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,
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.
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)
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
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
There’s a change in the way Microsoft 365 works with a sign-in to a Microsoft account. This applies to Word 365, Excel 365, PowerPoint 365 and other Office apps. Up to recently, Microsoft 365 / Office 365 has worked normally either when signed into a Microsoft account or not. Having
There was a big change to Office 365 / Microsoft licenses on 1 October 2018. Microsoft 365 counts logins not installations It’s a totally new way of counting and limiting use of Microsoft Office. As long as there’s been Office, licenses have been based on installations of Office. A single
Fake login pages for Microsoft 365, OneDrive or Outlook.com are now the second most common phishing targets. Links in emails or messages to these bogus pages which grab your email and password for hackers to steal your secrets, or those of your company. Ironside reports that Microsoft related fake login
The latest ebook from Office-Watch.com is a little different, it’s a heartfelt ‘Thank You’ to our Office Watch donors. Peter Deegan has been quite astonished and humbled by the generosity of readers to our reader appeal. Both the money and kind remarks have been a considerable morale boost quite beyond
Microsoft is releasing a ‘Quick Poll’ option in Outlook ignoring the very similar, voting buttons, option that’s already in Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac. Use Voting Buttons to ask a question and Outlook will automatically collect responses. Office Watch also explains how recipient see the voting options and
Dictate now has formatting commands with two ways to apply bold, italic, underline and other text formatting as you speak. Dictate with formatting is now available in Word Online (in a web browser) for Microsoft 365 customers. It’ll spread to other Word releases (for Windows, Mac etc) later. To use
