Excel in Fiction
Excel is everywhere including in crime fiction here’s some examples. Jo Livingstone has compiled some excerpts from novels that mention Excel. “George spent the next week glued to the chair in front of his computer, plugging new figures into his Excel spreadsheet, moving them about from column to column like some elaborate chess game.” “Safety […]
Straight lines and neater drawn shapes in Office
If you’ve used OneNote recently, you’re probably aware of the feature allowing you to draw shapes and make lines straight. Then Word for Windows got “Draw and Hold”. Now Excel and PowerPoint can draw straight lines and draw neat shapes (circle, square and more). We’ll explain how it works and how it’s different to the similar […]
Focus Cell for better highlighting in Excel
A nice extra coming to Excel 365 highlights the selected cell, row and column with a single click or use an Excel trick to get the same and even better look now. Until now, that’s only been possible with some conditional formatting and a touch of VBA. Excel 365 will be able to do the […]
Excel tricks to highlight selected row, column, heading and more
Make it easier to see your current cell in an Excel workbook by dynamically highlighting the selected row, column, cell or headings. Here’s obvious and more subtle highlighting options plus the downside of highlighting, real world tips and debugging tricks if you’re having trouble. There are many different variations on this method; two colors, headings […]
Make simple bar charts with Conditional Formatting
Excel can make bar charts in-cell without bothering with the full Chart system. Despite what you might have seen, there’s plenty of options in Excel Data Bars. The usual example of Excel Data Bars has the colored bar in the same cell as the value. In this article we’ll show how it’s possible to have […]
Office 2024 is now on sale
The new version of Microsoft Office 2024 is now on sale to the general public all around the world. This is the ‘perpetual licence’ or single purchase release with no subscription fee. Office 2024 is now available direct from Microsoft.com and some retailers at the same prices as Office 2021. See All about Office 2024 […]
How to correctly spell Brontë in Microsoft Word with the diaresis
An 85-year-old blunder has just been fixed at Westminster Abbey to change the spelling to Brontë with the important diaresis. Here’s how to type an ë in Word and other matters arising. Here’s how the memorial to the Brontë sisters looked in Poets Corner until a few days ago. For 85 years this memorial, seen […]
Microsoft Office and the “Dialog from Hell”
A short video which brings up some interesting points in the early development history of Microsoft Office, some might surprise you. Microsoft Office started as separately sold products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) and only gradually did they become an integrated package with shared components, consistent interface and some interconnections. See the whole video on […]
Limited-time offer: Free Python in Excel classes
While it lasts, check out some free classes about Python in Excel for better data analysis, DataFrames, charts & visualizations and machine learning. We’re a big fan of Python in Excel and these lessons should help those of us who haven’t yet caught the Python bug. Advance Your Python in Excel Skills, will be available […]
Python in Excel is now available to ‘all’
Excel 365 now has Python features included for all business and enterprise customers with a Microsoft 365 software licence Python is a powerful programming language with many great libraries of tools for analysis and charting. It’s a massive extension to Excel that we’ve already raved about. Python Editor for Excel is out and essential Excel […]
Copilot Wave 2 – watch out for the fine-print
A new collection of Copilot features have been released under the banner “Wave 2” with inclusions for Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Word and Teams. Don’t get too excited because there’s ‘fine print’ that limits who can catch this wave. Before we explain a little of what’s in the new set of Copilot features, let’s look at […]
Excel – why do the columns have numbers not letters?
What to do if Excel’s columns have numbers across the top instead of letters. There’s a simple setting to switch between two different ways of labelling cells. You open an Excel workbook and the column headings look all wrong – instead of letters (A, B C …) there are numbers. There are numbers for both […]
Building In-Cell Bar Charts in Excel
In-cell charts in Excel provide a powerful method to visualize data trends and patterns. They allow you to quickly derive insights within a worksheet, making information interpretation more straightforward without fussing about with full charts. We’ll explain how to make in-cell charts and then go further and show how to make them look better by […]
Lock up and stop editing of Excel worksheet or cells!
How to lock your Excel worksheet from editing – the whole thing or some cells. Allow some people to edit a few cells, leaving the rest of the cells and formulas untouchable by others using the worksheet. Here’s a very simple example: Anyone opening the worksheet can enter a US dollar amount to see the […]
Pay less for Microsoft 365 with the Workplace Discount Program
The Workplace Discount Program (formerly Home Use Program) offers 30% discounts on Microsoft 365 to employees of many organizations and government agencies. Here’s how the Workplace Discount Program (WDP) works, the tricks and traps. What is the Workplace Discount Program – WDP? Organizations (companies, governments etc.) that have Microsoft 365 volume licenses can get Software […]
TrimRange solves a long-standing performance Excel problem
Excel is getting a new function TrimRange() which should solve a long-standing calculation performance problem. As well as speeding up workbooks, TrimRange() comes with some new range options that add to the well-known colon. Ever since Microsoft added dynamic arrays to Excel there’s been a problem … how to reference a range of cells that […]
