David L. Farquhar, computer security professional, train hobbyist, and landlord
Anything related to Microsoft Office
I had an issue in a document with a hyperlink to an existing file. The file existed on a network drive, so the link worked fine… until someone with different drive mappings than me had to look at the document. Then the link didn’t resolve and the person got an error message. A confusing error message. It turns out it’s tricky to make a Word hyperlink UNC path.
Fixing it wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Read more
VLOOKUP is a very useful tool in Excel but can be difficult to get right. Here’s how to use Excel VLOOKUP, including an example and what to do when it doesn’t work right.
VLOOKUP is a useful tool for data analysis in Excel, especially merging data from multiple sources. It’s a frequent question in job interviews for business analysts and other jobs that handle data.
Combining cells in Excel is something we frequently need to do. And there are multiple ways to do it, depending on what exactly you need to do. One is easier to remember than the others, but let’s step through them.
I find the easiest-to-remember way to combine cells is to use the & operator with the cells you want to combine, along with any additional text. For example, the formula =A1&” “&B1 will combine the cells A1 and B1 with a space in between them.
When doing data analysis, frequently you’ll use conditional formatting to highlight certain cells. But then you’ll probably find you still need to group those similar cells afterward. That’s where sorting by color comes in. Here’s how to sort by color in Excel.
You can sort by color in Excel using either the filtering function, or the Sort button on the Data tab of the ribbon. Sorting with the filtering function is faster and easier, but using the sort button lets you set up complex criteria, including multiple levels. This is useful if you want to sort on both cell color and font color.
What is the purpose of Powerpoint? You might be surprised how many people ask that. Once you reach a certain stage in your career, you can expect to use it a lot. But there are definitely right and wrong ways to use it.
There are several reasons to use hanging indents when writing. Proper use of hanging indents include numbered or bulleted lists, citations, and dialogue lines in scripts. Here’s how to make a hanging indent in Word.
This works in Word 2013, Word 2016, and virtually any other version of Word you’re likely to be using.
Last Monday, Excel greeted me with a new error message on my work machine, which happens to be a Mac. When I imported a CSV file and tried to change the row height to the default 16 points, I got the message that Excel row height must be between 0 and 5.68″.
I’ve been changing the default row height back to 16 for decades so I don’t know why Microsoft changed it. But they didn’t ask me. Complaining about it doesn’t help either. So I set out to find a workaround. While I observed this on Excel for a Mac, I would expect some versions of Excel for Windows will behave the same way as well. My copy of Excel 2013 on my Windows box hasn’t changed, but that’s the most recent version I have.
A vulnerability scanner like Nessus or Qualys will record the MAC address of every computer it finds. But Qualys doesn’t output the MAC address in a nice column format. It mixes a lot of other data into the cell. So I had to figure out how to extract a MAC address from Excel data to give an infrastructure team an inventory they wanted.
The lowly Countif function is one of the most useful tools for data analysis you’ll find in Excel and other spreadsheets. It’s also not all that well understood, I find. Knowing how to use it sure has made my job much easier since 2013, so I think there’s a chance it will help you too. Here’s a Countif example to show you how to use it.
Every couple of months or so, we have to collaborate at work on a Microsoft Word document and submit it without all the distracting markup in it. And it seems like it always takes four of us half an hour to re-figure out how to accept all changes in Word and remove the comments. This applies to Word 2007 and all newer versions.
Sometimes I also find the tracked changes and other markup causes weird problems, and the fastest way to make them go away is to get rid of the markup.
So I figured it might help someone. This is something that either takes you 30 seconds or 30 minutes. If you don’t do this every day, it’s likely to take too long. This is for those of you who can’t do it in less than 30 minutes.
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