Yet one more for the list of things you’d never thought you’d see from Microsoft. They now have a deal with major Android phone and tablet makers to include Office software in some of their products. That’s right, Microsoft is paying companies to put their software on non-Windows devices. At
After a preview period, Microsoft Delve has gone public for Office 365 Business users. More links into Delve have also been announced. Delve is a new form of search tool which bring in relevant data from a selection of sources. Some are private like a Sharepoint site, corporate address book
Microsoft has released its monthly security patches for January 2015 but no fix for the broken patch from last month! All the talk has been about Google’s disclosure of a security flaw in Windows just before Microsoft released a fix for the problem. Lots of accusations flying both ways on
One of the automatically installed patches for Office causes a new bug! Ouch. The new bugs aren’t common but even so, they are embarrassing. You can find the details under the Knowledge Base article headed ““Cannot insert object” error in an ActiveX custom Office solution after you install the MS14-082
We’ve already told you about document properties and how useful they are in Word. We also complained about the poor support for properties in Excel. You can add and edit document properties in worksheets much the same as in Word documents. Go to File | Info in Excel 2013 (Prepare
Document Properties is one of those long-standing parts of Office that is worth another look. It can be quite useful and not always in the ways that Microsoft intends. At first, document properties looks like a fixed and rigid feature with limited use. However it can be used in much
One of the September 2014 updates has us scratching our heads because it doesn’t make a lot of sense. The download is a fix for a problem caused by a previous bug patch, but what else? Under the bland title “September 9, 2014 update for Excel 2010” you’ll discover that
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
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
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
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
Some great tips on table formatting. Joey Cherdarchuk has a nice posting on a very different table styling to the type that Microsoft prefers. Under the banner ‘Clear Off the Table’ he suggests getting rid of gridlines and colors to simplify the look of tables. In his example, Joey takes a
How to change the date format in Excel Online The default date format in Excel has always been a mystery to newcomers and its stranger in Excel Online (the new name for Excel Web Apps). To change the default date format for display and date entry for Excel Online, go
The features in Excel for iPad. Here’s a look at the major features in Excel for iPad, looking over the five main tabs. The buttons will be familiar in most cases, though the underlying menus/galleries are different and limited compared to Excel for Windows or Mac. Shameless plug:Office for iPad:
A close look at the new Formula Keyboard in Excel for iPad. One of the highlighted innovations in Excel for iPad is a dedicated Formula Keyboard which looks like this: It’s necessary because none of the supplied iPad virtual keyboards work well when you’re trying to enter Excel formula. Hunting
A free way to show Microsoft Office help in other languages Office Screentips is a way to show tooltips for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other programs. This free addon from Microsoft doesn’t interfere with how the programs work or the wording of the tabs and ribbons. Only the tooltips
How to find your pictures to insert into an Office document. Even a simple thing like adding a picture to an Office document or email has subtleties and annoyances. When you choose Insert | Picture in recent versions of Office, it opens, by default, in the Picture Library. That seems
Can you call a Translation service to return results in Excel? After checking out the clever European word translator, we started wondering about loading translations into Excel. It should be simple to have some code to call a web server and return a translation of a word. Office 2010 and
How the Clinton ‘Saints and Sinners’ spreadsheet might look. Excel has many uses and an upcoming book talks about one of them. Apparently Bill and Hillary Clinton used Excel to maintain a list of those they like and dislike. We could not help wonder what the Clinton worksheet would look
Examine US public health data in Excel. One of the great things about the recent Internet is the availability of previously hidden data. Large blocks of information have been collected, checked and published online. Combine that with a tool like Excel and you can do your own analysis! Here’s just
An example of web scraping from BestBuy.com into Excel. We’ve already talked about getting prices from the Amazon.com web site into Excel with automatic updates. Now let’s look at how to do it for BestBuy.com prices.Excel has had a method of web scraping for many versions you can find it
How to check Amazon product prices automatically in Excel. With Black Friday coming in the USA, it’s time to carefully check prices and look out for bargains. Ideally get those prices automatically and put them into Excel for comparison. To do that for Amazon means ‘scraping’ or trying to grab
Updating Office 207 can literally go on forever! Many users are reporting a problem with the patches for Office 2007. The three troublemakers are: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760583/ (KB 2760583) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760411/ (KB 2760411) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760588/ (KB 2760588) No matter how many times you install them, manually or automatically. Given the widespread nature of the
