When reviewing a Microsoft Word document with many pages you may find yourself constantly scrolling up/down or using the Page Up/Page Down keys. To aid in navigating large documents Microsoft has added the Navigation Pane to Word 2010.

The Navigation Pane is only available when a document contains Heading styles. At a minimum a document must utilize the Heading 1 style. The Navigation Pane will also recognize and use the higher heading styles (2,3,...).

To use the Navigation Pane you must ‘turn it on’ by checking the Navigation Pane check box in the Show section of the View tab on the ribbon.

The Navigation Pane appears on the left side of your screen. The following screen capture shows the Navigation Pane with the Heading view. You can immediately move the cursor to a location in a document by clicking on a heading name in the Navigation Pane.

Right mouse-clicking on a heading displays a short-cut menu.

This menu allows you to promote/demote headings to a different level, insert headings and sub-headings, print the selected heading and its content and other tasks.

You can put the Navigation Pane into Thumbnail view by clicking on the middle tab in the Navigation Pane. This displays small images of each page of the document. To move to a particular page click on its thumbnail image.

This is similar to the Pages Navigation Panel in Acrobat Reader.

Copyright 2010 - VBA Consultants Ltd

One of the features added to the 2010 version of Microsoft Excel are sparklines. Sparklines are small one-cell mini-charts that allow the user to quickly see:

1. trends over time, such as sales by quarter
2. the relationship between various components, such as sales by location for quarter 1, or
3. win-lose scenarios similar to a comparison between fair market value for an investment compared to its purchase price.

Each sparkline is inserted into its own cell and references a source range of cells containing the data being charted. Just like Excel charts, sparklines are ‘live’: the sparkline adjusts itself as the data in the source range changes. You can have multiple sparklines in a worksheet. Also any particular data cell can be a source for multiple sparklines.

The example in this blog post is based on the following worksheet comparing “something” by quarter for three locations.

To enter a sparkline select the Insert tab on the ribbon and then select the type of sparkline.

To see the trend for Location 1, click the Line type. This displays the Create Sparkline dialog box.

Using either the keyboard or the mouse, enter the Data Range containing the cells to chart and the Location Range where you want the sparkline to be inserted and click the OK button. Follow the same procedure for the other two locations. You can also copy a sparkline by copying the cell containing the sparkline to a new location. Excel will relatively adjust the Data Range in the same manner as copying a formula.

A separate Sparkline Tools tab will be displayed on the ribbon whenever the cell cursor is on a cell containing a sparkline. This tab allows you to change various properties of the sparkline including type and color.

To see the relationship of each location within a quarter, create a second set of sparklines choosing Column as the type and rows 3:5 as the Data Range. The following screen capture shows the worksheet with all of the sparklines in place.

Note that the visual detail provide by the sparkline is dependent on the row height setting. Taller rows will make the changes/differences appear more dramatic.

Copyright 2010 - VBA Consultants Ltd