Technically speaking…

I know that this may seem rather basic, but sometimes the basics are the best way to reinforce a task.

In this post I am going to look at sorting a mess of data in Microsoft Excel which is a very useful trick.  Suppose you are creating a sheet that will store information about wedding anniversaries for family members.

You might use fields that denote his first name, his last name, her first name, her maiden name, his birthday, her birthday, wedding date, relation to you, and a few other things, this way you could use one spreadsheet to keep track of anniversaries and birthdays and other important events.

With the sheet created you will need to select the content that you wish to sort.  Since I am going to sort the entire sheet clicking on the item in the very top left corner above the row numbers and to the left of the column numbers.

This will select all of the data on the sheet.  Then you can sort the selected info by any cell’s data.

With data selected select Data

Note: In Excel 2003 choose the data menu in the menu bar, if you are using Excel 2007 click the data tab on the Office Ribbon

From there select Sort.  This will open the sort dialog box allowing you to sort by a column in the sheet.

Office 2003 Sort

You will then select the column you wish to sort by, if more than one column is needed you can choose columns in additional dropdown menus on the dialog.  After selecting the column to sort on, choose Ascending or Descending for sort and click OK.

Office 2007 Sort

In Office 2007 the dialog looks a bit different.  The rules are the same, choose the cells to sort by in the first dropdown and them choose to sort of values, which will sort on the data in the cell, then select how to sort, (oldest to newest, A-Z, etc) and click OK.

Note: To add additional sort criteria in Excel 2007, click the Add Level button at the top of the dialog

Once you click OK on the sort dialog, the selected cells will be sorted according to the rules you have specified.

After you have sorted a few spreadsheets, this will be old hat, but it never hurts to have a quick reference for sorting a spreadsheet’s data.

Since the late 1990’s it has been quite the advancement in computer technology to allow users to store data on CD Rom media or even make identical copies of existing CD Rom discs.

When the technology to create CDs was first introduced, the computer needed to have CD writing software from Nero or Adaptec or some other vendor coupled with a CD Rom drive that was capable of writing data to CD media.

With the popularity of CD burning PC manufacturers have been including CD Rom drives that can write CDs in the majority of computers sold and Microsoft licensed CD burning technology from Adaptec to include in Windows.

The remainder of this post is going to walk through the process of creating a CD Rom directly with Windows XP using no other applications.

To create a CD Rom using Windows, complete the following steps:

1. Create a new folder on your desktop called Write to CD

Note: I am using a new folder here to create an easy location to place the files you will write to a CD. However, any folder location will work.

2. Copy the files you wish to write to CD into the new folder

3. Open the CD Rom folder for the CD Writeable drive in your computer (usually drive D or E) by clicking on Start and then My Computer and then double clicking the letter of the CD writeable drive.

4. Drag the contents of the Write to CD folder into the open Window for the writeable CD drive.

5. In the left portion of the CD rom window you should see a section for CD Writing Tasks, if there are no options showing, click the double down arrow to expand it.

6. Click the link labeled Write these files to CD

7. The CD writing wizard will appear, click Next past the welcome screen

8. Enter a label for the CD Rom, this will default to the current date.

Note: You can only enter 11 characters into the label field

9. Click Next to begin writing the CD

10. After the first disc has completed, the final window of the wizard will appear displaying a check box to create another copy of the same CD, if you wish to do this check the box and click Finish, if you are done creating CD Roms, click Finish to close the Wizard.

There you have it… the simple, but useful process of creating CD Roms.

One final note, if your computer has Nero installed on it, you may have difficulty using the Windows XP CD writing utility and should use Nero instead.