Monday, October 29th, 2018

Excel Templates To Make Marketing Easier

Excel templates for marketing

Marketing template shown here is a free downloadable template from Hubspot: https://offers.hubspot.com/monthly-marketing-reporting-template

Learn how Excel templates help you manage your marketing tasks

If you surveyed people about the tools that they consider among the most important in their software arsenal, there is no doubt that Microsoft Excel would be at or close to the top of that list.

In a world where just about every job requires reports, presentations, and budgets in spreadsheet format, Microsoft Excel is indispensable. It’s hard to imagine doing our jobs today without it. If the Gods of information technology didn’t create and develop Excel, our working lives wouldn’t just be tougher they would also be more chaotic, especially when you’re in marketing.

Nowhere is the need for Excel spreadsheets more evident than in the world of marketing, where tasks can be incredibly varied, and you’re expected to do them all. With its unparalleled ability to organize information and simplify tasks, Excel is an indispensable tool for marketers of all types.

If you’re a marketer, you would do well to check out at some of the ways you can use Excel templates to make your job easier.

Reporting monthly marketing metrics

Monthly reports are par for the course in any industry workplace. Making them can be tedious, but they are always a great way to communicate to your boss how your marketing campaign is going.
For simplified reporting, you can use a monthly marketing metrics template that allows you to lay out data pertaining to monthly visits, leads, conversion rates, and customers. Once the layout is there, you can update the worksheet quickly and easily. Tracking and reporting on which channels are doing well also will also be more accurate when properly structured.

Blog editorial calendar

Creating a blog post that will help draw in visitors and leads to your website is easy enough. Managing that blog, however, is an entirely different story.

You need to keep track your blog post ideas and published posts. You also need to distribute them strategically. If there are contributions from other bloggers, you will need to monitor those too.

To keep track of everything you need a blog editorial calendar, and Microsoft Excel is an excellent tool for creating one.

With a blog editorial calendar, you can keep an eye on all your content. It can also help you when it comes to choosing topics, managing buyer personas, and aligning your calls-to-action, amongst other things.
Blog Editorial Calendar

On-Page SEO Template

When running an SEO campaign, there are so many things that a marketer needs to track. In addition, periodic algorithm changes will force you to rethink your SEO strategy and make the necessary adjustments.

If you don’t have an Excel template where you can see all the information you need to manage your SEO strategies, your life as a marketer is bound to be more difficult. An on-page SEO template will help guide your SEO strategy and remind you of SEO best practices that you need to employ for the best results.

Budget template

No marketing campaign will ever run effectively without a properly allocated budget. Preparing a budget could be complicated work, but if you use an Excel budget template, you will be able to organize your marketing spending better.

Aside from establishing a clear alignment between your spending and your goals, an Excel budget template can also help you keep track of your spending and help you ensure you don’t go over budget.

There are many other ways that you can use Excel templates to make your marketing job easier. You can create these special templates yourself, or you can avail of the many Excel templates being offered online.

Tuesday, September 9th, 2014

Find Your templates in Microsoft Office – Mac

Need to manage your Microsoft Office templates but can’t find them?

It’s not easy to find the templates folder on your Mac. You might know it is My Templates but a typical search in Finder won’t turn it up.

Luckily help is at hand. Launch Finder and choose Go > Go to Folder. Now paste this folder name into the search box to go to your My Templates folder where you can now see and manage your templates!

~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/My Templates

 

 

 

 

Friday, August 23rd, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – Markup the changes to your document

Keep track of the changes made to your document

Word’s Reviewing tools make it easy to show someone the changes you’ve made to a document.

You can set Word to record the changes before you make them by selecting the Review tab on the ribbon and click Track Changes > Track Changes.

Now, in Word 2007 & 2010, every addition to your document will be underlined and every deletion will be marked with strikeout. Word 2013 defaults to Simple Markup so you will need to choose All Markup to see the changes marked up.

 

These changes are retained when you save the document.

You can apply the changes permanently at any time by selecting Review > Accept or Reject and choose Accept All Changes (or Reject All Changes).

Word 2013 has a new feature which lets you force Track Changes to be enabled. Choose Review > Track Changes > Lock Tracking to enable this feature. Now if you save the document and send it to someone, any changes they make to the document will be recorded in the document. They cannot disable this feature without having the password to unlock the setting and disable it.

Helen Bradley

Thursday, August 15th, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – How to sort data in a Word document


Sorting data in Word 2007, 2010 & 2013

In the pre-ribbon versions of Word you would use the Table commands to sort data in a Word document.

In Word 2007, 2010 & 2013 you can’t use the table sort options any longer for plain old text simply because you can’t select the table options if you don’t have a table – it’s a Catch 22 situation.

Luckily, Word now includes a proper sort option for any text – not just table text. To use it, first select the text to sort and then click the Sort button on the Home tab of the Ribbon.


