Category: Office 365

Did you know … Outlook can share OneDrive files for you?

Collaborative document editing in Teams and SharePoint is a huge time saver – instead of trying to merge multiple versions of a document together, we can all edit the same document (we can even edit it at the same time). OneDrive offers the same benefit, but it’s a bit of a hassle going into OneDrive, setting up sharing, and then sending people a link to the document. But Outlook handles this for you.

I have a private file saved to my OneDrive for Business space.

In your message, select ‘Attach’ and then ‘Cloud locations’.

You will see your OneDrive for Business files – select the file(s) that you want to share and click “Next”.

You will see the file as an attachment to the message – the OneDrive cloud logo lets you know that the ‘attachment’ is actually a link to a OneDrive document. Address and send the message as you normally would.

Check OneDrive again, and you will see that the document is shared.

The recipient will see an attachment to the message, and they will be able to view and edit the file.

 

Did you know … Excel can automatically highlight data for you?

Reading through large tables of data is inefficient – it’s time consuming, error prone, and just not a heap of fun. Graphs are one way to visualize data – allowing you to quickly spot trends, outliers, etc. Excel offers another way to visually enhance data to make it more comprehensible – conditional formatting. Where some charts and graphs obscure the underlying data, conditional formatting allows the exact value to be quickly identified.

Highlight your data. On the ribbon bar, select “Home” and click the drop-down for “Conditional Formatting”.

Select the logic to determine which cells are highlighted – we’ll go through a few examples here, but click around on your own! To highlight cells that are higher than some value, select “Highlight Cell Rules” and then select “Greater Than”.

In the window that appears, enter the number and select the colouring scheme. The prepopulated number will be the average of the highlighted data. The changes are applied as you select formatting options, so you have an idea what it’ll look like ahead of time. In this case, there are still a lot of values higher than 125. I could increase my number to reduce the number of highlighted cells. When you have finished composing your formatting rule, click OK.

And the format is applied to your data. You can apply multiple formats – add another format to turn anything below 25 green, make values between 100 and 124 yellow. Whatever you want.

If you need to change your formatting rules, click on the “Conditional Formatting” drop-down and select “Manage Rules”.

If your rules do not appear, change “Current Selection” at the top to “This Worksheet”.

You can also define custom rules. From the “Conditional Formatting” drop down, select “New Rule”.

Again, select the logic used to determine which cells are formatted. Here, I am highlighting duplicated values. Click “Format” to define how the highlighted cells should appear. Click “OK” to apply the formatting to your spreadsheet.

Now every duplicated record is in green with a strike through the value.

Formatting rules can be nuanced – here I am creating a custom formatting rule that uses a three-colour gradient based on where a value falls within a range.

Now you can quickly compare each value by it’s colour.

 

Did you know … Excel can use maps to visualize data?

I remember visiting my uncle at a NASA design lab sometime in the mid-80’s – it was a huge cavernous room that he explained used to house the computer. A computer his graphing calculator could draw circles around. It was a powerful visual reminder how quickly computing technology advances – components are smaller, more powerful, and simpler to use.

More than two decades ago, I wrote a visualization application that presented a graphical representation of the geographic distribution of records. Which is a long way of saying it showed where something happened to a lot of people. The application was part of a cooperative effort between the FBI and local law enforcement – a data mining project meant to identify serial offenders across jurisdictional boundaries I wanted to be able to visualize where different types of crime were occurring and identify anomalies, so I built a program to do so. It took months to develop and took hours to crunch values and draw a map. The first time I used Excel to visualize frequency distribution on a map, I thought of that NASA computer room. What used to take a high-end Unix server with a RISC processor and tonnes (for the time) of memory – not to mention an entire summer of code development – is clickity-click and done on my little laptop. And the results are nicer:

How do you create this type of visualization? First you need data with something that is mappable – the example here is going to show the office locations listed in PeopleSoft. Click within the data set.

On the ribbon bar, select “Insert” then select “3D Map” in the “Tours” section.

If you have not used it before, you will be asked to enable data analysis service.

A new window will be displayed – select the column you want to map. Here, I am using zip codes, which is mapped to the “Postal Code” field in my spreadsheet. If your fields do not map automatically, you will need to click the drop-down next to a location data type and select the appropriate column.

There are different types of visualization – here, I have switched to a “heat map” where the color of the blob represents how many records fall into this zip code. It is a quick way of identifying clusters – hot spots.

You can control the look of the map as well – here, I have switched to a flat map and added location labels.

If you would like to include a copy of your map in another program – say, this Word document – select “Capture Screen” from the ribbon bar. You can also create a video to show an animated view of your map (zooming in on specific locations, rotating the globe to see people over in Mongolia)

After you’ve clicked “Screen Capture”, just paste and an image of your map will be inserted into your file – see!

Going A Little Farther:

Data isn’t perfect, and even when the data looks good it may not map properly. My sister used to live on a street in New Jersey that does not exist on a map. The post office affirmed it was the correct address, but UPS and FedEx claimed it didn’t exist. It was funny to me, but I wasn’t the one trekking two kids down to the neighbor on the main road who nicely accepted packages for her. She moved before they ever got the address situation sorted, but I’ve got first-hand experience with addresses that don’t map in some systems but are perfectly fine in others. Why do I mention this? The map visualization provides a “Mapping confidence” statistic – it is the percentage that appears above the box where you select the location data to be mapped. 98% is pretty good – there are a handful of records that don’t appear on the map … but the data I am presenting is a decent representation of our employee office locations. A low percentage would indicate that your map does not accurately convey your data.

