Office Tips

Ever need to add some random or meaningless text into Microsoft Word to test a document, temporarily fill some space, or to see how some formatting looks? Luckily, Word provides a couple of quick and easy methods for entering random text into your document. Random Text To do this, position the cursor at the beginning […]

If you work extensively with Excel at home, at work, or in a home office, you have the luxury of setting up your worksheets exactly as you want them. However, each person has their own quirks and methods for working with Excel. Some prefer organizing data into columns and others into rows. If someone gives […]

One often overlooked feature of Excel is the What-If Analysis tool that allows you to explore different scenarios without changing the values in your spreadsheet. This function is particularly useful for economics and management majors as well as business owners because you can see how different values affect models, formulas, and projected profits. Excel’s What-If […]

Excel is a versatile application having grown far beyond its early versions as simply a spreadsheet solution. Employed as a record keeper, address book, forecasting tool, and much more, many people even use Excel in ways it was never intended. If you use Excel a lot at home or in the office, you know that […]

Sure Excel is used for spreadsheets, but did you know you can connect Excel to external data sources? In this article we’re going to discuss how to connect an Excel spreadsheet to a MySQL database table and use the data in the database table to populate our spreadsheet.  There are a few things you need […]

I recently upgraded the version of Microsoft Office on my computer and learned that my spell checker was no longer working! Usually, it would automatically show me misspelled words immediately if I mistyped them, however, after the upgrade, nothing was being marked. Even if I ran the spell checker manually, it would complete without marking […]

Recently, I had a user in my office get the following errors when trying to open a Word document: Word cannot start the converter mswrd632.wpc. or Word cannot start the converter SSPDFCG_x64.cnv Whenever the user clicked the OK button, it would simply pop back up. What was really weird is that if she clicked on […]

So previously I wrote about how you can create a simple dropdown list in Excel, which is perfect for any kind of data validation. If you have a range of values that people are required to enter repeatedly, it’s best to create a dropdown list so that no invalid data can be entered. That’s all […]

I am a big fan of text-to-speech technology, mostly because it doesn’t work all that well.  However, sometimes it ends up being useful for certain situations. Excel is packed with many features, including one called Speak Cells, which basically lets you feed your chosen cells to a text-to-speech engine. It is a great accessibility tool […]

Just about every corporate email account is using Outlook and Exchange server to handle user email and there is an awful lot of data stored in those PST files. My own work PST file for Outlook is close to 2 Gb, which is why I wrote a post on how to optimize your PST file so […]