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 You can do IT is a regular feature of laterlife.com
aimed at trying to help laterlife visitors make the most of Information Technology on or
off the web.
Jackie Sherman who runs the You can do IT
Question & Answer section is an IT trainer and author. Jackie has spent her career in
education and specialises in teaching IT to adults. Her courses for adults include such
topics as MS Office, the Internet, e-mail and basic web page authoring. 
Jackie has also written the two books shown here - you can find
more details about these by clicking on the cover images above. Jackie has also been running a course specifically for over
50s.
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Via laterlife.com Jackie aims to particularly help those new to IT and the web to
build up knowledge and confidence, so no question is too basic. At the same time she will
cover Q&As for the more experienced user.
So if you
would like to ask a question of Jackie, why not email her jackie@laterlife.com
or if you
have discovered something which may be of interest to others in making the most of the
web, then she would love to hear about that too jackie@laterlife.com
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March
2004
As many of you are gardeners and this is the time to be thinking about
next year`s display, I thought I would explain how to use a spreadsheet package such as
Excel for keeping track of sowing and cropping information.
Open a new spreadsheet and type your headings across the columns: these
might include the plant type, variety, form (seeds, bulbs etc.), month to sow, month to
start cropping, flowering season, colour of flowers etc. etc. It is always a good idea to
put in as much information as possible.
If you want to consult the spreadsheet regularly to see what sowing or
other gardening jobs are coming up during the month, you will need to sort your plant
records by date. You cannot, therefore, type in January, February etc as these can only be
sorted alphabetically, so that August will appear well before January. You will need to
represent the months by typing dates the machine will recognise e.g. 1/1/04 or 1/8/04. If
you want the selected column to display Jan, Feb etc. instead of 1/4/04, open the Format
- Cells menu, click Date, then click Custom and select or type the
letters mmm to represent the first 3 letters in the month (or mmm-yy to display
Apr-04)
Now type in all your plant information. Later, if you want to add a new
plant record, simply insert a new row: click on the numbered grey row header, open the Insert
menu and select Rows. A new row will slide into place. (You could also add new
plants at the bottom of the entries and re-sort the records to put them into their proper
place.)
To reorder the records, you will need to carry out a sort. Select ALL
the entries, including the column headings, and open the Data-Sort menu. This
allows you to sort by one heading, then by a second and even by a third e.g. by month of
sowing, name of plant and then month of harvesting. (If you don`t include the column
headings when you select the data, you will find you have to sort by Column A, B or C etc
which isn`t as easy as using the real heading names.)
Finally, you can use your spreadsheet to find plants easily using the
Filter. Once again, select all the data and then go to Data - Filter - AutoFilter.
Arrows will appear next to each heading. If you click the arrow, you will display all
entries in that particular column. To find which plants need to be sown in February, for
example, click on February in the list dropped down from the SOW column, and you
will filter out all other records.
For more complex searches, select the Custom entry in any column
and then complete the various boxes e.g. to display plants that can be harvested in June
or July, use equals for the months and click the Or button:
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