Using the Tell Me feature in Microsoft Office

Tamara Bredemus wandered into my office yesterday and said “here’s a tip you might want to use…”, and she was right! You can ask the Tell Me feature in Microsoft Office to show you how to accomplish tasks without having to figure out the exact search terms or find the menu options. Here’s how it works…

Creating multiple lines in an Excel cell

To be honest, this tip is probably more for me so that I remember and don’t forget how it works. 🙂 There are times when I want to have multiple lines in a spreadsheet cell, and not just lines that wrap around. To get that hard linefeed, you just have to use ALT-Enter, and you’ll have a new line in your cell. Here’s what that looks like…

Using the Data In Picture feature in the Excel mobile app

I first learned about this feature from my friend and colleague Christian Buckley a few months ago when he presented it as a tip in one of our Office Productivity Tips webcasts. However, at that time it appeared that it was only “coming soon” in the Android version of the Excel mobile app. But now the feature is fully rolled out, and it’s in the iOS version too! SQUEEEEE! The ability to take a picture of a data table and have it converted into rows and tables of an Excel spreadsheet is pure awesomeness. Here’s how it works…

Adding a watermark in an Excel spreadsheet

Unlike Word, Excel does not have a Watermark feature that you can select from a menu. However, there is a way to get a watermark effect in Excel, and it’s ideal for spreadsheets that have confidential information. Here’s how you do that…

Proper case names in Excel

I recently had a question from someone asking if there was a way to take a column of names in Excel that were in all upper-case and convert them to proper case. In Word, it’s just a menu option, but that feature doesn’t exist in Excel. However, you can get there with an Excel formula. Here’s how…