How To... Create and Edit a Basic Table of Contents in Word 2010

Recently a student came to me close to the deadline for submission for an assignment. He was very worried that he would not be able to make his submission before the 5 o'clock deadline and was worried about incurring a late submission penalty. The reason his assignment was not ready was that he could not create a Table of Contents (TOC), and he wanted me to show him how. I felt strongly that this was something that he could figure out for himself and that it was not my role to do this, even though I knew how easy it was to create a TOC. However, in the face of desperation I relented, and took less than five minutes to show him how to create a TOC for his assignment - which he did successfully.

The key to creating a TOC in Microsoft Word is knowing about Headings in the Styles Gallery. Once you've worked out how many and where you want the headings, Word does the rest and creates the TOC for you. Once created it is easy to modify, eg if you add a new heading, or change/delete an old one. Naturally I decided to make a video for my YouTube Channel to show how it is done, and here it is:

How To... Display Two Measures in a Bar-Line Chart in Excel 2010

To mark the occasion of reaching 1,000 subscribers I have created a new video on "How To... Display Two Measures in a Bar-Line Chart in Excel 2010". This one is inspired by the blog post Bar-Line Graph from Sanjay Matange on the Graphically Speaking Blog from SAS Software. Sanjay's post describes how to write the code using SAS Software to display "two measures by one classifier using a Bar-Line graph, where the scale of the two measures is vastly different". It seemed like a very complicated way to draw a Bar-Line chart, so I thought I'd give it a go in Excel 2010. It turns out to be very easy to do - here's my 4 minute 54 seconds video showing you how:

How To... Use If Statements in Excel 2010

IF...THEN...ELSE - always fascinated me since I first learned about IF statements back in the 1980's when I first learned programming. Logic is central to IF statements - that's why I like them. I always had fun writing them and testing then to see if they worked. 

IF statements can be used in Excel as conditional statements. My latest video show Excel users how to write a basic IF statement. The syntax is quite simple:

IF(logical_test, "value_if_true", "value_if_false")

In the video I use the example of using an IF statement to check if a student score is a pass or a fail - the IF statement for this is as follows (assuming a pass mark of 40%):

IF(B2>=40, "Pass", "Fail")

where "B2" is the cell where the mark is located on the Excel spreadsheet. In this statement you are testing to see IF a value (the contents of cell B2) is greater than or equal to 40 - if this is True, then the word "Pass" is displayed. If this is not True, then the word "Fail" is displayed. So for example, if the value in cell B2 is 60, then this is greater than or equal to 40 - therefore the statement is True, while a value of 30 is not greater than or equal to 40 - therefore the statement is false. Check out the video on YouTube and see what you think:

How To... Make a YouTube Ready Video With PowerPoint 2010

Since starting to create videos for upload to my Learn with YouTube channel, I have used various tools to create the videos. They are mostly made with Camstudio and Windows Movie Maker. Recently I have begun to use the audio recording options that PowerPoint offers. I simply create my presentation slides as normal, and then record the voice-over for each slide one at a time. When finished I save the presentation as a Windows Media Video (.WMV) which can then be uploaded to YouTube. The .WMV file size is quite large, but that doesn't really matter any more. My most recent video below is about how to do this: "How To... Make a YouTube Ready Video With PowerPoint 2010":

This actually took a bit longer to make. With Camstudio for example, I record the video in one take from start to finish. If I make a mistake I record it again. Usually I'm happy with the video as long as I don't make a major mistake. But when I was recording one slide at a time in PowerPoint, I found myself recording each slide over and over as I tried to get the recording a little bit better each time. I don't do this when recording the whole video in one shot. Some slides I must have recorded them more than 10 times before I was happy.

I'm feeling a little bit of excitement building as the view count for the channel edges close to half a million views. Last Thursday the view count for a single day went over 2,000 for the first time. At the current rate (484,571 views as I write this post) - I should pass the half a million mark before the end of the month!

How To...Use Subtotals for Data Analysis in Excel 2010

I have a new video to YouTube - this one is about creating subtotals in Excel 2010. This is a handy function that takes some of the work out of analysing data, and reduces the risk of error. It is based on a spreadsheet containing sales figures by region, and shows how to get subtotals of units sold and revenue for each of four regions. This is done without writing formulas or copying and pasting data. This is a straight-forward exercise, but I've never used the subtotal function before (and only learned how do use it myself just before I created the video). I hope to use more exercises like this in class tutorials to help students analyse data, so that they have a method with which to summarise data for presentations and reports.

How To... Create a Basic Pivot Table in Excel 2010

My second Learning with YouTube video this week is about Pivot Tables in Microsoft Excel 2010. Pivot tables allow you to rotate or swap data fields in a spreadsheet to generate a view of your data that filters, summarizes, and groups the data in many different ways. Put simply, if you want to make sense of a large data sheet, this might be the tool for you.

I have always been fascinated by some people's ability to create great looking tables with ease using Pivot Tables - it looks really cool when you see others doing this. I never investigated how to create them, but it turns out it is very easy to create a basic Pivot Table, so my video shows you how do do this. There's lots of advanced stuff that you can also do, but the video is just intended to get you started. 

How To... Create a Simple Filter in Excel 2010

It' been a while since I made a video for my Learning with YouTube Channel. I have not posted any since early June, but I am delighted to see that while the viewing figures dropped off a bit during the summer months, there were over 70,000 views during June and July. That's an average of over 1,000 per day. Viewing figures peaked during April and May - I'm guessing that the increase in numbers reflects students checking them out for study and revision. The current total views stands at 428,316 as I write this post - at the current rate of viewing I expect to reach the half-million mark in October/November. A nice landmark that I'm looking forward to - I continue to be astonished that so many people are watching my videos and (hopefully) finding them useful. I have a lot of fun creating the videos and checking out the viewing figures.

My latest video is about the basic use of the Filtering tool in Microsoft Excel 2010. This allows you to filter out data that you do not wish to view to make data analysis a bit easier. There are more advanced uses of the filter tool, but this video is intended to get people started. I'm looking for more videos to make (suggestions welcome) - I will continue to concentrate on Excel, PowerPoint, and Problem-Solving videos. Have a look at my latest video below if you would like to learn about filtering data in a spreadsheet: