Aug/100
Revolutions + Pointless comments = (new Office comic)
This post is syndicated from Office Comics.
[ Note to readers: I originally published this comic on my old blog on MSDN, but people seem to like it, so I'm reposting it here so new readers don't miss out. -- David ]
...(read more)
Aug/100
=VLOOKUP (uhh…now what?)
This post is syndicated from Microsoft Excel 2010.
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Today’s post is brought to you by Anneliese Wirth, a writer on Office.com. |
On Office.com, the term “VLOOKUP” frequently bubbles up in our list of high-volume search queries. My job is to figure out why this is and what specific information people are actually looking for when they type “VLOOKUP” into the search box in Help or on our web site.
The “VLOOKUP” query appears to represent a bunch of different questions. Certainly, one of the main ones has to do with the function arguments—a.k.a., “the stuff between the parentheses." The bottom line is this: If you don’t use VLOOKUP regularly, it’s hard to remember off the top of your head what the different arguments mean, or how to use them correctly.
From personal experience, I can really relate. I use VLOOKUP infrequently, usually when I need to run a particular type of report for my writing team. The report requires me to pull data from my content management system, and then match topic ID numbers in one worksheet to corresponding titles in another worksheet. To make things work, I invariably end up in Help, poring over our VLOOKUP topic.
In particular, as an occasional user of VLOOKUP, I wonder about the following:
· What pieces of the formula do I need, and in what order?
· What’s the secret handshake for referencing lookup tables on other sheets?
· Is TRUE the right argument for exact matches? Or is it FALSE? Which one is the default? Which is the one that requires me to sort the first column in the lookup table in A to Z order?
· When counting columns, do I start at 0 or at 1?
· Why am I seeing the wrong results when I copy the formula?
To help address questions like these, I created a dedicated VLOOKUP Refresher. Feel free to print a copy of this card or save it for later, whenever you need it.
Of course, anyone who uses VLOOKUP will eventually want to know THIS, too:
· Why am I getting #N/A errors?
That last bullet is a whole ‘nuther ball of wax. I’m currently working on a card of troubleshooting tips and techniques for circumventing #N/A, but in the meantime, check out Greg Truby’s recent post, Solutions to three common problems when using VLOOKUP().
If you have comments about the VLOOKUP Refresher card, tips or resources of your own, or suggestions for future posts, please leave a comment.
Aug/100
Conditional Formatting: Highlight your most important mails
This post is syndicated from Microsoft Outlook 2010.
Last month I wrote about how to quickly create rules to help rid your Inbox of so-called graymail. This week I wanted to share another tool for making sure the right email messages stick out when you’re reading down the message list in your Inbox. This advice comes straight out of the Outlook Best Practices – a series of guidelines to help you be as productive as possible with Outlook.
Conditional Formatting allows you to customize how different messages appear in your Inbox message list based on criteria that you set. By default, conditional formatting makes unread messages bold. By adding your own customizations, you can highlight the messages that are most important to you.
For example, when you are at work, emails that are sent directly to you and no one else are probably some of the more important messages for you to review. For that reason you might want to set these messages to appear larger than others in your Inbox.
To set up Conditional Formatting from your Inbox, on the View tab, in the Current View group, click View Settings, and then click Conditional Formatting. Click Add to create a conditional formatting rule.
Let me take you through an example. I first created a formatting rule for mail that is sent only to me, so after clicking Add, I named it “Only You.”
Next, I clicked Condition and then specified that I want this to apply for messages where I am the only person on the To line.
After clicking OK, I clicked Font and then selected how I want the text to appear in the message list. Because these are the most important messages, I chose a red color and a larger, bold font.
I repeated these steps to create conditional formatting for mail where I am on the To line with other people, mail that I was on the CC line, and mail that was sent to a specific distribution list (DL) instead of directly to me. Here are the results of what these look like in my Inbox.
The different sizes and colors help me see the most important emails and leave the others for later. I recommend that you try conditional formatting rules that help you keep your Inbox more organized. For some people that might mean using a specific color for messages from family members, or making messages from your boss larger than others. We love to hear what works for you, so leave a comment below.
Josh Meisels
Outlook Program Manager
Aug/100
The PowerPoint Web App Gets Clip Art!
This post is syndicated from The PowerPoint Team Blog.
Along with the news about our new themes, you may have noticed that the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog also announced the ability to insert Clip Art in the PowerPoint Web App.
High quality images and more
| Many of you may be wondering why you should be excited by this. Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Clip Art” is this friendly little illustration you’ve known for more than a decade: |  |
A word to the wise: there’s a lot more than you remember hiding in that gallery. We now feature high quality, royalty-free images, including selections from partners like iStockPhoto and Fotolia. There are even audio and video files to choose from, as well as the expected illustrations. The next time you need an image for your presentation, feel free to use one of these.
Use It on the Web
Adding Clip Art is just as simple as adding a picture. As you can see, there are two ways to add Clip Art to placeholders: the Ribbon and content buttons.
We hope you enjoy this feature on the web, and perhaps you’ll give it another look on the Office desktop applications, as well.
-Rebecca Loew
PowerPoint Program Manager
Aug/100
New Themes!
This post is syndicated from The PowerPoint Team Blog.
