A short video which brings up some interesting points in the early development history of Microsoft Office, some might surprise you. Microsoft Office started as separately sold products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) and only gradually did they become an integrated package with shared components, consistent interface and some interconnections.
While it lasts, check out some free classes about Python in Excel for better data analysis, DataFrames, charts & visualizations and machine learning. We’re a big fan of Python in Excel and these lessons should help those of us who haven’t yet caught the Python bug. Advance Your Python in
Excel 365 now has Python features included for all business and enterprise customers with a Microsoft 365 software licence Python is a powerful programming language with many great libraries of tools for analysis and charting. It’s a massive extension to Excel that we’ve already raved about. Python Editor for Excel
A new collection of Copilot features have been released under the banner “Wave 2” with inclusions for Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Word and Teams. Don’t get too excited because there’s ‘fine print’ that limits who can catch this wave. Before we explain a little of what’s in the new set of
What to do if Excel’s columns have numbers across the top instead of letters. There’s a simple setting to switch between two different ways of labelling cells. You open an Excel workbook and the column headings look all wrong – instead of letters (A, B C …) there are numbers.
In-cell charts in Excel provide a powerful method to visualize data trends and patterns. They allow you to quickly derive insights within a worksheet, making information interpretation more straightforward without fussing about with full charts. We’ll explain how to make in-cell charts and then go further and show how to
How to lock your Excel worksheet from editing – the whole thing or some cells. Allow some people to edit a few cells, leaving the rest of the cells and formulas untouchable by others using the worksheet. Here’s a very simple example: Anyone opening the worksheet can enter a US
The Workplace Discount Program (formerly Home Use Program) offers 30% discounts on Microsoft 365 to employees of many organizations and government agencies. Here’s how the Workplace Discount Program (WDP) works, the tricks and traps. What is the Workplace Discount Program – WDP? Organizations (companies, governments etc.) that have Microsoft 365
Excel is getting a new function TrimRange() which should solve a long-standing calculation performance problem. As well as speeding up workbooks, TrimRange() comes with some new range options that add to the well-known colon. Ever since Microsoft added dynamic arrays to Excel there’s been a problem … how to reference
Excel 365 has two new translation functions to identify language from text or translate text from one language to another. Let’s see how the work, some problems and unknowns. New in Excel 365 are: DetectLanguge() to identify the language of the text supplied, hopefully correctly (see below) Translate() converts text
There’s a simple but not so obvious way for Excel to take a list of values and show them grouped into segments or groups. As an example, here’s the results of a class exam with their scores grouped into blocks of 20. It’s done with a tricky use of PivotTables
We went hunting for koalas in Microsoft Office. Found more than 18 of the cuddly marsupials for Word, PowerPoint or Outlook. There are emoji, Office icons, SVG, online images and more making a colony or cling of koala (either can be the collective noun for koala). None of the endangered
Microsoft 365 for Windows might crash while someone is just typing (you read that right). All the Office apps, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or OneNote can be affected according to Microsoft, which knows about the problem and offers some workarounds. The problem is caused by an out-of-date language pack which
As promised, Excel 365’s Regular Expression support has been extended to include both Xlookup() and XMatch() functions. Regex adds a huge amount of power to matching results from a table. Back in July, Excel 365 added three Regular Expression (regex) functions, RegexTEST(), RegexEXTRACT() and RegexREPLACE(). At the time Microsoft promised
There are quicker ways to use the View Zoom slider in Microsoft Word and one little-known trick that works in other Microsoft Office apps, Excel and PowerPoint. Plus a related Windows volume tip. Scroll to View Zoom Hover the mouse pointer over the Zoom slider (bottom right in Word, Excel
Excel 365’s Linked Data Types are technically impressive. However, the reliability of the data is a problem Microsoft doesn’t talk about. We discovered mistakes with the data without actively looking for them. In general, the data sources are ‘scraped’ from sites like Wikipedia which explains some, but not all, of
Excel 365’s Geography data type isn’t totally reliable or accurate. Looking at its results for the UK (United Kingdom) vs Great Britain is just one example of the problems you need to watch out for. If you’re not clear on the difference between United Kingdom and Great Britain, see below.
We’ve expanded our live Paris Olympics medal table to compare countries’ performances to their population or wealth. Along the way we explain how to cope with some problems that can arise when Excel theory hits the Real World. Our newsletter readers get a working example workbook to try themselves. We
Excel for Mac is now getting the ‘From Folder’ option in PowerQuery. An important part of the PowerQuery puzzle. PowerQuery’s ‘From Folder’ lets you add more data to a query simply by adding data files into a folder. PowerQuery will then scoop up all the data and add it to
Use Excel to get your own automatically updating Medal Table for the 2024 Paris Olympics then make charts and maps too. Our newsletter readers get a working example workbook to try themselves. Not interested in the Olympic medal count? This article and download are a good, working example of how
Here’s some more ordinal rank (First, 2nd etc.) options for Excel including with joint or equal results plus special fun wording. In a previous article we looked at options for showing ordinal numbers in Excel, now we’ll go a step further to cope with joint or equal results plus special
A US government department has accidentally revealed a secret by overlooking the obvious in Office document security, the file name. Microsoft Office helps you scrub documents of private or secret information before sending. It’s easy to overlook the obvious data leaks that ‘Inspect Document’ doesn’t cover. ‘Inspect Document’ checks for
Excel on the web has a new look and some nifty extra features like better ways to arrange rows/columns – move, resize, insert. A clever Freeze Pane option too. Some of these we’d love to see in desktop Excel. Overall, the web version of the Office apps now look more
Microsoft Office has a Remove Background tool for images but there are two better, faster and free ways to do the same job. Background removal lets you get an image with a transparent surround which can be merged/overlaid into any other slide or document more seamlessly (left) than a separate
