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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Excel’s method of converting measurements is good but could be so much better. Once you start looking into the CONVERT function in Excel, you realize that it’s really an incomplete function. Excel has been around for a long time and yet this important feature has lapses that would make it
How to get table or other information from the net into Excel (or Word). Ever seen some data on the Internet and want to copy it for yourself? From small tables to large data chunks, there’s several ways to do it. Simple copying Almost any table or grid on a
Can you have a vertical ribbon in Microsoft Office? Is it possible to make the ribbon go vertically down the side of a document instead of horizontally? Back in Office 2003, it was possible to move the toolbar from the top row to any side of the Office window –
The Nook Color tablet/ereader supports an impressive list of Microsoft Office documents. Office Watch reader, Dale M writes: ” for the NookColor …. it reads natively, office documents in Office 2003 and in Office 2007 format. Works for Word, Excel and PowerPoint and maybe others. Also, PDFs display quite nicely
Word 2007/2010 Text Box is also in Excel and PowerPoint. We’ve talked a lot about the Text Box feature in Word 2007 and Word 2010. Both Excel 2007 / 2010 and PowerPoint 2007/2010 have Text Box features similar to Word. There’s no gallery to choose from, so you have to click
Microsoft’s promotional videos for Office 2010 continue with a video showing how Apollo 11 could have been made. Following Microsoft’s remaking of the US Declaration of Independence we now have a marketing video showing how NASA could have made the moon shots with Excel 2010. It shows how weight was
How to make one Word document appear in another document by linking or embedding. A Word document can be placed inside another so it appears in the second document. This can be done as a ‘one-off’ insertion or a linking where changes to the source document automatically appear elsewhere. For
Another way to enter lists in Excel, why Microsoft’s effort sucks and an alternative. Excel has two ways of typing in data, there’s the usual direct entry into the worksheet or you can make a form with a single click of a button. For example here’s a ‘typical’ Excel list:
