Why Excel PivotTables get messed up and how to stop it. Time and again we’ve heard from people who try PivotTables and only get nonsense tables. That’s understandable since Microsoft’s hype about PivotTable ignores the basics that we’ll cover in this article. You’ve probably seen a Microsoft demonstration of PivotTables
How to add and remove data from a PivotTable. Thanks for the great feedback from our article on PivotTables. One concern some of you have is about adding or removing source data after the PivotTable has been created. That’s understandable because the original PivotTable releases where unclear and curiously sensitive
Forget the Romans … what use is a smartphone? The Guardian has an interesting article “From cameras to keycards, everyday devices killed off by the smartphone”. It could read like a scene from Life of Brian titled: “What have smartphones ever done for us?” “Well, aside from mobile phones, landlines,
Microsoft needs to play ‘catch up’ with email encryption. Yahoo is going to join Google is supporting not just email encryption but the same type of email encryption. Sadly we’ll have to wait until sometime in 2015 for Yahoo to release their version of OpenPGP. That’s good news … but
Some programs let you email documents directly – here’s now. Microsoft Office for iPad has an ‘Email as attachment’ as one of its limited options for sharing a document. Here’s some clever ways to make use of that and workaround the Office for iPad limitations. Some cloud services offer an
Updates now available free for our popular Windows 8.1 and Office for iPad ebooks. We’re pleased to tell you about TWO free updates to our ebooks that are now available. Free updates are just one of the unique benefits of Office-Watch.com ebooks. Office for iPad: The Complete Guide A third
The Insert | Symbol feature in Office is overdue for an overhaul. Our venture into the new Unicode symbols and symbol fonts highlighted how much work Microsoft needs to do on this part of Office. Insert | Symbol has changed for a long time and many versions of Office. Here’s
Microsoft celebrates 25 years of the software suite. Microsoft quietly celebrated the 25th anniversary of their Office suite on 1 August 2014 but were they being a little ‘previous’ in their celebrations? While Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows were around on 1 August 1989, were they sold as ‘Microsoft
A bad example of Excel and document sharing online. Over on Reddit there’s a sad example of sharing an Office document that does no credit to the author. A husband started a diary of his attempts at, shall we say, ‘horizontal folk dancing’ plus his partner’s reasons for not wishing
The latest Office for iPad announcement is misleading and accurate at the same time. You have to hand it to Microsoft .. they can write something that’s both accurate and misleading at the same time. It tricks customers and the media into thinking there’s more in a product than there
Only days after the v1.1 app updates, we’ve revised the matching ebook. A third edition of Office for iPad: The Complete Guide is now available. We’ve updated the book to include the changes made only a few days ago to the three apps (now version 1.1). The 3rd edition contains
More good stuff added to Office for iPad Microsoft has released version 1.1 of their Office for iPad apps with more useful features added. EMAIL to PDF Microsoft gets tricky with the wording of one new feature. They boast about “Export to PDF is available in the Share menu in
A simple, practical and non-scary example of how Excel PivotTables can work for you. Excel’s PivotTables are a great feature but one that seems way too hard for most of us … so here’s a simple and practical example of how PivotTables can help. A little fear of PivotTables is
Microsoft confirms Office across devices, including Android. There has been plenty of unquestioning press reports from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2014. Statistics and commitments are quoted without much consideration for their worth. The good news is another commitment to Microsoft Office ‘cross platform’ meaning, for the moment, not just
A funny example of how you can’t trust the spelling and grammar checks in Word. We laughed at this sign, seen in a Tesco’s supermarket in the UK. Guess what – according to Word 2013 that entire document has no grammar mistakes at all! Even ‘incontinence’ doesn’t get a contextual
Word: how to find the character code used for a particular letter or symbols. Last week we talked about the Unicode v7.0 symbols and how to use symbols in Word. With over 100,000 characters in the Unicode specification, it’s important to know the character code number for the symbol you
Microsoft delivers 1,000GB for Office 365 users. As we mentioned last month, Microsoft decided to greatly increase the OneDrive storage available for Office 365 subscribers. The base storage for paid customers is now 1 Terabyte. That change has now been implemented. If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, go to OneDrive
What is Delve and what does it mean for Microsoft Office? At the recent Microsoft conference there was mention of Microsoft Delve. But what the ?^%$ is ‘Delve’? It’s an enhanced search tool for your documents and online info. Not just standard Office documents but also videos, audio, links to
How can you get the new Unicode symbols in Office documents? There’s plenty of new symbols included in the Unicode 7.0 standard, here’s how to get them into your Office documents. Most fonts do NOT have all the Unicode characters, after all, there are over 133,000 of them. There are
Unicode adds more characters to an already large list. Unicode has added another 2,834 new characters in the Unicode 7.0 specification, mostly support for 23 new scripts. That takes the total to a whopping 113,021 characters! But we’ll have to wait for these new characters to appear automatically in Office,
Miracast gives you a wireless external screen for PowerPoint and a lot more. Miracast is a clever trick that lets you wirelessly connect some Windows 8.1 portable computers, Android and other devices to any HDMI capable monitor or TV screen. All you need is a Miracast dongle available online for
Microsoft makes a ‘one stop’ page for the latest Office update details. Figuring out what are the latest updates for Microsoft Office isn’t easy which is why we’re delighted to see Update center for Office, Office servers, and related products from Microsoft. It’s been a long time coming but as Sam
A guide to getting more life and value from your printer. The Guardian has a nice little guide to maintaining an inkjet printer and saving money. We’ve never had good experiences with recycled ink or toner cartridges and have always found their quality to be poor. But others swear by
Plenty of free ebooks about Office 2013, Office 2010, Office 365 and more. Microsoft has released another 130 free ebooks for anyone to download. It includes titles about Windows 8, Office 2013, Office 2010 and Office 365. A list of the Office related titles with links is below. Free ebooks
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