Senior Computer Tutor
Don Edrington Home Profile
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Enlarging the Text of Incoming Email, Wrap Text in a SpreadsheetOne of the most frequent questions we hear is: "Can I enlarge the text in emails I receive? Some of them are very difficult to read." Yes, there are several ways to do this. Here's what you need to know: You can NOT edit an email message in its "received" mode in your Inbox. However, if you copy and paste the message into a word processing program (such as MSWord) you can edit it in any way you want. You can also easily save and print the word processing document. Another way of getting an Inbox email into an editable form is to simply click on Reply or Forward. This immediately creates an outgoing version of the received email that be easily edited. At this point you can mouse-select any hard-to-read text and choose a different size and/or font (such as, say, 14 pt. Verdana). With some email programs making the text larger might also make it too crowded to display properly. Well, if this happens in Outlook Express or Windows Mail you can click on Format>Plain Text to make everything more legible. Gmail and AOL Mail also have a "Plain Text" option. If you're using a Web-based email service (such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail) and you're viewing it with Internet Explorer 7 or 8 you can click on 100% in the lower right corner of the page to increase the view to 125% or 150%. This will make the text and images larger on your screen, but will not change their print-out size. If all else fails, copy and paste the email into a word processing document, as suggested above. You can permanently change the font on incoming Outlook Express and Windows Mail by clicking on Tools>Options>Read>Fonts>Font Size and making your choices. (Do this once and all future incoming text will match your choices.) How to "Wrap Text" in a Spreadsheet Claudia Donovan wrote that an address book she created with Excel is very wide and asked if she could split information into two rows and then be able to sort by "every other row." Well, a second row isn't necessary because data within any row can be "wordwrapped" into multiple lines. Highlight a cell, row, column, or the entire worksheet; then click Format>Cells>Alignment. Finally, checkmark Wrap Text. A cell's data will then "wrap" onto another line if it doesn't fit on one line. Notice how the address in Row 4 wrapped to a second line in the illustration below. 
Copying a Spreadsheet from one PC to Another Peggy Merchant asked how to move an MSWorks spreadsheet from an older PC into a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet on her new PC. (LibreOffice is free from www.libreoffice.org). Well, Calc can read Excel and Quattro Pro spreadsheets, but not MSWorks files. However, Peggy's MSWorks spreadsheet can be easily converted to an Excel file. Here's how: Open the MSWorks spreadsheet, click on File>Save As, and choose Excel (*.xls) in the "Save As Type:" field. Now copy this newly-converted Excel file to the new PC and store it in the Documents folder. (You can transfer the file via email or a portable external drive.) Next create a blank spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc and click File>Open, whereupon all the Document folder's files will be listed. Double-click on the Excel file to import it into the Calc spreadsheet, where it can subsequently be saved as a Calc or Excel file (or a file compatible with several other listed programs). How to Sort (Alphabetize) Lists One of a spreadsheet's most useful functions is its ability to sort data alphabetically and/or numerically. Try it yourself. Type your name into Cell A1 along with several random names below it in the "A" column. Now mouse-select all the names and click Data>Sort, whereupon a dialog box will offer various sorting options. To sort data in an MSWorks spreadsheet, click Tools>Sort. In Calc click Data>Sort. To sort these names in a Microsoft Word document, stack them in a column by pressing ENTER after each entry. Then mouse-select them all and click on Table>Sort. Alternatively, you can create a spreadsheet-like "table" in Word by clicking Table>Create Table and then put one name per cell vertically into a column. Finally, alphabetize them with Table>Sort. One of the sorting options will be "My Table (or Spreadsheet) Has a Header Row." Checkmark this item if you use Row 1 for listing headers, such as First Name, Last Name, Street Address, etc. This option prevents entries in Row 1 from being used in sorting or other calculations. If you have multiple spreadsheet or table programs on the same PC, there is an easier method of copying a worksheet from one program to another. Mouse-select all the data in the original and copy it with Edit>Copy. Then click into Cell A1 of the target sheet and do Edit>Paste. The copied data will then expand into the same cells they had occupied on the original worksheet. © Donald Ray Edrington – All Rights Reserved
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