Using Excel to Organize Your Browsing Discoveries
By: John W. Howe

Category: Self Help » Leadership
Article Views: [276] (Old Stats: 462)

Situation: You are browsing the Net and find a great site with solid content. You are rushed and intend to come back and read it later. When later comes, you cannot remember the URL and cannot find it. Has this ever happened to you? Microsoft Excel can help you solve this problem.

Judging from the large market share that Micosoft owns on the Internet, a large majority of Internet users have Excel available on their computers.

Excel is a great, versatile tool and can be used for any number of uses.

Many people consider Excel a program for number crunching and formulas.  It is much more than that.

An Excel workbook (contains more than one worksheet) can be created to record interesting information or websites to which  one wants to return later.  Nothing is more frustrating than to discover a great site with super content and not be able to find your way back to it.

An easy way to use Excel for this is to create an icon for the workbook and put it in the "Quick Launch" area of the tool bar on the bottom of the page to the right of the Start Button.  When you are browsing and find a "gem", you can quickly open the workbook and record the gem and its URL.  This workbook will probably stay open a lot of the time that you are on the Net.

To use Excel as a database, make each row be the entry in the database and each column be the field in the record contained in the rows.

You enter the information for an item in each row.  You can then sort all the information, use the Find function to look up an entry by search term, delete a row, insert a row, etc.

A video has been created to demonstrate how to use Excel to organize your topics and website locations. (Video length 24:32).

To effectively use the video, download the example Excel workbook from Boomer eZine.  To download it, right click on the link below and select "Save Target as".  Save the spreadsheet on your hard drive where you keep your important files.

http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Downloads/Info_Reference_Example.xls

You can use this workbook for your practice lessons in the video and you can use it for your mini-database.

Now, about the format of the video, it will cover a short topic and then pause so you can practice the same steps in the workbook.

If you want to go back and review something in the lesson, you can use the slider at the bottom of the video player to skip back.

When you are satisfied that you understand the content and you are ready to proceed, click on the arrow in the video to continue.

I hope you find this Excel workbook handy to organize your Internet browsing data.

Please use this form http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Suggestion_Form1.htm for any suggestions about the video -- Thanks.

http://www.tinyurl.com/2hlu8q Click here to view the video about using Excel as a mini-database

Good luck and good browsing.