Our friends over on the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog recently announced some great new features in the Excel, Word, and PowerPoint Web Apps. Among the new goodies are some brand new themes that you’ll find in the Select Theme dialog when you create a new presentation on SkyDrive. We’ve also re-organized the gallery in a way that we believe will better suit your needs:
On and off the Web
For those of you using PowerPoint 2010 installed on your computer, we bring the latest and greatest content right to your front door through the themes gallery on the Design tab:
Just click the “Enable Content Updates from Office.com…” button:
Once you’ve enabled updates, you’ll see a set of themes at the bottom of the gallery that stays up to date as we add new ones:
Included in this update is the first in a set of new designer themes that we’re really excited to begin rolling out. It’s called “Summer,” and it’s perfect for capturing the essence of your warm weather excursions over the past few months:
For those of you living in the southern hemisphere, it’s time to start thinking light thoughts as your summer season draws near :)
Enjoy the new looks!
-Christopher Maloney
Program Manager, PowerPoint
Aug/100
You Asked: What the heck is Scroll Lock
This post is syndicated from Microsoft Excel 2010.
This week’s post is written by Amy Miller. Amy is a writer for Office.com. She’s written and edited content for Excel, Access, OneNote, and InfoPath.
Imagine you’re working in a spreadsheet and you innocently press the arrow keys on your keyboard to move to another cell, but instead of moving to another cell, the entire spreadsheet moves. You may have asked yourself, what the heck just happened, and how do I make it stop? Lucky you. You’ve encountered that pesky little problem called Scroll Lock.
Recently, while reviewing customer comments related to scrolling in a spreadsheet, I discovered that a lot of folks have run into this issue. Scroll Lock is a toggling lock key on the keyboard, just like the CAPS LOCK key. Once pressed, Scroll Lock is enabled. To turn it off, simply press the Scroll Lock key again.
Easy, right? Well, the real problem is that many people don’t know how Scroll Lock got turned on in the first place, so they don’t know where the key is to turn it off, and often times they don’t realize that Scroll Lock is causing the problem in the first place. All they know is that they suddenly can’t move between cells with the arrow keys.
So here’s a quick tip to help save some time and ease any scrolling-related panic. If you’re having these wonky scrolling issues, take a look at the Excel status bar. If Scroll Lock appears, then it’s turned on.
To turn it off, just press the Scroll Lock key, which sometimes appears as ScrLk on the keyboard.
If you can’t find it, try turning the Windows On-Screen Keyboard on (go to Start, All Programs, Accessories, Ease of Access), and disabling it from there.
For more information and troubleshooting tips, check out the article Turn off Scroll Lock.
Aug/100
Clip Art, Charts, Themes and Printing - Need We Say More?
This post is syndicated from Microsoft Office Web Apps.
When we shipped Office Web Apps in June, we set out to make the Office experience more accessible so you could work from anywhere and share with anyone. We love to get input from the people who use Office Web Apps. That feedback helps us decide what features we offer next and when we make those features available. The latest updates to Office Web Apps add some much requested functionality to Word Web App, Excel Web App and PowerPoint Web App.
Here's what we added...
Word Printing
One of the top requests from customers we saw once Word Web App went live was the ability to print Word documents. Word Web App's viewer includes the ability to print but what we realized as we looked through all the customer feedback is that you wanted the print command in the Word Web App editor as well. Now, if you drop the File menu when you are editing a Word document you'll see this:
Not only will this make the print command easier to find but it will also reduce the number of steps required to print a document you are editing.
Excel Charts and the Auto Fill Handle
In Excel Web App there are two updates I want to highlight: inserting charts and the auto fill handle. Now in Excel Web App you can go to the Insert tab and insert charts. You will then be able to manipulate the data and elements of the chart in much the same way you can in Excel 2010. Here is a taste of the new UI for inserting charts:
You can also modify existing charts (or ones you just created!) just by clicking on them:
Here is a chart made in Excel Web App:
Also, you can now use the auto fill handle in Excel Web App. The auto fill handle is a time-saving feature in the Excel desktop client that allows you to use the contents of one cell to fill in adjacent cells. For example, In this worksheet there are two columns of numbers. I am summing the first row of numbers. If I want to sum the remaining numbers in the two columns, I can grab the small black square (the auto fill handle) and drag it down:
Here is the result when I drag the auto fill handle down the column:
PowerPoint Clip Art and More Themes
With the addition of clip art to PowerPoint Web App you can now add high quality photos and illustrations to your presentation from Office.com’s image library. Choose from over 200,000 high-quality, royalty-free images, including selections from partners like iStockPhoto and Fotolia. Use the Insert tab to add clipart to slides with image placeholders:
You can use the Insert Clip Art dialog to search through thousands of images:
We are also happy to report that you can now select more themes when you create a new presentation in PowerPoint Web App. Once you name your presentation this dialog box comes up when the presentation opens:
Thank You!
We really appreciate all your feedback. Keep it coming! You can give us feedback directly from each of the web apps. There is a Give Feedback link in the File menu.
Stay tuned as we have even more to share in a few weeks.
Nick Simons
Program Manager, Office Web Apps
Aug/100
Excel Web App leads to healthier snacks for kids
This post is syndicated from Microsoft Office Web Apps.
Roxanne Kenison is a writer on Office.com who writes primarily about Office Web Apps and Office Starter. She posted about her own experiences with Excel Web App. The post is over on the Excel 2010 blog. Enjoy!
Nick Simons
Program Manager, Office Web Apps