Most of my Excel worksheets don’t fit on a single page, so when I print them, the sequence is important; if they print out of sequence, I spend loads of time putting the pages in order. How can I be sure the second page to print is the part of the sheet to the right of the first page or below it?

To control the sequence, click on File , Page Setup . Be sure you’re on the Sheet tab. At the bottom of the panel, right under Page order , make your selection: Either click on Down, then over (a graphic of that choice will appear to the right), or on Over, then down (and a graphic of that sequence will appear, too).

Then click on OK and proceed with your printing.

I often repeat formulas in worksheets. I know I can save them as macros and then insert them anytime with a few clicks, but I really don’t like macros. Is there an easy alternative?

There is, but I urge you to rethink your aversion to using macros. They actually are very easy to create and use. But here’s the alternative:

Select the cell with the formula you want to save and press F2 to put Excel in the edit mode, allowing you to edit contents of the highlighted cell. Depress the Shift key, and using either the mouse or the arrow keys, select the entire formula. Now press Ctrl+C to copy the formula, placing it in the Clipboard . Press Esc to exit from the edit mode.

Click on Insert , Name and choose Define , displaying the Define Name dialog box. Under Names in workbook , assign a name for the formula (it must be a name without spaces, such as add1 ).

Select whatever is in the Refers to box at the bottom of the dialog box and press Ctrl+V to replace that reference with the formula in the Clipboard .

Be sure to remove any absolute references ( $ ) in the formula because this method will not work well with them. Click on OK .

Now whenever you want to use the formula, all you need to do is enter an equal sign and the name you gave the formula. Although only the name will show in the cell, the formula will be used in any calculation.

In theory, going paperless is a great idea. In practice, however, the biggest obstacle, at least in my office, is not the work to convert documents into electronic files; it’s finding them afterward and retrieving them. We try to get everyone in the office to agree on a unified way to name files and place them in the correct folders, but often, when people are in a hurry, they file them incorrectly. We priced document-retrieving software as a way to solve that problem, but it was too costly. Any suggestions?

I mentioned that concern to one of my frequent correspondents, Jeff Lenning, president of Click Consulting in Seal Beach, Calif. He suggests using Google’s new desktop search engine, which is free. Although the original version of Google Desktop Search (GDS) can search only one computer, a recent enhancement gives it the ability to search a network’s shared drives. With the assistance of a third-party plug-in, GDS even can read and index Adobe ( .pdf ) files. In addition, by installing another Google plug-in, other computers in the office can even search your organization’s server computer. Now that is great news for those seeking quick searches across a network.

To run these services, first download GDS from http://desktop.google.com . It’s best to install it on your file server, although it can be installed on any Windows computer that has access to the network. Next, so GDS can read the Adobe format and index those files, install the plug-in OmniPage Search Indexer, also from the Google site. Finally, so all the computers on your network can access GDS through their Web browser, install the DNKA plug-in, also available at the Google site.

You’ll find other third-party plug-ins there, too. For example, if you want to be able to index Microsoft’s Access database files, load the AccessCrawler plug-in.

Call me old-fashioned, but when it comes to things like address and phone directories, I prefer a paper book. Is there some way to print a little booklet of my Outlook contacts with phone numbers and addresses?

Since I didn’t immediately know the answer to that question but realized it would be useful to many readers, I did a little experimenting in Outlook. To my surprise (and delight), when I clicked on File , Print , I discovered Outlook can take its contact data and format it for printing as a Card , Small Booklet , Medium Booklet , Memo or Phone Directory (see screenshot below).

Then, when I clicked on Page Setup , it revealed a wide assortment of booklet style choices for each basic format (see screenshot below).

I selected several of the options and then evoked a Print Preview of the page to see what they looked like. Here’s a scaled-down screenshot of one style of directory layout:

It couldn’t be easier.

I get into trouble when I want to print various pages or sections of a Word document. More often than not, I end up either printing the whole document or the wrong pages. Can you help me figure out the Print Range controls?

Let’s start from the beginning. When you command your computer to print (either by clicking on File , Print or pressing Ctrl+P), the Print menu appears. The controls are under the Page range section.

The Page range defaults to All (print the whole document). Below that is Current page (only print the page on the screen). If you want to print certain pages or sections—either sequential or nonsequential pages—click on Pages . Then if you want to print pages 3 to 6, type 3-6 . If you want to print page 3 and pages 5 through 8 and page 12, type 3, 5-8,12 .

Now, here is where it can get confusing. If your document contains sections, and you want to print pages 2 to 7 of section 4, be aware that the letter p stands for pages and s stands for sections, so the formula is p2s4-p7s4 . Likewise, you can specify a range across sections. To print page 2 of section 4 through page 5 of section 7, type p2s4-p5s7.

I have a few files that open very slowly even though none is unusually large. Do you have any
suggestions?

First make sure that Track Changes is turned off; it can slow the opening of a file to a crawl. Then, as a further check, click on Tools , Options , Save and be sure the Allow Fast Saves box is checked.

If that doesn’t help solve the problem, it may be that, over time, as the files were moved around and revised, they collected a lot of what I call “invisible formatting junk,” something for which Windows is notorious.

Here’s a way to clean out that junk: If you don’t have an icon in your toolbar for engaging formatting marks (they look like paragraph marks ), press Shift+F1 to open the Reveal Formatting screen and click on Show all formatting marks , which is at the bottom of that screen.

Those innocent-looking marks do more than reveal the start of a new paragraph; each invisibly encapsulates all the formatting code for the preceding paragraph. There’s a good chance the junk is lurking in that last paragraph mark. Just erasing it won’t do the trick; you need to copy the entire document—that is, all but the final paragraph mark.

Here are the steps: Open a new, blank document (Ctrl+N). Return to the slow file, cursor down to the end and delete the last paragraph mark. Now press Ctrl+A to highlight the entire document and then Ctrl+C to copy it. Switch to the new, blank document and press Ctrl+V to paste the contents there and save it with a new name. Now close the old document. Check in Explorer and you’ll probably discover that the new document is smaller than the old one. In all likelihood it will load more quickly.

Ctrl+1: Displays the Format Cells dialog box
Ctrl+9: Hides selected rows
Ctrl+0: Hides selected columns
Ctrl+(: Unhides any hidden rows within the selection
Ctrl+): Unhides any hidden columns within the selection
Ctrl+~: Applies the general number format
Ctrl+$: Applies the currency format with two decimal places (negative numbers in parentheses)
Ctrl+%: Applies the percentage format with no decimal places.

Stanley Zarowin, a former JofA senior editor, is now a contributing editor to the magazine. His e-mail address is zarowin@mindspring.com .