The role of the help desk is shifting from fixing what’s broken to teaching users how to avoid problems in the first place.

In a feature in yesterday’s Computerworld (titled “The New Help Desk: Agile, Educational, Efficient”), writer John Brandon highlighted three IT departments and what they are doing to bring the help desk from where it’s stuck – the 1960s – to the present. One of the organizations featured, the University of Georgia, has put an emphasis on using calls to the help desk to educate users. We like that idea.

Click to see a video on creating charts in Excel.

The old way of working is myopic. If you keep fixing an issue that, with a little instruction, can be avoided, where is the long-term value? And, if you cannot – or do not — track where problem spots are, how can you plan for the future?

At PC Helps, we fix stuff too; we’re a help desk, after all. But we also teach customers how to resolve issues on their own, and how to avoid having them crop up again in the future.

In that spirit, today’s post offers tips for creating Excel charts, a topic we receive many calls about. Happy charting.

Creating Charts

By PC Helps Staff

Data (n.) – raw, unorganized facts.
Information (n.) – organized and processed data that can be useful in some way.

When working with a large amount of data, it often can become an overwhelming task to extract information from the data. Excel provides a great tool to facilitate converting data to visual information through the use of charts.

Follow these steps to create a chart: Read more…

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You may not realize how much you rely on a mouse until you have to grapple with a malfunctioning one. Work that could be done in a snap takes twice as long to complete. Avoid the agita by learning how to get by only with your keyboard. Below are some of our consultants’ top keyboard tricks:

How to Make Vertical Selections of Text

Microsoft Word 2003, 2007, 2010

Our consultants’ top keyboard tricks.

This is by far the coolest keyboard trick I’ve ever learned. When selecting data, you may need to select portions of multiple lines of text but not the entire line of text. To do this, use a simple trick: hold down the ALT key.

1. Make sure the text you want to select is on screen.
2. Press and hold the ALT key.
3. Click and drag with the mouse to select the text.
4. Release the ALT key, then release the mouse.

Now you can format, copy, cut, or anything else you need to do with selected text.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts to Select and Move Text

Microsoft Word 2003, 2007, 2010

When typing in a Word document, it may be inconvenient to switch to the mouse for selecting text. If you are looking for a way to select and move text while keeping your hands on the keyboard, familiarize yourself with the keyboard shortcuts in this tip. Read more…

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Long before there were apps, there was Excel. It does almost everything, from calculating mortgage payments to finding out precisely how many days old your Great Aunt Mary is. Below are some of our top date calculation tips. Read more…

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It may seem a trivial matter, but getting your Office 2007 and 2010 applications set up correctly before you start working is a smart move. Think about all the times you have had to change formatting options on existing workbooks and tally up that time — it adds up.

Tech tips: 3 ways to make life easier in Excel.

Here are three tips that will enable you to reset Excel 2010’s default formatting. Set them once, and never again.

1. Setting Formatting Options for Workbooks, Part 1

Excel does not offer many options that allow you to set formatting defaults for your workbooks. However, you can work around this by modifying the formatting in a blank workbook, then saving it as the default template.

Excel 2007:

1. Open Excel to a blank workbook. Read more…

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Forget a leisurely Sunday drive or going to a restaurant without a reservation. Today, everyone wants everything to be convenient and fast. We have drive-through everything – photos, pharmacies, weddings, and anything else you can dream of.

There’s no need to wait in line at the local Blockbuster; you can watch Netflix on demand. You can order your groceries online and have them delivered, print a boarding pass at the airport kiosk (no humans necessary!), and have your dry-cleaning delivered with just a click. Even GPS systems, which were once a luxury in cars, are becoming a standard. Have we lost our sense of direction? No, we like having a faster, more convenient way of getting there. Read more…

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If you are managing the IT infrastructure, senior-level projects or are the IT leader in charge of maintaining and analyzing the majority of IT’s data points, you’re likely using Microsoft Excel every day. Read more…

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The beauty of Excel is its simplicity: If you enter your data correctly, it works. However, it can be ugly, especially when it returns a mess of formula errors, which sometimes are as understandable as Sanskrit.

We have gathered some tips that will help you root out the potential problems in formulas. If you can identify the issue quickly, then we’ve done our job. As for helping you fix it, that’s for another post.

A circular reference sends Excel into an endless loop where it will never stop calculating the cell. Excel goes around and around, never stopping to give us a final number…

1. Formula Evaluation Tool (Excel 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007)

by David McQueary

If you’ve ever created a formula, you no doubt have come across a dreaded #N/A, #DIV/0 or other type of error. This can be frustrating, especially if the formula you entered is long and complex. Sometimes it is not easy to see what is causing the malfunction, and trying to read through the formula to spot the offender is not always a fruitful effort. Excel offers a Formula Evaluation tool, which assesses a formula step by step, showing each calculation and enabling you to view exactly where the error occurs. Here’s how:

Excel 2000, 2002, 2003:

1. Click Tools and move your mouse over Formula Auditing. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Excel, How To circular reference, formulas, software support, Worker Productivity

Dear Mr. CIO:

I understand we’re in a recession, and the pressure for you to prune your budget is great, but how on Earth do you expect to get the same quality IT outsourcing for less money? I didn’t major in business, but I do know that in a capitalist society, nothing is free. Didn’t they teach you that in economics 101? Read more…

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Cue the Benny Hill music: CIO.com reports that in a recent study, researchers found that employees at large companies (10,000+ workers) spend an average of 38 minutes searching for one document, whether it’s on company networks, databases, intranets or local drives.

What a frightening, unnecessary drain on productivity.

Below are five more snags that can tie up employees for hours. Read more…

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Efficiency. It’s the unofficial buzzword of 2009. It may summon fear in corporate workers; after all, it’s often heard as justification for layoffs. But that unassuming little noun can also motivate your employees, and maybe even give them renewed interest in your company. It depends on how you package it.

In a recent post on TechRepublic, Calvin Sun offers 10 tips on the subject. Here are three that warrant elaboration:

Less Imaginary Widgets, More Genuine Examples

If one of your employees is fumbling with the Access sample database “Northwind,” it’s no wonder. Read more…

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