Are your Excel worksheets ready for negative interest rates? The world is seeing historically low interest rates. So low that they can drop to zero or even lower rates. Not only can Excel worksheets break with unexpected negative percentages but modelling can accidently move into negative territory. Interest rates might
Excel’s Sparklines have a good range of options for highlighting high and low values, text or calculated overlays, changing axis and handling blank or zero values. Sparklines are in Excel for Windows and Mac. Excel Mobile (iPhone, iPad, Android) shows existing Sparklines made elsewhere but they can’t be changed, only
There’s been another breakdown in Microsoft’s crucial online services – the third in only ten days. The trouble started on Thursday 7th October about 2:45pm US East Coast time (18:45 UTC). Users could not login to Microsoft cloud services. According to Microsoft, the outage affected “Microsoft Teams, Outlook, SharePoint Online,
Google’s paid suite of Office software and services was called G Suite is now called Google Workspace. Google Workspace plans have custom email for businesses with collaboration tools like Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites and more That’s not all, Google Workspace comes with new icons
Microsoft is changing their operating system requirement for Office 365 on Mac from 10 November 2020. From 10 November 2020, Office 365 will need one of these macOS release: 10.14 (Mojave) 10.15 (Catalina) the upcoming 11.0 (Big Sur) to get Office 365 updates or install on new computers. Keep up
Excel isn’t the best way to store a large database but it’s a great way to sort, filter, analyse, chart and PivotTable from it. Here’s the best way to import and update a large database into Excel. The standard way to store a list in Excel is to import CSV’s
The UK has been embarrassed (again) with the news that around 16,000 COVID-19 test results were missing from the official database and so contact tracing wasn’t done. The culprit? Excel. Or, to be fair, bad use of Excel is to blame. Not understanding it’s limits and how to workaround them.
A strange name but Sparklines is a useful new part of Excel which makes simple single-cell graphs in Excel for Windows or Mac. Mea Culpa – we thought that ‘Sparklines’ was a fancy name made up by Microsoft after a long liquid lunch … Office Watch readers, John F, Nick
Office Lens, the nifty way to photograph documents then convert to a document or PDF is ending it’s run as a Windows app. Office Lens for Windows is mostly for Windows Mobile smartphones though it can also be used on any Windows 10 machines. Microsoft has gone beyond just stopping
Word and Outlook are getting a new text prediction feature which suggests the rest of a sentence and phrase as you type. It’s like an advanced form of autocomplete that appears in browsers. As you type, the rest of a word or more will appear in light gray. Accept the
Microsoft isn’t having a good week with yet another breakdown of their cloud services. This time it’s their mail hosting infrastructure for Microsoft 365 hosted mailboxes and Outlook.com . The troubles started early on Thursday 1st October 2020 (before 7am UTC ) Initially it seemed to only affect Outlook on
Microsoft has done a clever thing, combining two important Excel features into a new and really useful addition – Custom Data Types. Excel 365 for Windows/Mac already has Stock and Geography data types to drop live information into workbooks. It’s now possible to make your own Custom Data Types (CDT)
Ignore the scary headlines and threats about Office 2010 ‘ending’ early next month. Things are nowhere near dire, desperate or urgent for Office 2010 users. Office 2010 support (security patches, bug fixes and tech support) end on 13 October 2020. That does NOT mean that the software will suddenly stop
Office 2010 ends support on 13 October 2020 and we’ve been receiving questions from readers asking about switching to newer Microsoft Office. We’ll answer questions about when to update, what to replace Office 2010 and important factors to consider. We’re hearing concerns about privacy in modern Office, reliability and the
It seems that Microsoft has quietly changed how they enforce Office 2019 licences on a single computer. Some people are discovering that they can’t use Office 2019 the way they did a few months ago. Office 2019 is the perpetual licence, one-time payment version of Microsoft Office. You buy the
Microsoft has finally confirmed what was long suspected. There will be another fixed price, perpetual licence version of Microsoft Office. The successor to Office 2019 will be released in late 2021 for Windows and Mac. Update in late 2021: of course we now know it’s called Office 2021 All about
Microsoft 365 suffered a major outage of their online and cloud services. Here’s what we know, where we stand now and how to reduce your risk of trouble with future problems. The online services from Microsoft could not be accessed from about 5pm Monday (US Eastern) that included Office logins,
Microsoft 365 Enterprise customers can now try Application Guard as a new way to protect against malicious documents infecting computers.What is Application Guard and what it means for Office 365 Application Guard is a combination of Windows 10 Defender and Office programs that opens a suspect document in a special
Microsoft Word is getting the adaptive mini-toolbar. The extension to the mini-toolbar appeared in preview versions of PowerPoint recently. Now it’s in Word previews as well. The buttons on the right change according to how you use Word. Compare that to the current Word mini-toolbar with a fixed list of
Apple’s iOS 14 for iPhone and iPad have some useful new features. Change default mail and web apps, Widgets, Scribble and Translate. Microsoft wasted no time improving Outlook to take advantage and adding a little extra to OneDrive. iOS 14 was released with very little notice to app developers. Most
There are several ways to fill in a PDF form and add your signature with Microsoft Word, Acrobat Reader or online services. All these tips are free with nothing to pay. It’s possible to ‘sign’ a PDF form and return it without making a paper copy. Paper forms are so
PowerPoint for Windows is getting a new mini-toolbar with adaptive extra features. Some of the buttons will change depending on the tools you most commonly use. The mini-toolbar is in all Office apps, it appears whenever you select something. At the moment, the options are the same with basic formatting
Common programming tools can be used to make malicious Office workbooks which bypass both online security checks and Microsoft’s own protections in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Access. We’ll explain what’s happening and what Microsoft could do better. VBA Purging or VBA Stomping are clever tricks to make an Office documents
The latest iPad Air is interesting but, like many iPad’s there’s a hidden extra cost because of Microsoft 365 licence rules. The new iPad Air has the usual changes, a faster processor and slightly better screen. The big changes are: Fingerprint login is combined with the Power button USB-C connector