When the Sort Text dialog opens you can choose what to sort such as Paragraph or Field and the type of sort. If you want a case sensitive sort so A is treated differently to a then click Options and check the Case Sensitive checkbox.

Once you are done select the sorting options, click Ok to perform the sort.

Helen Bradley

Friday, August 9th, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – Flow text through a document with linked text boxes


How to use linked text boxes to flow text throughout a document automatically

If you’re familiar with using desktop publishing software you’ll know that it is useful to be able to create text boxes and have the text flow automatically from one to the next. You use this feature to start a story on one page of a newsletter, for example, and to have it continue on a later page.

Word 2007, 2010 and 2013 can do this for you too, if you use the built in text box feature. To do this, first choose Insert > Text Box > Draw Text Box and click and drag to draw a text box on the page.

Repeat this and add a second text box on another page in the document.

Now select the first text box, right click and choose Create Text Box Link.

Now click in the second text box to link the two together.

In future, any text which you type into or paste into the first text box and which won’t fit because the box is not large enough to accommodate it, will flow automatically into the second text box.

Helen Bradley

Thursday, August 1st, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – Add a time and date stamp to a printed page


Know when your document was printed by adding a date and time stamp to each printed page

Add a date and time stamp all your printouts by placing the current date and time in the document footer so it prints when the page is printed.

To do this in Word 2007, 2010 and 2013 choose Insert > Footer > Edit Footer. Click the Date & Time button and enable the Update Automatically checkbox. From the list of dates and times choose a date or date and time – depending on what you want to see on the page. Click Ok.

Select the text that Word has inserted in the footer and you can now format it to a small font – such as Italic 8 pt. You can also prefix the text with the words Printed On: or something similar, if desired.

Click Close Header and Footer to return to your document. Now the current date and time will be printed in the footer each time the document is printed.

Helen Bradley

Thursday, July 25th, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – Making shapely images


Crop your image to a shape in Word
It is easy to crop an image to a shape such as a star or a heart in Word by using the Crop to Shape feature.

First add the image to your document then click to select it. From the Picture Tools > Format tab click Crop > Crop to Shape.


Select the shape to use to crop the image to. You can then add a shadow or reflection or other effect to the shape as desired.

Helen Bradley

Friday, July 19th, 2013

Excel Tip – Spin Buttons for Data Entry

Learn how to use a spin button (also called a spinner) form of control in Excel to aid in data entry. Using a spin button, a user can click the button to increase or decrease a value in a worksheet cell.

This video explains how to access the Developer tab, then, how to add the spin button form control and, finally, how to set up the control. It also explains how to scale the value that the control provides so it can provide percentages and very large or very small values. This feature is in Excel 97, 2000, 2002, Excel 2007, Excel 2010 and Excel 2013.

Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to have a look at creating spin buttons in Excel to make data entry just about as much fun as data entry can be. Before we get started with spinner controls let’s have a look and see what we’re talking about.

Here is a copy of the worksheet that we’re going to be working on and this is the spin button control. It’s been set to work between 20 and 30 so it will take a value between 20 and 30 years and every time I click the down arrow it decrements this cell by one so that the overall payment per month on the mortgage is increased because the term is much shorter. When we increase the term on the mortgage by clicking on the up arrow the overall payment is reduced. And it stops at 30.

So let’s see how we would add the spinner control to this particular worksheet.
Well first of all you have to have the Developer tab available. It it’s not choose File and then Options and in Excel 2013 and 2010 you’ll go to the Customize Ribbon button here and you’ll check this Developer tab here so that turns it on. In Excel 2007 you’ll go here because there will be an option here for Show the Developer Toolbar in the Ribbon.

So once you’ve got the Developer toolbar available click it and then take this Insert option and you want the form controls. Now the Active X controls look pretty much the same thing but they work very, very differently. And what we want are the simple form controls because they’re the easiest to use. I’m going to click here on the spin button control and then I’m going to click and drag to create the control on my worksheet. Now I can resize it later on but I’m going to start by drawing this size.

I’m now going to right click it and choose Format Control. And this gives me my options for formatting the control. To start off with I can set its current value. So I can start it at for example 25 and then I can set its minimum value which I had previously set to 20 so all our mortgages are going to tested between 20 and 30 years in length. And then I’m going to make the maximum value the 30. So we’re going to move between 20 and 30. And the incremental changes how big a change do I want to happen with each click of the button. Now these have to be integers so one is the smallest value. And cell link is a pointer to the cell that I want the value to be inserted in so I’m going to click in here and then click in this cell because this is going to be my link cell and click Ok.

You can see that the cell value changed to 25. That’s because that was the starting value. Now if I click on the spin button right now nothing is going to happen because it’s still active. So I’m just going to click outside it and now I can test it. You can see I can click up but when I get to 30 I can’t click it any more and then it will click down. And when I get to 20 it won’t go any lower.

