Microsoft Office Resources

For many years, Microsoft Excel has been the tried and tested reporting tool for many businesses. In 2019. more and more organisations are turning to Power BI as an alternative with its strong analytics and reporting functions.     With faster visualisations, statistical functions and calculations across broad datasets, it’s obvious that Power BI can […]

Having the right business intelligence at your fingertips is crucial in the drive to become agile and competitive. As businesses grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage data being generated regularly. With a siloing effect and biased reporting structures, it leads to the decision makers in business to make their judgement on data that may […]

Moving to Office 365 and migrating your desktop to the Microsoft Cloud is nearly always a move in a positive direction for any business. There are more applications available, faster and more collaborative ways to work and communicate, slicker and easily accessible portals but has anyone spared a thought for the end user? They must […]

Tooltips pages can add visually powerful information to your reports and dashboards. Not only are they visually stunning, they’re also incredibly simple to implement! Follow our guide below to enhance your Power BI dashboard, and instantly reap the rewards of greater analytical power. An Example of Tooltips: The tooltips will appear when you hover over […]

Excel charts are great visual tools to show changes in data. You can build dynamic charts in Excel with a few easy steps. Below is an example of a table which can be used to build an interactive chart. The Quantity column’s values are simply entered into the cells, but the Revenue figures are the […]

We all wish we could do more with the time we had, but our inbox tends to get in the way of the productivity boost we’re craving. Here, we’re going to take a look at 10 effective email management tips that can help you save time, get productive, and even get a step closer to the […]

Office 365 has been around for a long time, but should your business start using it? The short answer is yes, particularly if you care about productivity! To embellish on this, here are 15 reasons your company needs to use Office 365, starting today: Improved Planning  With the calendar requests feature, you can schedule and plan […]

If you’re searching for ways to boost productivity, then using Office 365 is a brilliant place to start. Even the basic version will help you be more productive and improve efficiency, but the real benefits come when you download additional apps for the platform. With these apps, you can take your business performance to a […]

Power BI is Microsoft’s powerful business intelligence tool. It’s a fantastic tool for visualising data, offering a range of benefits for analysts who want to be able to present their information in a more digestible way. Of course, there are other tools for visualisation, so why should you choose to use Microsoft Power BI instead […]

Forecasting is important in many circumstances to be able to do effective and efficient planning. The future electricity needs forecast vital to planning building more power stations; scheduling employees in a call centre next week requires forecasts of call volume; just imaging how much forecasting the planners behind London 2012 Olympic Games must have done. Forecasts can be needed months or years […]

Charts from a dropdown list in Excel Many people who use Excel can generate a chart or two on their spreadsheets. This is a relatively easy task to perform in Excel. These charts will either sit in data sheets or in their own sheets. Don’t you sometimes wish you had a button to click in Excel […]

Many users have questions about Office 365 With so many companies moving to Office 365 and embracing the cloud, you might still have questions about reliability and security. Here are few questions that have been asked. Is Office 365 reliable and secure? Office 365 is built from the ground up for reliability, availability, and performance […]

What’s new in Access 2016? Access is a technical tool to store data and that’s all. And do we need more tools in Access? My answer is no and it seams that Microsoft agree 🙂 History of Access If we look at the history of Access Microsoft has not added much over the years. Microsoft […]

What’s new in Visio 2016 Believe it or not, Visio has been around for 20 years! Things have certainly moved on and improved since the first launch. Now, we are eagerly awaiting the release of Visio 2016. In this blog post, we shall be looking at what will be new in the next version. Tell […]

What’s New in PowerPoint 2016 If you are currently using Powerpoint 2013, you will know what a big improvement it is on earlier versions, with some great new features such as the ability to insert pictures and videos directly from websites such as Bing Images and YouTube, and the Merge Shapes tool which allows you […]

How to add Multiple Timelines in Project 2016 One of the new features of Project 2016 is being able to add more than one Timeline for a project. If the Timeline is not displayed just select the View tab and click Timeline. What is a Timeline? The Timeline was introduced with Project 2010 and has […]

The 2016 version of Office is available to preview now and this look at what’s new in Word 2016 focuses on two main features: Insights Real-time collaboration Word has been around for many years so much of its functionality is already established. New releases of Office tend to focus on expanding Excel’s repertoire – but this time the […]

