This ol’ chestnut.
Share your knowledge! What’s a software-related technical trick you’ve used this semester to get a client out of a bind?
My reply:
I had a client who was having trouble sorting their data on Excel. They followed all the right steps but the sort command had no effect on their document. This is, most of the time, due to a very simple reason: they’re sorting the table based on cells that have cell references (in formulas) in them instead of values. The (simple) solution to this is to copy the contents of the cells and paste them as values (paste > paste special > values). The sort would then work on the newly copied cells. This may not be the most elegant solution, but for most purposes this is better than the more complex solutions.
I also had a client who was having issues formatting their resume on Word. I used the super handy show/hide paragraph button to reveal what was wrong with their resume. Turns out all the lines and paragraphs in that document were in cells in a table. I’ve seen this quite a lot. This usually happens when they copy-paste data from somewhere else into their document. There is no quick fix that I know of, other than moving the data from each cell into a regular paragraph in the document.