Data Mining ‘fun’ coming soon
The new Wikidata site should provide hours of Excel ‘fun’.The WikiMedia foundation, operators of Wikipedia among others, is developing a new site called Wikidata. It will be a home for public ‘structured data’ in other words, lists. There are plenty of lists already in Wikipedia. Wikidata will link with Wikipedia and help structure those lists […]
Office Mobile Apps coming soon
Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint will soon be on mobile devices. One interesting snippet generally overlooked in the Office 365 Small Business announcements was the mention of Office Mobile Apps. There’s been plenty of talk about Microsoft Office coming to mobile devices, especially non-Microsoft devices but the Office 365 announcement was the first time Redmond […]
Excel LEN anomaly for large numbers
A little Excel quirk to mention using LEN() with large numbers. A little Excel quirk to mention. For as long as we can remember you could get the number of digits in a number by simply using =LEN() even though the input is a number, not text. But have a look what happens for the […]
Office 2013: the real startup guide
Our famous guide to Office, saving money, install and new features. Now for Office 2013. Many of you figured it was coming and now it’s here … Office 2013: the real startup guide is available now. “Things you need to know that Microsoft won’t tell you: saving money, installing, configuring and using Office 2013” Only $9.95 […]
Word document recovery
Office lets you recover documents lost but it can be hard to choose the right one. For many versions of Office you’ve been able to recover open documents that haven’t been saved before a system crash, but the details aren’t obvious. If Windows or Office unexpectedly stops, there’s a chance that Office can recover the […]
Final London 2012 medal tally in Excel
Get the full medal tally into Excel for your own analysis. We close our Olympics coverage (sorry “Quadrennial Corporate-sponsored Rings-based Sporting Event”) with links to some looks at the medal tally. The Guardian continued their data analysis of the medal wins. In the end they produced a simple interactive which shows the medal count adjusted […]
London 2012 medal tally in Excel
Some alternative views of the Olympic medal count and how to Thanks to all the readers who dropped us a note about our article on the London 2012 Olympics calendar and how to overlay it in Outlook. While many are using it to schedule their TV viewing, others use the calendar to work out […]
Putting SuperPAC’s into Excel
How to get detailed SuperPAC donation and spending information into Excel. Today the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) is receiving and publishing details of the controversial SuperPAC’s showing who has donated and what they spent money on. It’s a good and timely example of how you can get information from the web and turn it […]
Piers and Larry and Excel
Who is better? Larry King or Piers Morgan – do your own analysis in Excel. Data is now available to analyze the CNN ratings of Larry King and his successor Pier Morgan (aka Piers Moron as he’s known to readers of Private Eye). We really don’t care about the ratings differences between a former King […]
Get folder / file list into Word or Excel
How to get a list of files in a folder into Microsoft Word. As long as there have been word processors, we’ve seen the question of how to get a list of files into a document. It should be simple bit it isn’t. Here’s how … You could write or get a Word macro to […]
CONVERT() could be better in Excel
Excel’s method of converting measurements is good but could be so much better. Once you start looking into the CONVERT function in Excel, you realize that it’s really an incomplete function. Excel has been around for a long time and yet this important feature has lapses that would make it better, easier and more accessible […]
Getting data from Internet into Excel
How to get table or other information from the net into Excel (or Word). Ever seen some data on the Internet and want to copy it for yourself? From small tables to large data chunks, there’s several ways to do it. Simple copying Almost any table or grid on a web page can be copied […]
Vertical Ribbon in Office 2007 or Office 2010
Can you have a vertical ribbon in Microsoft Office? Is it possible to make the ribbon go vertically down the side of a document instead of horizontally? Back in Office 2003, it was possible to move the toolbar from the top row to any side of the Office window – at the bottom or even […]
Nook Color does Office docs
The Nook Color tablet/ereader supports an impressive list of Microsoft Office documents. Office Watch reader, Dale M writes: ” for the NookColor …. it reads natively, office documents in Office 2003 and in Office 2007 format. Works for Word, Excel and PowerPoint and maybe others. Also, PDFs display quite nicely on NookColor. No loss of […]
Text Box in Excel, PowerPoint and Word
Word 2007/2010 Text Box is also in Excel and PowerPoint. We’ve talked a lot about the Text Box feature in Word 2007 and Word 2010. Both Excel 2007 / 2010 and PowerPoint 2007/2010 have Text Box features similar to Word. There’s no gallery to choose from, so you have to click on the Text Box button […]
Landing on the moon with Excel 2010
Microsoft’s promotional videos for Office 2010 continue with a video showing how Apollo 11 could have been made. Following Microsoft’s remaking of the US Declaration of Independence we now have a marketing video showing how NASA could have made the moon shots with Excel 2010. It shows how weight was the most important factor in […]