  Here’s what’s New in Excel 2016 With the launch of Office 2016 in the Autumn of 2015, you may be wondering about the new features in 2016 and what’s changed. With Excel at the core of many businesses, it would help to have all of the new features explained. We have compared the different versions of […]

An easy to update Gantt chart in Excel Building a Gantt chart in Excel is pretty easy. But what if you needed to update any of the tasks? This would usually mean lot’s of time consuming manual editing of cells.  But there is an easier way…. Step in Excel and the ever flexible conditional formatting function! Yes […]

By Ann K. Emery With an estimated user base of 500 million people worldwide, many of us use Excel at work and personally for home budgets, projects, to-do lists, and more. It doesn’t take too much use of Excel before you reach the point of trying to express your data visually. This is where Excel charting […]

Using loops to easily make changes across multiple worksheets Loops are one of the key tools in Excel VBA when we need to perform tasks through a number of objects (cells, worksheets, charts, workbooks etc.) .  Here we will look at how to loop through Excel worksheets and workbooks. Loop Through Excel Worksheets Below you will […]

Quickly create drop down lists in Excel with automatic sorting The Drop Down list in Excel is a great automation tool. You can turn any data list into a drop down list which makes it easier to place items in cells. Drop down lists show the data in the same order in which they appear […]

Creating an Excel Dashboard – Election Special Video What is an Excel Dashboard? Dashboards are essentially reports in Excel that help you visualise and analyse complex pieces of data. In the following video we look at an example Excel dashboard to guide us through the mind boggling data being produced by the current UK general […]

The UK general election is almost upon us and it’s a tight race! It’s the most unpredictable election in memory and has already produced some lively debates and political speed-dating as potential alliances are considered. There are so many sources from which to gain the latest on likely election winners, and one such are the bookies. There are some […]

Say goodbye to copy and pasting. Connecting Excel to website data There are times when having live data in Excel can be really useful. You may need the latest currency exchange rates, monitor your stocks, track house prices, the possibilities are endless. Once you have established the data links you can refresh the data, also […]

Make sense of someone else’s workbook When you are given a workbook that has already been created it can be hard to work out which cells contain manually entered values and which cells are the result of formulas. So how do you show formulas in Excel? Below is an example workbook, at first glance it’s not easy […]

Save yourself from errors with the BODMAS rule A question we often hear is “Why do we need to put Brackets in Excel Formulas?” Some formulas that you use won’t need brackets. If you write the formula =5+2+10, It will calculate the result as 17. There were no brackets in that formula, and it still […]

How to remove duplicates from a column of data in Excel It’s not uncommon when adding or importing records that you may need to remove duplicates in Excel. Whilst filtering and deleting records to make a list of unique items is an effective solution, there is an even easier way. Simply follow these steps to remove duplicates […]

How to use SpecialCells method in Excel VBA SpecialCells in VBA is a really useful method to deploy in Excel. It returns a Range Object that only covers the type of cells you specify. You can use the SpecialCells in VBA Method to return a Range Object that only holds numbers, text, blank cells, formulae, cells with […]

What’s the difference between Count and CountA in Excel? The Count function is one of the 400 functions in Excel. Count as the name suggests, counts the number of cells selected that contain numbers. You can use the Count function to obtain the number of values within a range, rather than the total of those values. If we wanted to count the […]

Quickly and easily delete blank rows and columns in Excel It’s not uncommon to end up with blank cells or rows in an Excel worksheet. If you need to delete these to maintain accuracy, especially when calculating the average value, the quick way is to filter out all blank cells / rows and delete them […]

Refine your filter options with the Advanced Filter in Excel For most filtering of data Excel AutoFilter is perfectly adequate. Here we’ll look at some benefits for moving beyond the AutoFilter by using the advanced filter in Excel. A Recap of AutoFilter Benefits For ease of use, it’s hard to beat the Excel AutoFilter feature. Just click […]

By J. Peter Bruzzese The recent global recession is still quite fresh in everyone’s minds. From an IT perspective it forced IT administrators to tighten their belts and hold off on upgrades of both hardware and software for quite some time. The growth of “cloud” solutions (like Office 365) has provided IT teams with another option when considering new […]

Quick and easy ways to change case text in Excel. You may have a list which you wish to change the case test in Excel. Rather than manually re-entering the data in Excel, there are some useful functions you can call on to save you this work. Let’s look at a few of them. In […]

