In the past, I highly recommended the Excel newsgroups as a place to go for help. Earlier this month, Microsoft shut down their newsgroup servers, where thousands of people every month had gone to post their Excel questions. Over the past several years, I spent lots of time in those newsgroups, reading and answering [...]

Did you enter the Excel 2010 Future of Productivity Giveaway, that ended at noon yesterday, Tuesday, June 8th? The giveaway prize was a copy of Microsoft Office 2010, a Flip video camera, and a Seagate 1TB hard drive.
Of course, I used Excel to select the winner, from all the valid comment entries. I typed [...]

As the storm clouds rolled in yesterday afternoon, I tweeted about saving my Excel files more frequently, as a safety precaution. There were a couple of responses, asking why I didn't use Excel's AutoSave feature, and Jon Peltier reminded me to use AutoSafe -- Jan Karel Pieterse's free add-in.
I mentioned AutoSafe in my Excel New [...]

Have you installed Office 2010 yet? Would you like to win a copy, along with a couple of other great prizes? [for USA residents only]
In this short video, Microsoft employees and customers talk about the benefits of Excel 2010, both for the users and the IT department. Watch carefully -- there will be a [...]

A very nice email, from someone who visited the Contextures website, made me think about how long I’ve been using Excel. My guess was that I’d started around 1987, so I fired up the old Mac laptop, and dug some old floppies out of the storage cupboard.

The laptop is a Mac PowerBook 170, from late [...]

When sharing an Access database, you should have the data in one file (the back end) and the queries, reports, forms and modules in a separate database (the front end).
Give each user their own copy of the front end, linked to the shared back end.
Keep a master copy of the front end file, tucked away [...]

You don’t have to put all your lists in Excel – Word has a Sort feature too. And Word has an extra feature that makes it easy to sort a book list.
For example, in this list, several of the book titles start with “The”. When sorting the list, I’d prefer to ignore that word, and [...]

Occasionally you might get an email in which the sender mentions someone else. In the example shown below, the client promises to ask Xavier to contact you. That name sounds vaguely familiar, but perhaps you can’t remember exactly who Xavier is, or what role he has in the client’s company.
If you’re using Outlook 2007, it [...]

I’ve got a few different Signatures set up in Outlook 2007. Most of the time I use my business signature, but occasionally I’d like to use one of the others. Usually I use the Ribbon commands, but I’ve just discovered a mouse shortcut that makes it much easier. I’ll be using the shortcut from now [...]

Did you know that you can create a new Outlook email message by dragging some text off of an existing message? I discovered this tip by accident, but it would be useful if you’re sending an email to someone, and a slightly different version to someone else.
To create a new email from existing text:

Create [...]