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Even if you, like me, only speak one language there are still some powerful language and dictionary options in Word to keep in mind.
All copies of Microsoft Office (recent versions anyway) come with English dictionaries. ‘Dictionaries’ plural because there’s many variants supplied. You’d expect English (US) and English (UK) but there’s many others available:
Of course, all language variants have a lot of common spellings but differences like the common ones color/colour etc. and less well known ones like spelled/spelt.
Other languages that are included with the ‘English’ version of Office are French and Spanish – with a similarly large number of variations including French for France and Canadian Quebecois.
... click here to read more at Office-Watch.com ...“I’m looking for a job and many employers are asking for my resume in RTF format. How do I do that and why can’t I just use a Word document?” Ian G.
RTF (Rich Text Format) is an older document format that’s been around for some time and still has a place. Microsoft Word can make and read RTF documents with little trouble.
It’s called ‘Rich Text’ to distinguish is from ‘plain text’ files. RTF documents can store a lot of formatting information like bold, italic, fonts, sizes etc. Some complex formatting available in Word can’t be saved in RTF format but for most purposes, like a resume, it’s more than enough.
To make an RTF document, go to File | Save As and choose Rich Text Format from the long list of options.
You can work on an RTF document all the time or have a Word document (.doc or .docx) and ‘Save As’ to RTF when you need a copy to send elsewhere.
Word’s File | Open dialog defaults to showing a range of document types including RTF, so you should only have to point to the correct folder and .RTF documents will appear.
... click here to read more at Office-Watch.com ...Windows RT tablets, like Microsoft’s Surface, are to get proper Outlook software later this year.
The news was announced by Microsoft in a blog post but the work on Outlook RT had been an open secret for months.
Windows RT is the low-power version of Windows running on ARM chips. The most prominent device is the Microsoft Surface which, while a nice piece of hardware, is badly let down by Windows RT. ‘RT’ Windows can’t run standard Windows programs so there’s a notable lack of available programs.
Word 2013, Excel 2013, PowerPoint 2013 and OneNote 2013 come with Windows RT devices at no extra charge, but there’s no equivalent of Outlook. That’s a major lapse and makes RT devices unappealing to businesses. In addition, the licence for Office RT is for home and non-commercial use so a business customer has to (in theory) pay again for a full Office licence.
... click here to read more at Office-Watch.com ...As a sign that the sales of Windows Tablets are not as good as the Redmond hype, Microsoft has announced that Office software can now be included free with the hardware.
Later this year (not right away) buyers of Windows tablet devices with screens between 7- to 10.1-inch size will get Office 2013 Home and Student Edition (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote) as well. There’s no extra cost for computer makers, so there should be no higher price for consumers.
This will happen when the update to Windows 8 (called Windows 8.1) is rolled out to computer makers and public later this year.
The bundling of Office with Windows 8.1 applies to tablets running on ‘standard’ x86 processors not the ‘RT’ tablets.
Windows RT tablets already come with Office 2013 Home and Student edition and will have an ‘RT’ version of Outlook added later in the year.
>... click here to read more at Office-Watch.com ...Back in July 2012 we showed you how to put singular or plural words against numbers in Excel – like 1 cookie or 3 cookies. At the end we noted how it got more complicated when you tried to deal with one, zero and negative numbers as well because Excel’s cell formatting has limitations.
Jon E. has come up with a clever solution which uses conditional formatting to split negative and positive cell values then have formatting appropriate for each side of zero.
“
You need TWO custom numbers, one for the positives, one for the negatives.
what I used for the positive values:
[=1]0 "day late";[>1]0 "days late";"On Time"
what I used for the negative values:
[=-1]0 "day early";[<-1]0 "days early";"On Time"
the key is to have a conditional format on all the cells telling it to use the positive custom format for cells >0 and the negative values for cells <1. (I guess you could also use >-1 and <0)
... click here to read more at Office-Watch.com ...The 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee in the USA got us wondering how Microsoft Word would cope. So we fired us Word 2013 with the latest English (US) dictionary as supplied by Microsoft.
We selected 30 words used in the final rounds of the spelling bee, Microsoft Word only recognized two of them. All the rest had the dreaded red squiggly line underneath.
