Learning new Microsoft Office tricks in "just a minute"
If you have a spreadsheet that has a lot of column filters set, it can be laborious (and probably error-prone) to try and delete all the filters one at a time. But by using the CTRL – SHIFT – L keyboard shortcut, you can turn them all off at once. Here’s an example…
It’s a nightmare of mine… someone pings me and says that hundreds of files are missing from a document library, and they’re not in the recycle bin either. If you’re lucky, you figure out who deleted the files, and often they didn’t realize they did that. Now in SharePoint Online and OneDrive, Microsoft will notify you via email if you’ve done a “mass deletion” of data. Here’s what happens…
I was working with Sandra the other day on a project that involved an Excel spreadsheet and about 2400 lines of data. I had to check to see if I had any duplicate values in one of the columns. Since I’m not the sharpest tool in the drawer when it comes to Excel, I asked her if she could help me somehow find potential duplicates instead of me scanning through the list manually. I was duly embarrassed when she showed me just how simple that is… 🙂
OK… I haven’t lost my mind here… It is very possible that if you have a large spreadsheet that has very little data in it, you might have a large number of blank rows in one of your worksheets. Each of those “blank” cells in the “blank” rows takes up space, and it can add up rather quickly when it comes to the overall size of your spreadsheet… let me show you how to fix that.
Today’s tip comes courtesy of Francis Hayes – The Excel Addict, where he explains how to simulate a “paper tape” function in Excel. For you young’uns who are confused by this concept… in the olden days, people used to add numbers on an adding machine, which often produced a paper tape as the numbers were entered. You would get a total, plus a visual list of numbers that got you to that total. You could then confirm that you entered everything correctly. Some habits die hard however, and here’s how you can do the same type of “paper tape” function in Excel.
I think that OneNote is one of the coolest tools in the entire Microsoft portfolio of products. It’s like the Ginsu knife of personal productivity (if I just aged myself with that reference, you can catch up here… The Ginsu (Commercial Offer, 1980)). One feature of OneNote I want to cover today is the ability to print to OneNote just like you would print to a printer or a PDF file. Here’s how…
Planner is a great lightweight planning tool that comes as part of Office 365. We’re seeing quite a bit of attention to it by Microsoft, and they’ve just released a new feature that I’ve had people request quite often… you can now create a new plan from an existing one. This means you can create a standard plan “template” that has all the items you normally want for a new project, and then use that for each new plan you create (as opposed to adding all the tasks manually). Here’s how that works…
This tip is the result of someone asking me yesterday whether they could edit a transcript once a video had been uploaded to Microsoft Stream. My initial thought was either “no” or “you can upload your own”, but then I hit the interwebs for some research. Much to my surprise, you *can* edit a video transcript, and it’s pretty easy!
This was a simple little thing I saw Sandra Mahan do during a Teams meeting yesterday, but it had completely skipped my notice earlier. When you’re in a Teams Channel tab (other than Conversation), you can expand the screen to remove all the Teams information on the left side of your screen. There’s an Expand Tab icon that does that for you. Here’s how it works.
