Unable to drag cell corner in Excel to auto-increment?

If you ever run into the issue of not able to get auto-incremented numbers when you drag cell corner in Excel, then this is for you.

1. Select Office Button
2. Select Excel Options
3. Select Advanced
4. Tick the check-box “Enable fill handle and cell drag-and-drop”

Note that this is for Excel 2007. A similar option should be present in earlier/later versions as well.

File Shredder: Remove files permanently

One way to shred a file on your hard drive is to take its printout and then feed it through the physical shredder that you can usually find near your Office printer ;)

Jokes apart, “File Shredder” is a tool that can be used for shredding (destroying) unwanted files beyond recovery. Provided below are couple of paragraphs from the tool’s documentation to provide a quick overview. Go to the website for complete details and to download the tool.

Why is this tool required? There are quite a few software tools today for retrieval of deleted files under Windows OS. Those tools, often referred to as "file recovery" software, are taking advantage of shortcoming of Windows "delete" command that we all use regularly to delete files. Actually, the "delete" operation in Windows only removes bits of information from files so they appear deleted in OS. It is easy to retrieve those files using aforementioned specialized file recovery software.

In order to remove, or shred files permanently from your system, you have to use a program that is capable of rewriting the files with random series of binary data multiple times. This process is often called shredding. That way, the actual content of the file has been overwritten and the possibilities to recover such a shredded file are mostly theoretical.

http://www.fileshredder.org/

Reduce Microsoft Office document sizes

There are many ways to achieve reduced file sizes for your Office documents like Word or PPTs. This is very helpful if you are sharing the documents by email – enabling you to meet the etiquette of not clogging others’ mailboxes.

Tips to reduce document sizes

1. Compress pictures
2. Do not paste snapshots directly
3. Turn off versions (revisions)
4. Turn off Preview Picture
5. Turn off Fast Saves
6. Embed true type fonts only if required

Tips 1 and 2 turned out the most helpful as I found on lot of situations.

How to compress pictures?

• Select a picture
• Select “Picture Tools” on the window bar
• Select “Format” section
• Select “Compress Pictures” option.
• Choose a resolution of 96 ppi (pixels per inch) – unless you want your recipient to print the images you sent over!

Note that the way to do these settings might vary a bit depending on the Office version (2003 or 2007 or later).

Do not paste snapshots directly

A common practice while embedding snapshots is to perform either “Print Screen” or “Alt + Print Screen”, and then paste it directly into your Word / PPT. However, the image is copied in BMP format in this case – leading to large document size. Instead, paste the snapshot into an image editor like MS Paint, save it into a format like JPEG & then insert the JPEG into your Office document.

Dia: Open source alternative to Visio

Dia looks to be a fair open source alternative to Microsoft Visio. Visio is licensed (not free) and it may not be available with everyone as such. This tool can be helpful in such scenarios. It can be downloaded from http://dia-installer.de/.

Provided below are additional links that you might find useful in this context:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/a-free-open-source-alternative-to-microsoft-visio/
http://www.osalt.com/visio
http://www.lucidchart.com/ (online and should be used only for non-official purposes)
http://inkscape.org/
http://www.networknotepad.com/