Learning new Microsoft Office tricks in "just a minute"
A while back, a colleague pinged me and asked if there was a way to remove line feeds from an Excel spreadsheet. I didn’t know of a good way to do it, but I came up with a hack-ish solution using Find and Replace. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about the Trim and Clean functions at the time.
When we first started upgrading to Office ProPlus (aka Office 2016), we were excited and happy… until someone noticed that the Properties Pane for things like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents was no longer visible. Needless to say, this made some of our customers “not very happy”.
Somewhere along the way, Microsoft fixed that problem in the Office clients, and now you can once again see and access the properties. Here’s how you do it…
If you work with Excel spreadsheets, you’ve likely ended up with the need to compare two dates to find the number of days, months, or years between them. Using the DATEDIF function, you can easily accomplish that.
One of my colleagues at work wondered if there was an easy way to clear out multiple column filters in Excel without having to go into each column separately. A quick search on Google showed that you definitely can do that…
This isn’t so much a cool “magical” tip as much as it’s a reminder to myself that it exists and I should use it more often. Excel has a Conditional Formatting feature that allows you to apply rules to a spreadsheet to have certain data situations display in different ways automatically.
This was a feature I never used before, but I can see where it would come in very handy at times… the Format Painter in Excel.
This little trick is handy if you have a list of email addresses in Excel, and you want to use that list to send everyone an email using Outlook. It’s really nothing more than copy and paste!
It’s that time of year again!
Each year, Eric Ligman from Microsoft has a blog entry that posts links to a LARGE collection of FREE ebooks on Microsoft technology. There’s no catch, it’s all legal, and it’s simply a “thank you” to everyone who is a Microsoft customer or partner. They are full versions of the titles, they are not time-bombed, etc. They are really and truly FREE for downloading.
When I go to start a new Word document or Excel file, I nearly always take the default blank template in the upper left corner. However, I recently decided to scroll down and see what Excel file templates were out there. I was amazed at what options I had to create something that was “out of the ordinary”.
