Tag Archives: Tips & Tricks

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Excel Tips

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Nerino Petro has identified a great article revealing some hidden gems in Microsoft Excel 2007. I believe that Excel is one of the most under used programs in a law office. There are so many things that you can do in Excel must easier than you can do in any other manner.

I use it daily to keep track of my expense report. I also use it quite frequently to calcuate amounts due for preparing a judgment or a affidavit for collection proceedings. The program is quite powerful.

I owe a tip of the hat to my wife, because without her, I would likely have never understood the true power of Excel. Like many attorneys, I am not a math person. Because of this, I simply avoided Excel. Once I saw how it easy it was to calcuate postjudgment amounts due, however, I was hooked.

If you are looking for some great tips on using Excel, I urge you to check out this article. If you are not using Excel, I encourage you to try it out. On my Files page, I have several Excel templates that I talked about when I did a presentation on Excel for the Chicago Bar Association. These template predate my new computer. Thus they are in Excel 2003 format.

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Fixing iTunes Library Problem

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We are getting ready to go on a short road trip. This means that I wanted to add some music to my wife’s iPod (it’s what we use for music on the trip). While selecting songs to add to the iPod (checking the little boxes in iTunes), I accidentally selected all of the songs in the iTunes library.

Given that we have over 5,000 songs in our library, this can be a bit of a problem. No one wanted to go back through the the library and select the songs that we actually wanted to synch to the iPod. Fortunately, we had recently synchronized the iPod and it had our currently selected songs on it. After some Googling, my wife found a solution that allowed us to reselect our desired songs without spending hours going through the library again.

Her solution is as follows.

  1. On the iPod, create an On the Go Playlist.
  2. Go to Genres.
  3. Hold the select button down for each genre until it flashes blue three times. This should add the songs in that genre to the playlist.
  4. Go back to playlists and open the On the Go Playlist.
  5. Scroll to bottom.
  6. The last option is save. Select that.
  7. Uncheck all music in iTunes.
  8. Synch iPod
  9. The synch will wipe all the music off the iPod. However, the playlist will show up in iTunes.
  10. Open the new playlist in iTunes. Select all of the songs. Right click, and choose check selected.
  11. Check any other other playlists you might have to make sure that all songs were selected.
  12. Synch again.
  13. Problem solved.