Blogs

I have a post or two in my head that deals with fixed width text files, something I’ve been dealing with quite a bit. Like me, you probably don’t run into fixed width text files in your personal life. It’s usually some crappy computer program at your job that forces you to deal with them. [...] Read More...

Today we are announcing the availability of the project codename "GeoFlow" Preview for Excel 2013, a result of collaborations between several teams within Microsoft. GeoFlow lets you plot geographic and temporal data visually, analyze that data in 3D, and create interactive "tours" to share with others. Read on to learn how GeoFlow adds to the existing self-service Business Intelligence capabilities in Excel 2013, such as Microsoft Data Explorer Preview and Power View, to help...

Recently, I have had to make changes to my “computing infrastructure.” This is one of them.   For the longest time I synchronized files between my laptop and desktop with the help of a flash drive. Then, I discovered Groove but it didn’t really fit the bill and I don’t remember why. It was on [...] Read More...

Several years back, I wrote an article on how to use multiple cells to simulate conditional formats that involved more than 3 conditions. Three versions of Excel later, I still receive requests related to this post. So, I updated it to include more screenshots and a downloadable file. In Excel 2003 and earlier, conditional formatting [...] Read More...

Date functions in Excel make it is possible to perform date calculations, like addition or subtraction, resulting in automated or semi-automated worksheets. When you mix date functions with conditional formatting, you can create spreadsheets that display date alerts automatically when a deadline is near or differentiate between types of days, like weekends and weekdays. In this tutorial, Excel MVP Frédéric Le Guen shows how to put this functionality to work, with some examples in the...

Not long ago, both my personal and business email was managed by Google. Those were the good old days. I had a consistent interface, and more importantly, consistent shortcut keys. Can you guess why I keep refreshing gmail? Now my work email is Outlook and Exchange. I’ve been setting up some macros in Outlook to [...] Read More...

As you are no doubt aware, Google Reader is going away. The public outcry hasn’t brought it back, nor open sourced it, by now so that’s not going to happen. There are some options, but I decided that I wasn’t going to switch until May 15th. That will give the smart people an opportunity to [...] Read More...