Microsoft Office Training — Microsoft Office Online Training

Excel Designed Minecraft Cake

by Mynda Treacy on March 5, 2014

Each year our sons choose a cake they want me to make for their birthday. Now, I am no baker and their cake of choice is usually something elaborate they find on the internet, and from there I talk them down to something I think I can manage. Last weekend our eldest son, Conor, turned [...]

Create Barcodes With (Or Without) Excel VBA

by Philip Treacy on February 27, 2014

in Excel VBA

Barcode Types & Uses There are LOTS of barcode types used for a multitude of things. Various internationally recognised standards exist (and some not standardised) for things like retail stock tracking, mail and parcel tracking, ISBN numbers, warehousing, pharmaceutical packaging and many other uses. Like creating secret spy messages to leave pinned up around the [...]

6 Ways to Fix Dates Formatted as Text in Excel

February 18, 2014

If you import data to Excel from another program chances are the dates will come in formatted as text, which means they’re not much use to you in formulas or PivotTables. There are many ways to fix the dates and the method you choose will depend partly on the format they’re in and partly based [...]

Who Needs Word When Excel Has Got Fill Justify Text

February 12, 2014

They say the true Excel fan has uninstalled Word from their PC, and removed the F1 key from their keyboard (accidently pressing F1 opens ‘Help’ which slows you down). After all, who needs Word when you have everything you need to write a letter right there in Excel? A must know tool for us Excel [...]

Convert Numbers (Currency) to Words With Excel VBA

February 7, 2014

We get requests now and again asking how to convert numbers or currency values into words e.g. 123.45 becomes One Hundred Twenty Three Dollars and Forty Five Cents. Excel doesn’t provide a function to do this so I’m going to write my own. Microsoft does provide some VBA code which I will use as my [...]

Curse You Excel Cursor

January 30, 2014

The Scenario You need to change the range referenced by your chart/conditional formatting/named range so you merrily open the Edit dialog box, like the one below for a chart, and start using your arrow keys to move the cursor into position, except all of a sudden the range referenced starts changing before your eyes. What’s [...]

Charting Disparate Data in Excel – 3 Solutions and 1 Crazy Mess

January 23, 2014

Last week we looked at some different ways to plot the same data, with each chart enabling the reader to glean different information. A by-product of that post was the observation that one series, the White, dwarfed the others, which made it difficult to get a feel for the trend and significance of the change [...]

4 Charts – Same Data. Which do you think is best?

January 15, 2014

Often when you’re charting data it can be tricky to find the best chart for the job. If you get it wrong at best it can be a waste of everyone’s time, and at worst it can be misleading. That’s why you need to know the motivation for the chart up front. What is the [...]

Mac Excel Keyboard Shortcuts Cover

January 10, 2014

If you’re frustrated using Excel on a Mac because you don’t know the shortcut keys you’re used to using on a PC, then fret no more. Now you can quickly get up to speed with your Mac keyboard using a KeyCuts Excel keyboard cover. Plus you might learn a few new ones too. It has [...]

Excel TEXT Function – handy but limited…or is it?

January 6, 2014

At first glance the TEXT function appears quite limited. Its purpose is to convert numbers to text in a specific/custom format. There are two key points here: The numbers become text. This means you can’t use them in any math type of formulas. On the upside you can format the numbers anyway you want…almost! Hold [...]