It’s that time of year again when I start receiving requests for help with creating planners for the new year. These planners are usually for teams or groups to organise holiday schedules and rosters. This year I created a reusable planner that can be used in future years and also includes most of the features […]
Continue readingIf you’ve covered even the basics of Excel, there is a good chance that at some point you have sorted at least 1 column of data in ascending or descending order. Sorting up and down is well covered in classes, books, tutorials and with a big button in Excel ribbons that says “Sort”, but […]
Continue readingI’m often asked for help with, or to recommend a good (cheap) program for designing certain shapes like banners etc. There are many good ways to do this out there, feel free to look into some yourself, this is what I usually tell people, but I also give them an Office design tip. A […]
Continue readingHaving trained a variety people and helped others with macros, especially in Excel, I have noticed a common issue – assigning keyboard shortcuts to the most regularly used macros. Ctrl along with most of the letters are already assigned as shortcuts, by assigning for example Ctrl and B to your macro, this overwrites the […]
Continue readingRecently I have been asked by a few people for a quicker way to create VLookUps across multiple columns. In each case the user wanted a VLookUp to pull in several columns of data, but did not want to have to create a VLookUp for each column (one case would have been over 20 columns […]
Continue readingIt is well known and well publicized that graphs and charts can be used to demonstrate and present data visually to an audience. The visual of the data can highlight points of data quicker and easier than just numbers in a table. One thing that I have noticed over the years is that when talking […]
Continue readingWould you like to add video to PowerPoint presentations? Videos and other media can add to your presentations, enhance slides and for longer presentations they can give you a break from talking and give your audience a break from listening to you (no offence intended). So how do you add video? A common technique I […]
Continue readingSo you’ve put together the content of your presentation and you are now ready to animate it. This is where the PowerPoint animation pane comes into play. As well as making animation easier, faster and less painful to work with, the PowerPoint animation pane may also give you easier access to some options. If […]
Continue readingSo, you have put together your presentation and are happy with the content, but how do you get your audience to listen to you presenting? Here are 2 PowerPoint tips to help you. #1 Use short points to make your point There are a few advantages to using short points to get your message […]
Continue readingThe first PowerPoint Animation tip I would give any client would be to leave it to the end!! I’ve seen so many presentations with good content ruined by poor attempts at animation which end up making the whole presentation look rushed and devalues the good content. I have even been told by some people […]
Continue readingThis is probably the best troubleshooting or problem solving tip you will ever read when it comes to trying to figure out why a macro, a formula, a link, a chart, etc is not working the way you want to. There are only 3 steps involved! Take your left hand and put it on […]
Continue readingHave you ever experienced returning to work after holidays, feeling refreshed and able to take on the world? That is until you check your email and the holiday becomes a vague, distant memory and the relaxed and refreshed feelings are replaced with stress, doom an gloom! OK, that may be a bit of and exaggeration, […]
Continue readingPaste Special is another time saving trick that may be going underused. You are probably already familiar with the cut, copy and paste functions in a lot of applications. Copy allows you to make a copy of selected or highlighted data to be pasted somewhere else Cut allows you to remove selected or highlighted data […]
Continue readingIn Excel, Pivot Tables are a quick and easy way to summarize, analyse and present data. The speed that the tables can be put together and rearranged makes them an invaluable and important tool for analysis and decision making. The more data you have to analyse, the more obvious the uses of Pivot Tables are. […]
Continue readingDebugging VBA Errors When creating macros in VBA, even if you just record one and amend the code you are almost certain at some stage to come across an error. When you run the macro you get a dialog box with an error message, it’s not as helpful as my example above, but at least […]
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