Category: Software

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Replacing Premiere Pro

    When I wrote my series on a video editing workflow back in 2017, I had settled on Adobe Premiere Pro as my video editing suite of choice. Despite the rather hefty price tag, I felt the toolset it provided me with – particularly the ability to synchronise clips based on audio profile – was worth…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Software Spotlight: Notepad++

    Whenever I get a new (Windows) computer, one of the very first pieces of software I download and install is Notepad++. It gets used for just about anything, and everything, and takes the concept of Notepad, a simple text editor, up a few hundred notches. I write a lot of different things, from text for…

  • 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…