Excel for iPad – a tour
The features in Excel for iPad.Here’s a look at the major features in Excel for iPad, looking over the five main tabs. The buttons will be familiar in most cases, though the underlying menus/galleries are different and limited compared to Excel for Windows or Mac. Shameless plug:Office for iPad: The Complete Guide is now available. Every […]
Excel for iPad – Formula Keyboard
A close look at the new Formula Keyboard in Excel for iPad. One of the highlighted innovations in Excel for iPad is a dedicated Formula Keyboard which looks like this: It’s necessary because none of the supplied iPad virtual keyboards work well when you’re trying to enter Excel formula. Hunting and pecking around different symbol […]
Office ScreenTips in other languages
A free way to show Microsoft Office help in other languages Office Screentips is a way to show tooltips for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other programs. This free addon from Microsoft doesn’t interfere with how the programs work or the wording of the tabs and ribbons. Only the tooltips that appear when you hover […]
Picture problems in Office
How to find your pictures to insert into an Office document. Even a simple thing like adding a picture to an Office document or email has subtleties and annoyances. When you choose Insert | Picture in recent versions of Office, it opens, by default, in the Picture Library. That seems sensible, at least to Microsoft. […]
Translation function in Excel
Can you call a Translation service to return results in Excel? After checking out the clever European word translator, we started wondering about loading translations into Excel. It should be simple to have some code to call a web server and return a translation of a word. Office 2010 and Office 2013 have a ‘mini […]
The Clinton’s special Excel worksheet
How the Clinton ‘Saints and Sinners’ spreadsheet might look. Excel has many uses and an upcoming book talks about one of them. Apparently Bill and Hillary Clinton used Excel to maintain a list of those they like and dislike. We could not help wonder what the Clinton worksheet would look like and why they’d use […]
Putting Health Data into Excel
Examine US public health data in Excel. One of the great things about the recent Internet is the availability of previously hidden data. Large blocks of information have been collected, checked and published online. Combine that with a tool like Excel and you can do your own analysis! Here’s just one example of what’s available […]
Import Best Buy prices into Excel
An example of web scraping from BestBuy.com into Excel. We’ve already talked about getting prices from the Amazon.com web site into Excel with automatic updates. Now let’s look at how to do it for BestBuy.com prices.Excel has had a method of web scraping for many versions you can find it at Data | Get External […]
Amazon price scraping to Excel
How to check Amazon product prices automatically in Excel. With Black Friday coming in the USA, it’s time to carefully check prices and look out for bargains. Ideally get those prices automatically and put them into Excel for comparison. To do that for Amazon means ‘scraping’ or trying to grab prices from a web page. […]
The NeverEnding Office 2007 updates
Updating Office 207 can literally go on forever! Many users are reporting a problem with the patches for Office 2007. The three troublemakers are: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760583/ (KB 2760583) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760411/ (KB 2760411) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760588/ (KB 2760588) No matter how many times you install them, manually or automatically. Given the widespread nature of the problem, across different versions of […]
How precise is Excel?
How accurate is Excel compared to universal needs. On page 45 of the Sept/Oct 2013 Mental Floss magazine is a small item ‘Why do we care so much about the digits if Pi’ which includes this trivia: “The computers that keep the International Space Station humming round off pi at a crude 16 digits. When […]
Editing Office documents with Evernote
Evernote for Android now comes with the ability to edit Office documents. Our favorite notemaking system, Evernote, now has the ability to edit Office documents within their Android version. Yes – we very much prefer Evernote over Office Onenote. Evernote runs very well, syncs seamlessly and completely across all popular platforms and devices. Evernote has […]
Excel’s SUM is much more
There’s SUM and then there are all the useful SUM variations to choose from. 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 […]
Excel bug: Row Insertion and cell ranges
We found a worrying bug in Excel 2013 when inserting rows into an existing worksheet. 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 […]
Excel’s effect on economic policy
A simple Excel worksheet mistake caused a change in economic policy. Was it a user’s mistake or Microsoft’s? 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 […]
New from existing document .. the alternatives
Other ways to make a new document based on an existing one … There’s more than one way to get a similar result as ‘New from Existing…’ that are worth keeping in mind. They apply across all recent versions of Word as well as Excel and Powerpoint too. You can just open the source document […]
