Q. I know I can add a comment to a cell by clicking on Comment under the Insert toolbar, but is there a way to embed a comment inside a formula? That way, I can explain to viewers what the formula represents without having all those little red triangles sprinkled throughout, making my spreadsheet look as if it has chickenpox. A. Well, there is a way to add a comment inside a formula (and yes, it’s hidden, except when you put your cursor over it), but there also is a way to get the “chickenpox” marks out of Comments . I’ll tell you how to do both.

Answering your immediate question, insert some numbers in a spreadsheet and then, when you write the formula that adds them up ( =SUM(D2:D4 ), attach the following to the end of the formula: +N(“Comments without chickenpox”) . So, for example, the complete formula might look this:

=SUM(D2:D4)+N(“Comments without chickenpox”).

Now, when you highlight the formula cell, the comment appears in the formula box under the toolbar.

You can achieve a similar result using the Comment function. To add a comment to a cell, click on Insert, Comment and type your comment into the balloon that appears. In Excel’s default setting, when you move the cursor off the cell, a small red triangle appears in the upper right-hand corner of the cell (see screenshot above).

When your cursor passes over the comment-embedded cell, the full comment appears in the balloon (see screenshot at left).

You can adjust the default setting so you can control how, or even whether, those red markers appear. To make the adjustment, go to Tools, Options and then click on the View tab.

Under Comments , you have three options: None (all signs of the comment are hidden), Comment indicator only (only the red triangle shows) and Comment & indicator (every comment and its marker shows).

WORD "> WORD
Q. When I send a memo to my three partners for review, they use Word’s Track Changes to add their comments and make changes. When I’m ready to review their comments, I have to handle one reviewer at a time. Isn’t there a way to do it all at once and yet keep the identity of each person? It would save lots of time.

A. You’re right; it would be a time-saver. But if you have a version of Word earlier than 2002, you’re out of luck. Your only choices are to do each individually or accept or reject them all as a group. In 2002 Word shows a list of reviewers, each with a check mark. Each time you select one, its check mark disappears.

A. Well, Word may indeed be finicky at times, but when this happens it’s not because the application made a mistake, it’s because you were unaware of a strange, even unintuitive, feature of Word. Few users realize it, but in Word, the formatting information is stored in, of all places, the paragraph mark.

“Wait a minute,” I can almost hear you saying, “there are no paragraph marks on my screen.”

You may not see them, but trust me, they’re there. Every time you hit the Enter key, an invisible paragraph mark is embedded at that cursor location. I’m telling you that because when you want to paste text from one place to another and you want the formatting to go with it, make sure you select the paragraph mark, too.

“But if I can’t see it, how can I be sure I’m taking it along?” you’re probably asking now.

The answer is: Make the paragraph mark visible. To do that, you can either change the Word default and make them visible all the time (which I don’t recommend because they make the screen very busy and you don’t need them most of the time), or you can add an icon to your toolbar that lets you turn them on and off as needed.

To change the default, click on Tools, Options and then on the View tab. Under the Formatting marks category, select the check box labeled Paragraph marks and click on OK , as shown above left.

A better way is to add the paragraph icon ( ) to your toolbar. To do that go to T ools, Options, Customize and click on the Commands tab. Under View , grab the paragraph icon ( Show All ) with your mouse and drag it to your toolbar.

Now you can hide and unhide the paragraph marks with a single click.

A. If you use foreign characters only occasionally, I can show you how to produce them with your regular keyboard. But if your correspondence is heavy, you may want to buy a special foreign-language keyboard.

In the meantime the box at right shows the keystroke shortcuts that will produce the most popular foreign characters.

Q. I have a problem that is driving me crazy! I know the asterisk (*) is used as a “wild card” when you’re searching for a file or data. But what I need to replace is a bunch of asterisks in an Excel worksheet and replace them with some data. So I evoke Find and Replace (Ctrl+H) and instruct it to replace all the asterisks with my data. So far so good. But when I hit Replace All , it replaces everything in the worksheet—not just the asterisks—because the asterisk is a wild card! It’s a catch-22. You see why this is making me nuts? Please help!

A. Relax. There is a solution. For those who aren’t aware of the power of wild cards, let me take a moment to bring you up to speed. A wild card is a keyboard character—in this case, an asterisk—that stands for any keyboard character(s); it’s not unlike wild cards in poker. So, for example, if you’re doing a search with Explorer’s Search tool for the file C:\clients\zignazerwitz \taxproblem.doc , but you don’t remember (or can’t spell) the client’s name—Zignazerwitz—you can use the asterisk wild card: *\tax problem.

