How To – Thoughts on many things

Outlook: Problems opening and organizing calendars

On a relatively regular basis, I find my days packed with appointments, reminders, and meetings. At other times, I need to organize a meeting, or talk to a colleague, and need to check their availability. For these reasons, and others, I’m an active user of digital calendars. Anything that happens during the work day is… Continue reading Outlook: Problems opening and organizing calendars

Powerpoint: Remove presentation notes

As part of my job, my role as head of my union local, and as a board member in my shooting sports club, I give presentations on a relatively regular basis. Whenever I do so, I usually share my slides so that people can refer back to them later on. I do not, however, share… Continue reading Powerpoint: Remove presentation notes

PowerShell: Troubleshoot network connectivity

A while back, a customer contacted us because they were having problems connecting to Amazon WorkSpaces. This led me to dig into a PowerShell command which was new to me; Test-NetConnection. In its simplest form, the command simply checks your network connectivity:

Finding your YouTube comments

From time to time, I’ve found that I need to find a comment I made on a YouTube video some time ago. As luck would have it, that a feat which is relatively easily achievable. Here’s how:

Endpoint: Finding the serial number of a computer

One of the nice things with managing computers in Endpoint is that you can get a lot of information about the specifications of a given computer out of it, such as the serial number, which is useful for warranty check purposes. Here’s how:

Find WLAN password from the command line

If I’ve been there once, I’ve been there a thousand times; I’ve connected to a wireless network with my computer, but want to connect with my phone, too. The only problem is that I don’t know what the WLAN password is. Luckily, you can find the password to networks you’ve connected to using the command… Continue reading Find WLAN password from the command line

Excel: Allow dividing formulas to fail gracefully

I’m sure I’m not alone in having had this happen: I was using Excel to make some quick calculations, and got #DIV/0!-errors for some rows because one of the fields I’d been dividing by was empty. Sometimes you don’t have all the information you need for every single row, but you still want to have… Continue reading Excel: Allow dividing formulas to fail gracefully

Paste text without formatting

I recently had a long term collaboration with a number of colleagues, where part of what we did was produce, edit, and agree upon finalized versions of text. We applied various formatting such as color, cursive, and bold to track the status of specific text blocks. At the end of it all, we needed to… Continue reading Paste text without formatting

Excel: Format cells based on content

As a union steward, one of the many things I do on a regular basis is evaluate key indicators of the company financials. I do this by plotting a few numbers from the accounting reports into Excel, and then run them through some standardised analysis to identify the performance of key indicators. These indicators are… Continue reading Excel: Format cells based on content

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… Continue reading Excel: Automatically set width and height