Delete a predefined or custom cell style

You can delete a predefined or custom cell style to remove it from the list of available cell styles. When you delete a cell style, it is also removed from all cells that are formatted with it.

1. On the Home tab, in the Styles group, click Cell Styles.

   Tip If you do not see the Cell Styles button, click Styles, and then click the More button next to the cell styles box.

2. To delete a predefined or custom cell style and remove it from all cells that are formatted with it, right-click the cell style, and then click Delete.

via Apply, create, or remove a cell style – Excel – Microsoft Office Online.

Office 2007 is, at times, the bane of my existence. Microsoft took away all the menus I’d been familiar with for more than a decade and replaced them by a completely new format that slows down the speed at which I work.  I mostly use keyboard shortcuts, which they have, thankfully, kept, but I don’t always remember them exactly.

In Word 2007, I still don’t know how to get to Page Setup without going to Print Preview.  I routinely need to spend time locating menus that have moved.

Today’s Troubles:

Now, in Excel 2003 there was a lovely menu tool that let me modify the table borders as I please. Of course, the more powerful options were in the format cells menu, but this was good enough.  So, not finding this menu button in my Excel 2003 document opened in Excel 2007, I tried clicking the Table Styles button and found a pretty style. But, every time I saved, Excel would remark that the styles were incompatible with previous versions of Excel. It wouldn’t, however, till me how fix it. So, Heaven Help Me, I couldn’t figure out how to remove the style and ended up just recreating the worksheet and using Alt,O,E  (Format Cells) and borders to make my borders.

The “Format as Table” menu doesn’t offer any option to remove Table Styles.

I had found the Microsoft help page (quoted above) with the Google search “excel 2007 remove table style” and tried “Remove a cell style from data” which didn’t work. As I write this, I realize that these instructions are for “Cell Styles” not “Table Styles”. If I try this on from the “Format as Table” menu, as above, the option “Apply and clear formatting” appears but doesn’t do anything.

In any case, I really don’t have the time to figure this out.  All in all, it is very frustration for this techie to be stymied by what Microsoft presumably saw an an improvement.

For all those wondering how us ‘computer savvy’ people can help you even if we aren’t familiar with your program or operating system.

XKCD Tech Support Cheat Sheet

Ominously, research by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — suppressed for years and released on Tuesday after petitions were filed by advocacy groups — shows that there are “negligible differences” in accident risk whether you’re holding the phone or not. Hands-free devices may even enhance the danger by lulling you into complacency.

It is the conversation that pulls focus. My greatest fear is that I’m going to be in a taxi when the driver gets a call from his wife to tell him that she’s run off with his sexy cousin.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Whirling Dervish Drivers – NYTimes.com.

also  Driven to Distraction, Dr. John Ratey:

Scientists are grappling, too, with perhaps the broadest question hanging over the phenomenon of distracted driving: Why do people, knowing the risk, continue to talk while driving? The answer, they say, is partly the intense social pressures to stay in touch and always be available to friends and colleagues. And there also is the neurological response of multitaskers. They show signs of addiction — to their gadgets.

John Ratey, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and a specialist on the science of attention, explained that when people use digital devices, they get a quick burst of adrenaline, “a dopamine squirt.” Without it, people grow bored with simpler activities like driving. Mr. Ratey said the modern brain is being rewired to crave stimulation, a condition he calls acquired attention deficit disorder.

“We need that constant pizzazz, the reward, the intensity,” he said. He largely dismisses the argument that people need the time in the car to be productive. “The justification for doing work is just that — a justification to be engaged,” he said.

There is some truth that taking a break from technology, from computer to kindle to phone to radio, can be very comforting and rejuvenating.  I try to take a break at least once a week.

I am positive that the sheer volume and accessibility of information is cause as much for anxiety as it is a source of good.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

via Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com.

What poetic irony that the already purchased books were George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984″.  Could you imagine Microsoft of Apple remoting into your computer and deleting programs?  How is this acceptable behavior?