Get Economic data or graphs from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) to load into your Excel workbooks or PowerPoint slides. From unemployment rates to the price of potato chips. FRED has 825,000 data sets for the USA and around the world. Tip: search FRED for your country (Canada, United Kingdom,
Word can do simple calculations because Word for Windows has its very own built-in calculator. Calculate in Word has some nice tricks but also problems and traps. Type a calculation, hit the button (see below) and the result appears in the status bar AND it’s loaded into the clipboard ready
How to get greater accuracy out of Word’s in-built calculator. Recently, we unearthed Word’s hidden calculator. Word rounds its calculator results to two decimal places. This time, we’ll take a look at the two ways to improve the accuracy of Word calculator results. Use an old maths trick or change
You haven’t heard about it? Don’t worry, even Microsoft has no information about this feature, unless you dig way back into its archives where you’ll find that the calculator – which formerly held a prominent position on the Tools Menu – was driven underground in Word 6.0 to make way
Pantone’s color of the year for 2025 is “Mocha Mousse”. You can use that exact color in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Designer using the Hex/RGB color code. And we’ll look at the flowery prose that’s become a hallmark of this annual promotion. The color of 2025 is … Mocha
Dig into a Microsoft Office document file, such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and see its inner workings, here’s a straightforward method. It reveals the small files that comprise an Office document, mostly XML files, which you can easily explore with a text editor. Very occasionally it’s helpful or necessary
Yes, Microsoft Word lets you select vertical (up or down) text blocks. Most text selection in Word involves selecting horizontally – selecting a line or a paragraph of text. Sometimes, though, you need to select a vertical slab of text. To do that, hold down the Alt key while you
Here are the exact colour codes and new names for the ‘Overground’ lines in London, plus how to add a thick double line in Office documents just like on a Tube map. The changeover is happening in late November 2024. Some old rail lines in London were coloured Orange on
There’s a hidden trap in Microsoft Excel’s DateDif function that rarely gets a mention and is too easy to overlook. DateDif() is a long-standing Excel function that returns the duration between two dates. It’s not a ‘full’ Excel function because it was added for compatibility with Lotus 123 and has
Understanding the difference between Excel’s stored value for a cell and its displayed value is important. It happens a lot and can make a big difference to the results. Back in the day we detailed a bug in Excel 2007 where the wrong number appears on the screen yet Excel
Stop accidentally turns CAPS ON when you don’t want it. There’s a way to change the Caps Lock key to do something else or nothing at all in both Windows and Mac. Maybe I’m getting clumsy in my old age but on some keyboards I keep hitting the CapsLock key
Excel is now 40 years old and it’s capable of some amazing things. Let’s not forget some of the mistakes made by users and serious bugs by Microsoft along the way. First a reminder of some Excel bugs and how Microsoft never seems to learn from their mistakes. Excel bug
Make it easier to see your current cell in an Excel workbook by dynamically highlighting the selected row, column, cell or headings. Here’s obvious and more subtle highlighting options plus the downside of highlighting, real world tips and debugging tricks if you’re having trouble. There are many different variations on
You can sort paragraphs, lists and tables in a Word document with all manner of tricks available under the simple ribbon button. Following our look at different alphabetical orders, here’s a look at the sorting options in Word. Select the list or paragraphs then choose Home | Paragraph | Sort.
Ever wondered what font is used in a famous logo? There’s a fascinating collection of familiar brands with their names replaced with the font name. Emanuele Abrate has made Logofonts, for example the Starbucks logo with the font name, FreightSans Black. Nike uses Futura. WhatsApp with HelveticaNeue. YouTube uses AlternativeGothic
An 85-year-old blunder has just been fixed at Westminster Abbey to change the spelling to Brontë with the important diaresis. Here’s how to type an ë in Word and other matters arising. Here’s how the memorial to the Brontë sisters looked in Poets Corner until a few days ago. For
There are plenty of audio and music options available in PowerPoint if you want to give your audience a break from your voice. We’ll go beyond the simple ‘adding music’ help to give some practical advice for audio in presentations: You will find the audio basics at Insert | Media |
The BBC has a great collection of over 16,000 sound effects that you can add to your PowerPoint presentations. Use them as a trigger sound for a click on a presentation, as a novel background noise or even an alert sound on your computer or smartphone. Sound Effects Galore Exploring
Here’s the basics of Styles in Word for paragraph, character or both (Linked) plus Tables and Lists. I know talking about styles in Word makes eyes glaze over but they are a really useful part of Word (plus Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook). Today I watched an ‘experienced’ Word user reformatting
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
Discover how to adjust bullet point spacing in Microsoft Word with the two key settings to achieve precise bullet point alignment and formatting. Learning the techniques to perfect your bullet points can make a significant difference in readability and presentation. There are TWO places to change the position of the
Quickly insert symbols, characters and emoji in Microsoft Word and Outlook without taking your fingers off the keyboard using a feature that’s been in Word (for Windows) for many years. Inserting Symbols into Word documents is a pain, go up to the ribbon Insert | Symbols | Symbol which takes