A comprehensive guide to these powerful functions in Excel The LOOKUP functions can be used to look up data in an Excel list or Excel database, saving a lot of time and potential error when comparing two lists of data. You have two LOOKUP functions, Excel VLOOKUP and the HLOOKUP. The only difference between the two functions is that the VLOOKUP  is used for […]

Discover some useful options available in the Excel status bar The Excel status bar, which is located at the bottom right side of the Excel screen, is an often overlooked but informative feature in Excel. For example say you wanted to find the total, or average of a selection of cells, the status bar is quickest place to […]

Summarise data quickly by using Subtotal Excel’s subtotal feature provides a quick and easy way of summarising tabular data.  A common use of the feature is to display only the totals for different categories. For example suppose you want to calculate and display only the total units for each product from data (partly shown below) Step 1 Sort the data by the Product field. Click inside the […]

The concatenate function quickly links the content of two or more cells The concatenate function in Excel allows you to join text strings from different cells (like first name and last name) which can be very useful. It can be used with a number of other Excel functions. You can concatenate in Excel by using the Concatenate function […]

Pull out a segment in an Excel pie chart Pie charts are great for visually showing categories. Occasionally we might want to emphasise a segment. To do this, we can pull out a pie chart segment! 1 – Create a Pie Chart Start by selecting your data, going to the Insert tab along the Ribbon […]

Save hours in Excel: spend a few minutes learning these shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts are great time-savers; allowing you to shave seconds off a task, but ultimately saving hours in the long run. This is especially true when you are working with Excel.  There are over 200 Excel keyboard shortcuts that you can use, here we have selected 15 […]

The Definitive Guide to Excel Keyboard Shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts can be a real productivity booster, here’s a comprehensive list to serve almost any situation that arises in Excel. CTRL combination Excel shortcut keys Key Description CTRL+SHIFT+( Unhides any hidden rows within the selection. CTRL+SHIFT+) Unhides any hidden columns within the selection. CTRL+SHIFT+& Applies the outline border to […]

Save time and reduce errors by viewing two or more worksheets at the same time It’s not uncommon to end up jumping between different Excel worksheets/workbooks because you are comparing data, copying & pasting or even creating links. This back and forth process takes up time and can increase the risk of error. Well there is a […]

Save hours and eyesore by using freeze panes in Excel Reviewing data in spreadsheets can be very demanding on the eyes and time consuming when you are trying to remember what a particular column or row of data actually is! If you’re not already familiar with how to freeze panes in Excel, read on and […]

Save time by avoiding repetition and errors Excel is great for lists; sales figures, staff rota’s, stock control, to name a few. But an easy trap to fall into is repetitive error prone data-entry that leads to inaccurate business reporting and lost time in troubleshooting. If you create a drop-down list in Excel, you can avoid […]

Improve collaboration and save time It is not uncommon with Excel to have multiple people requiring access to the same file. Whether the file in question is a sales report, marketing budget, or time-sheet for example. This is where the Share Workbook feature in Excel comes in handy, here we’ll look at how to share files […]

How to create AND split a stacked chart in Excel Amongst the many charts available in Excel, some of the most popular are column charts, and the main variants being clustered and stacked. We’ll look at how to split a stacked chart in Excel, and to do this let’s start by creating a basic column […]

Trying to review a spreadsheet with unformatted data can be a real eye sore, but by using the Total cell style in Excel you can quickly give your data more context. An example of using the Total cell style in Excel Below we have a list of sales figures for several sales reps in a travel […]

An easy way on how to calculate the age from date of birth using Excel formula Here we’ll look at how using the Today() function along with a less well known function, Datedif(), calculates the age from a date of birth. Even if this isn’t a pressing need of yours the example below is a handy […]

Imagine you’re at an important hospital appointment and you’re kept waiting because the scanner, which potentially cost £100K, needs a re-boot. And then you discover it’s driven by Windows XP which is no longer supported by Microsoft. That would be insane wouldn’t it? Sadly not. It’s a true story and it’s probably just the tip […]

In Excel there’s a lot of data being moved around, perhaps via copy and paste. If you leave a lot of stuff lying around on in memory or cache you’ll get a message along the lines of “you’ve left a lot of information on the clipboard…”. Generally in VBA you can avoid this with other […]