Now, back to the question. The asterisk also is a wild card when you conduct a search or a replacement, and it works in all applications, including Excel. Thus, if you want to find all the 4s in a worksheet, even when some of the cells contain multiple numbers such as 34 and 44, you evoke Find and Replace and enter *4 in Find what:.

Excel does the search, finds all the 4s, even when they are paired with other numbers, and tells you their cell location.

But if your worksheet contains asterisks and you want to replace them with 4s, you need to tell Excel to cancel the asterisk’s wild card attribute by placing a tilde (~) before it like this: ~*.

Now Find and Replace produces this screen, replacing all the asterisks with 4s:

Q. What happened to one of my favorite Windows utilities—ScanDisk? Before I upgraded to Windows 2000 I used ScanDisk all the time to check and repair any problems it found on my hard disk. But it seems Microsoft left it out of Win 2000.

A. Yes, Microsoft replaced it with a new utility that’s just as good as ScanDisk. However—and this may be hard to believe—it has no name, and for reasons known only to Microsoft, it’s hidden. It’s not even listed in the Help index.

There are two ways to launch it: Either click on the My Computer icon on the desktop and right-click on C:\ ( or whatever your hard drive is labeled) or go to Explorer and right-click on C:\ . Then click on Properties , which brings up a Local Disk (C:) Properties screen and click on the Tools tab (see screenshot below).

You now have three options: You can click on Check Now , which will perform the tasks formerly performed by ScanDisk; you can click on Backup Now , which, as the name implies, backs up files; or you can click on Defragment Now , which will defrag the files on the disk and, as a result, speed up your computer.

Microsoft also hid the functions that replace ScanDisk in XP, but you can access them the same way; however, Microsoft omitted the Backup Now option for some reason.

While I have your attention about checking the health of your hard disk, Windows 2000 and XP also contain Disk Cleanup , a function that tells you which files, such as accumulated temporary files, you can safely erase. While Microsoft doesn’t quite hide the function, it makes it difficult to find.

There are two ways to access it. Either right-click on C:\ and this time go to the General tab to see the Disk Cleanup button just below middle of the screen, or left-click on Start (the button that starts the shutdown process for Windows; pretty intuitive, eh?) and go to All Programs, Accessories, System Tools and, presto, Disk Cleanup .

If you have Windows 2000 or later, Windows can be set to automatically adjust the clock’s time for you. Every time you connect to the Internet, it will search out the exact time and reset your clock. To program Windows to do that, just right-click on the time in the systems tray and go to Date and Time Properties and click on the Internet Time tab, placing a check in Automatically synchronize with an Internet time server (see screenshot at right).

If you have an older version of Windows, you can still get your clock to run on time. There are a bunch of free applications that link to the Bureau of Standards atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, and, with a click or two, will adjust your computer’s internal clock. To get connected, go to http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/software/index.html .

Then, click on the paragraph in which you want the formatting revealed, and it produces the following:'

You also can set up a toolbar button that toggles the screen of selected text. Here’s how to set up such a button: Go to Tools, Customize , and if it’s not already highlighted, click on the Commands tab. Under Categories , cursor down to View and drag the Reveal Formatting icon up to the toolbar (see screenshot below).

First the gratis option: As you probably know, it’s easy to save an Outlook e-mail message as text. Just open the message and click on File and Save A s. You then have the option to save it with a file name and a format—as HTML or plain text; if you want, you later can convert either version of text to a Word file, but that’s an extra step.

Now, what you probably didn’t know is that you can save a bunch of e-mails as a single file. So if you have a group of e-mails relating to one subject, you can store them in a single message. To do that, select the e-mails you want to gather together and, while holding down the Ctrl key, highlight them one at a time and then click on File, Save As .

This method provides a bonus. Compared with trying to search through Outlook’s native database, you’ll find it easy to index and search those more familiar text files.

If you’re willing to pay for a utility, called ArchivER, that does the above and much, much more, go to http://www.smtechnologies.com/prod13.htm and download a free evaluation copy. The program can migrate Outlook data into individual files and directories using a common file format rather than the Outlook archive folder.

Another reader recommended using the F4 function key to toggle between making a cell reference relative and absolute. Either double-click on the cell or press F2 to edit the cell; then hit F4. It works even when you highlight multiple cells. F4 adds the dollar sign to the cell references you’ve highlighted. If you don’t highlight a cell reference, Excel will add the dollar sign only to the cell reference closest to your cursor.

For this latest suggestion, thanks to Dan Olsen, who works for Utah’s Division of Finance in Salt Lake City.