The two words not underlined were:
Schadenfreude – is recognized by Word 2013. But only when capitalized. Probably because, as Wikipedia notes “the termschadenfreudeis sometimes capitalized to mimic German-language convention as German nouns are always capitalized”. Alas, the clever transposed variant ‘Freudenschade’ (sorrow at another persons success) isn’t recognized by Word 2013.
Ignimbrite a geological term definition is recognized by Word 2013.
... click here to read more at Office-Watch.com ...More details of the Windows 8 update are coming out and it’s much as we suggested a few weeks ago.
There will be a Start button on the bottom left of the desktop – Microsoft is calling it a ‘Start Tip’. It is NOT a return of the Start Menu from earlier versions of Windows. Instead the ‘Tip’ will send you to the tiled / Metro Start Menu.
You’ll be able to skip past the mandatory Start Menu and start Windows showing the desktop.
Both of these changes plus a ‘proper’ Start Menu can be had right now using one of the many Start Menu replacements available. We’ve been using Classic Start Menu which has an option to skip start Windows to the desktop.
Other Windows 8.1 changes that might interest Office users are …
The Start Menu is getting some changes. There’s new tile sizes and easier ways to rearrange apps into groups. Newly installed apps will be visible, as they were in earlier versions of Windows.
... click here to read more at Office-Watch.com ...Excel’s SUM() function is probably the first one we learn but there’s a lot more to it than simply clicking on the button to add up a list of numbers. In this article we’ll look at the options available in SUM and related functions.
SUM is pretty simple. SUM(B2:B5) will add up the numbers in cells B2, B3, B4 and B5.
Use a comma to separate cells you want to add up eg SUM(B2,B23,CD30) adds up the single cells B2, B3 and CD30 (in a large worksheet). Up to 255 individual references are possible.
You can mix ranges and single cells eg SUM(B2:B5,CD30).
SUM can add up references to cells, range, named range, formula or array.
Allowing formulas gives you flexibility to SUM without needing an intermediate cell to calculate before adding up. =SUM(B3 * PI(),B2) takes the value in B3 multiplies by PI (3.14159…) then adds the value in B2.
... click here to read more at Office-Watch.com ...While investigating the Excel ‘coding error’ in an economics paper we uncovered a worrying bug in Excel.
It occurs in our testing of Excel 2013 in the cell ranges of formulas like SUM and AVERAGE at the bottom of columns of values.
When the columns contain a mix of numbers and text values (like ‘n/a’ for a value that’s not available) then the cell ranges at the bottom aren’t consistent when you add a row to the list.
To add trouble the Audit features in Excel, that are supposed to detect these kinds of inconsistent cell ranges doesn’t always work.
So far we’ve tested Excel 2013 and Excel 2010, we’ll look at earlier versions soon.
Let’s start with a simplified version of the worksheet that started all the trouble.
Note that column B and E have text cells with ‘n.a.’ instead of numeric values. That was done in the original worksheet and is a common way to deal with ‘known unknowns’ (as Donald Rumsfeld would say). The text cells will affect the results of SUM or AVERAGE but that’s not the concern here. The bug is in the cell ranges (e.g B2:B5, C2:C5 etc) in row 6.
... click here to read more at Office-Watch.com ...A few weeks ago came the news that a much quoted academic paper was based on a faulty Excel worksheet.
The paper titled "Growth in a Time of Debt." from Reinhart & Rogoff was widely used to support the idea of limiting government expenditure during the current fiscal crisis. They concluded (wrongly) that there was a 0.1% decrease in economic growth across various countries when the real figure was 2.2% Increase. A difference of 2.3% seems small but that’s a massive difference when we’re talking about economic growth of countries.
There were several problems with the calculation and methodology. We don’t intend to deal with the level of disclosure nor conclusions in the paper let alone the subsequent use in economic policy. That’s an economic and political area that us mere computer nerds are quite unqualified to comment upon.
We’ll just look at the mistake made in Excel. Paul Krugman called it a ‘coding error’ and that phrase was used elsewhere without further detail.
... click here to read more at Office-Watch.com ...|
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