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 scientists […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
