Category: Microsoft Office
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Excel: Automatically set width and height
If I’ve been there once, I’ve been there a thousand times; I’ve got a spreadsheet in excel with varying widths and heights that don’t fit the data. Now, sure, you could go in and correct it manually – but that’s not only boring, it’s a pain it the behind. Luckily, there are keyboard shortcuts to…
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Excel: Merge cells without losing data
If you’ve ever attempted to merge cells that hold data in Excel, you will almost certainly have encountered this warning: This can be annoying when you’re trying to combine data in multiple different fields, such as first and last names. Happily, there is a formula (in Excel, there’s more or less always a formula) to…
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Calculating percentage change in Excel
If you do a lot of work in Excel, odds are you’ve needed to calculate a percentage change. Luckily, Excel does this for you quite readily if you simply apply a basic formula of (New Value – Old Value)/Old Value. There is, however, a pitfall that you’ll not get the values you expect if the…
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Set Outlook to only mark as read when you open an email
A while back, a customer complained that Outlook always marked emails as read when he clicked over to another email, and wanted to know if there was a setting that would change this behavior. As it turns out, there is. Here’s how you do it: Go to File -> Options Go to Mail Scroll down…
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Outlook: Disable the send without location prompt
Like many others, my work days are – to some extent – made up of meetings with others. It’s not uncommon for these meetings not to have an assigned meeting room, and I find it annoying that Outlook asks me if I want to enter a meeting location: To get around this issue, we can…
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Outlook: Mail merge
I have previously written about one of my many responsibilities; contacting users whose login credentials have shown up in breach lists. While the pertinent results of the breach files are delivered to me in a flat file, I use Excel’s Text to Columns feature to separate logins (usually email addresses) from the password. While this…
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Outlook: Offline Mode
From time to time, I need to run Outlook in Offline Mode. This is usually the case when I want to ensure that a mail merge has worked successfully. It is also a good option to reduce data usage when on mobile networks. Going to Offline Mode is straight forward. In Outlook, go to the…
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Excel: Text to Columns
I work a lot with text files containing data which is, to some degree or another, structured. Whether a breach file from a published breach, or the result of a powershell query such as Get-ADUser, Get-ADComputer, or Get-ADDirectReports, I need to separate the data into columns so that I can work with it. This is…
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MS Office: Pin items
Many companies, my employer included, uses spreadsheets on a more or less consistent basis in order to track such things as vacation planning and KPI reporting. For me, as an employee, keeping track of these spreadsheets can, from time to time, be a bit annoying. Much to my surprise, at some point in the past…
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Farewell Bear, hello … OneNote?
In December of 2016, I discovered Bear Writer. At the time, I had been using a number of different solutions for note-taking and organisation, none of which had really done the trick for me. That all changed with Bear. Arriving to critical acclaim, Bear is certainly a very pretty app, and its iCloud sync feature…
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Outlook: Not all folders are synced
Shared email boxes are a useful tool for departments needing to have a single point of contact, but whose needs do not extend so far as to need a CRM or ticket management tool. I’ve talked before about how to add them to Outlook, in which I noted that I usually uncheck the box for…