So that’s a spin button control that you can use to control this sort of value. But there are some limits to spin buttons that we’re going to have to get around. One of them is that they only return integer values and the maximum value is 30,000. So right now that would cause us some problems in trying to add the mortgage amount which is in the region of 200,000 or more when the maximum value is 30,000. And here the interest rate is 5 percent. That’s .05. That’s not even an integer. It’s not even a one. So we’re going to have problems controlling that. And we’re going to have to find a way around it which of course can be done easily.

To see how we would deal with the situation where the amount borrowed is a much larger figure than we can use in the spin button control let’s have a look at this worksheet. In this worksheet we’re looking at how we could possibly scale a range of 0 to 30,000 to actually work for us. Let’s say that the minimum amount that we want this mortgage calculator to work for is 100,000 and the maximum is one million. Well let’s look and see what 100,000 is. Well 100,000 is 10 times 10,000 and a million is 100 times 10,000. So we could have our spinner work between 10 and 100 if we could scale it up by 10,000 each time. I’m going to replace the formula with a value and it’s going to multiply the contents of cell D2 by 10,000. Now there’s nothing in cell D2 right now but we know that we can put a value in there using a spin button.

So again Developer, I’m going to Insert and I’m going to select the Spin Button Form Control. I’m going to drag to create it on the worksheet, right click it and choose Format Control. This time I want my minimum value to be 10 because I’m going to use a 10 to 100 scale here. The maximum value is going to be 100 and I’ll have it increment by one digit at a time which is going to be 10,000. I’m going to set my current value to, for argument sake, 20 so that we’ll get back our 200,000 in this cell. And the cell link cell is going to be the cell that has the value in it that this formula is using. When I click Ok let’s see how it’s working.

As you can see the spin button here is giving us this value here of 20 and in this cell we’re just taking the value of 20 and scaling it up. So now if I click on this button it’s going up by 10,000 every click of the button and it’s going to max out at one million. And if I were to come down then it would max out in the bottom direction at 100,000. And each time as I click on the button, well I’m sitting on the button right now, but as I click on the button the amount that we’re paying each month is being recalculated accordingly. So scaling up like this is a way of getting larger values than the 30,000 that we’re allowed in the spin button control. Of course that’s preempting the solution for this value here. All we need to do now is to scale this downwards. So let’s see how we do that.

To reduce a value using a spinner we’ll work the opposite direction. Let’s say that we want an interest value between 2 and 10 percent. That’s between .02 and .1.
.02 can be represented by 2 times .01 and 10 by 10 by .01. Now that’s only going to give us whole interest values so I don’t think it’s going to be quite big enough. Let’s go down a scale and let’s say it’s 20 multiplied by .001 and 100 multiplied by .001. That’s going to give us additional percentages in the range so instead of going 2 percent, 3 percent, 4 percent we can go 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and so on. So let’s take this scaling back to our worksheet. Again we’re going to add a spin button here so from the Developer toolbar Insert make sure that you’re using this form control and drag a spinner into position. We’ll right click it and choose Format Control and we’re going to use cell D3 as our intermediate cell. The minimum value is going to be 20. The maximum value from our previous calculations on the other worksheet is 100. We’ll use an incremental change of one for now and the cell link will be this cell here D3 and press Ok.

Now nothing is actually happening because we haven’t put our formula in here yet. The formula multiplies this value here by .001. And here is our smallest value 2 percent. We’ll need to reformat this cell so I’m going to the Home tab of the Ribbon and I’m going to increase the decimal places here so that we can see exactly what values we’re getting and not rounded values. Here everything is now going up in .1 of a percent. And it will max out at 10 percent because that’s where we set it to max out at. It won’t be able to go any larger than that.

Now all we need to do to make this worksheet a little bit neater is just to hide the column that contains those intermediary values. And now somebody can use this calculator to calculate a loan and instead of having to put value in here manually they can just click on the spin button controls to do it automatically.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my video tutorials on this YouTube channel and visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on a range of Office programs including Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Publisher.

Helen Bradley

Thursday, July 11th, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – Preview and Save a web page document

See your document as a web page and keep it looking that way

To see how any of your Word 2010 and 2013 documents will look when they are saved as web pages, select the View tab on the Ribbon, then click Web Layout.

Now, to save a document as a web page, select File > Save As. In the Save As dialog, under click the Save as type: dropdown list and choose Web Page (*.htm;*.html).

 

Make sure to choose a location to save the document in, give it a name (it should have the .htm extension), and click Save.

Helen Bradley

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013

Word 2010 and 2013 Tip – Wrap Text Around a Table

Use a text box in Word to control text wrap around a table

In a previous tip I showed you how to place a table inside a text box so you could put two tables side by side. You can use the same process to make the text on your page wrap around a table.

Click here to learn how to place a table inside a text box

To control the way text wraps around a table, first create a text box and place a table inside it.

Then click to select the text box and, from the Ribbon, select the Format tab > Text Box Tools. Click the Wrap Text dropdown menu and choose the desired wrapping option from those in the list – typically you will use Square to wrap text round the text box with its inserted table.

Helen Bradley

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