This morning one of my colleagues asked what time it was in a certain part of the world. I typed the name of the place followed by “Current Time” into the Google search box. Google responded by displaying the current time for that location above it’s normal results list.
A question arose today about entering random text into a Word document. You probably know that if you type =Rand() into a Word document you get 3 paragraphs each containing 5 sentences where each sentence is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”
And if you type =Rand(X,Y) where X and Y are numbers, you get X paragraphs of Y sentences each where sentence is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. For example =Rand(8,10) will generate 8 paragraphs where each paragraph contains 10 sentences.
Well in Word 2007 you now have =Lorem() Read More
When using Outlook with MS Exchange, you can open another user’s mailbox (providing that they have assigned permissions correctly). This is useful if you want to check whether a colleague is available..or you just want to snoop at an ex-colleague’s whereabouts!
However, Outlook remembers the names of the previous few users whose mailboxes you have opened (Click File > Open do display the list) - handy if you want to check the same user’s calendar again but could also land you in trouble if you’ve been snooping! Read More
Unfortunately at work I am limited as to the software I can use. I occasionally have the need to work with photos and if I’m lucky I may find that the PC I’m using has Paint Shop Pro installed but more often that not I’m reduced to using Microsoft Photo Editor.
There’s a known issue where, when you open the program or double click a graphic file, Photo Editor will start minimised. When you click on the “entry” in the Windows taskbar, it does not restore to a window. When you open Task Manager, it is running.
To resolve this:
Run Regedit (Start > Run > Regedit).
Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Photo Editor/3.0/Microsoft Photo Editor.
Delete the key called “Initial Position”.
You may need to re-boot for the change to take effect
I was recently presented with an Excel file which displayed a message every time it was opened indicating that it contained links to other files. I was assured by the owner of this spreadsheet that all links had been removed.
Thanks to officearticles.com for helping me to solve the problem:
Of course if you have Excel 2003 or later you can just select Edit > Links and there is a Break Link button in the dialog box!
In Word, selecting some text and pressing Shift+F3 will change the case of the selected text. It works on a cycle through the following - lower case , CAPITALS or Sentence Case.
Excel does not have this feature but you can select a cell and use =UPPER, =LOWER or =PROPER.
The format is =FUNCTION (CELL) where FUNCTION is the required function (upper, lower or proper) and CELL is the cell that contains the text.
For example, if A1 contains MIKE THOMAS, and in B1 you enter =PROPER(A1), B1 will contain Mike Thomas.
You can then use Copy and Paste Special / Values to copy the contents of B1 into A1, thus overwriting the original text.
I’ve used this feature many times for clients who have been given a list of, for example, names, that have been pulled off another system (say a payroll system) where the original data has been stored as capital letters.