy to create reports based on those queries. You don't have to worry about expanding data and whether it fit on a page. You can create Keys and sort any which way.

MS Access databases offer infinite possibilities whereas Excel can be very, very limiting at times.

See above post. Pivot Tables FTW. It would take so long to set this up in access whereas pivot tables can work with large amounts of data easily and be done very quickly.

http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/en...ot-tables.aspx

Link for pivot tables and info.

I haven't figured out why pivot tables aren't included in Excel 101. They may seem a bit complicated, but I'd argue that they may be the single most useful feature in Excel when it comes to manipulating data.

Yeah, I'm familiar with Pivot Tables but I guess it depends on your level of experience in Access because I could do the same thing in no time in Access.

To each his own!

Well, the issue is that most people don't know WTF to do with Access. Unless they already have a vague understanding of how it works, it's tough to explain without having someone at least show you around.

Not that pivot tables are much easier in that regard.

Dude, I programmed extremely complex MS databases for years in the music industry. My wife is a SQL programmer and the shit she does is absolutely mind boggling (plus she was a math major).

I think you're right, though. Most people barely even scrape the surface of Access.

Yea, most people don't scratch the surface in it but then again most people don't need to manage an amount of data that is too big for excel.

SQL programmers are nuts though. I had a guy I worked with that dropped out of a computer science program at a previous job and the shit he could do with databases and excel was amazing.

Thanks for the pivot tables heads up (even though OP was asking the question). I had always wondered what they were and how they worked.

I still think Acess would be a much better tool for this particular need, but I am looking forward to playing with pivot tables in the future.

BTW, here is a good youtube pivot table tutorial:

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Excel 2007 made them a lot easier to make. Excel '07 is one of those rare microsoft updates that actually made things easier for the average user.

To me, they're completely different applications. I couldn't see managing a million lines of data 30 columns wide in Excel.

Excel to me is almost worthless because I can set up databases with requisite queries in no time and be able to manipulate the data anyway someone sees fit. Doing that in Excel requires redoing the work in many cases and it's just far too time consuming.

I'm a lazy bastard like that :D

Yea, that would be a pain in the ass. I use excel because the data that I pull is mostly financial statements and other info that's pretty standardized and doesn't have a lot of info that I don't need to use.

I know, but that's a lot of work for a novice Excel user.

You mean a novice Access user?

Not following...

I think he means that, if you're a novice at Excel, Access will be way over your head.

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

That supposition is most likely true.

I personally find Access a lot easier to use than Excel....then again, I haven't really used Excel in any real capacity.

Interesting. I'd guess you're in the minority, but I don't really know for sure.

I generally prefer Access when you're wanting to run a consistent analysis across a changing group of data. When you're doing a quick analysis on a static group of data, I still prefer Excel, personally.

Yep...that's what I meant. The original post led me to believe he was using Excel to visually lay out information, not collect, slice and dice data.

Me too...Excel is way faster for that.