What if my map confidence level is low? Click on the map confidence value to see what didn’t map. There are some marked with a result that is questionable – spot-checking them, 03109 is Manchester NH and 10001 is New York, NY. The one with no resolution, according to the US Postal Service lookup isn’t a valid postal code. If your data is wrong, fix it 😊 In cases where the data is right but the application isn’t confident about the location, you can add additional data to make the address more specific (here, I might increase the confidence by having the zip+4, or including the street address in my data set).

You can filter data in your map – first we’ll need some field on which to filter. Here, I’ve added the employee’s department to my data set.

On the right-hand pane, expand “Filters”. Click “Add filter”.

Select the column on which to filter data. A unique list of values will be presented – you can scroll through it or start typing the value to search. Once you find what you want to display, click the check-box before the value.

Now we are visualizing where people in my department work.

If your data is hard to see – records are distributed out fairly evenly across the map – you can increase the area of influence to make smaller clusters easier to identify. Scroll to the bottom of the right-hand pane and drag the “Radius of influence” slider to the right. If you have very clustered data, you can drag the slider to the left to turn a large red blob into a more nuanced visualization.

When you have finished visualizing your data, click “File” on the ribbon bar and select “Close”.

 

Moving A Microsoft Form Can Change The Form ID

Create a personal form at https://forms.office.com

Look at the form ID – it’s in the form URL

Now I’ve tested it & I’m ready to use it. I need to grant the rest of my team rights to modify the form. Click the fallen-over hamburger menu on the form

Select “Move”

Pick Teams space and click “Move”

Return to your Form – in the URL, look at the Form ID again. Compare it to the original … they don’t match!

Why do I mention this? Well, if you use a form in Flow … it is referenced by the form ID. Creating a personal form, building a workflow in flow, then moving the form to your Teams space to allow others to edit it breaks the workflow. When you go into the Flow to add additional owners, you’ll need to update the Form ID as well. If you don’t update your Flow, it will start failing. Oddly not at the initial “when a new response is submitted” step where I would expect it to fail if the Form ID was not valid but at the “get response details” step.

Looking at the error detail on “get response details”, the status code is 404 (HTTP error for ‘not found’, so I assumed it was used in the same context). The result body has an error code 639 which I couldn’t find anyone talking about online.

Did you know … you can cancel sending an e-mail in Outlook?

Anyone who has mis-addressed a message or hit ctrl-enter and prematurely sent, well, some of a message has probably found the message “recall” option. Unfortunately, “recall” depends on the recipient having “Automatically process requests and responses to meeting requests and polls” enabled, cannot recall the message if the recipient has a rule that moves the message out of their inbox, and doesn’t work if the recipient isn’t using Exchange. Many times, your attempt to recall a message yields another message like this:

Which is better than someone thinking I meant to send them half of a thought that stopped mid-sentence. But it’s not what I expected. You can, however, configure Outlook to delay sending messages … allowing you a little time to cancel the message.

Outlook Client:

On the ribbon bar, click “File”. On the ‘Account Information’ screen, click “Manage Rules & Alerts”

Click “New Rule…”

In the new rule wizard, select “Apply rule on messages I send”

Do not select any conditions – just click “Next”.

You will see a warning that the rule will be applied to all messages you send – click “Yes”.

Click the check-box before “defer delivery by a number of minutes”, then in the text below click the hyperlinked ‘a number of minutes’ and enter the number of minutes you want to delay sending messages. Use a small number – if you close Outlook before the message is sent, it will not be sent until you re-open Outlook! (Plus it’s confusing if you’re on a call with someone, tell them you are sending them something, and it doesn’t actually send for fifteen minutes). Click ‘Next’ to continue.

Give your rule a descriptive name, then click “Finish”.

You will be warned that the rule will only run if Outlook is running – click OK. If you routinely use Outlook on two different computers, you’ll need to create this rule on both computers.

Now when you send a message, you will see a counter next to “Outbox”. The message will sit there for the time you specified, then it will be sent. Once the message is sent, the counter will disappear.

If you want to stop the message from being sent, click on “Outbox”.

Right-click on the message – you can select “Move” and move the message back to your “Drafts” folder or you can delete it.

Outlook Web:

Click the “Settings” gear in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.

Click on “Mail” to display the mail-related settings.

Expand “Automatic processing” and click on “Undo send”

Click the radio button to select “Let me cancel messages I’ve sent for:” then click the drop-down to select how long sending will be delayed. Pending messages won’t be sent if you close your browser or put your computer to sleep – they’ll still be there when you open Outlook again. Click save.

Now when you send a message, it will be deferred in your “Drafts” folder for the selected time period. While the message is deferred, you will see a “Cancel send” option in the upper right-hand corner of your Outlook Web screen. If you don’t want to send the message, just click “Cancel send”.

The message will be opened to allow you to continue editing it. You can save it as a draft or discard it as well.

Did you know … you can reply to an e-mail message with a meeting request?

Sometimes it is easier to take a few minutes, get everyone together, and talk about something. Switching from an e-mail thread to a meeting invitation, though, means you’ve got to copy/paste all of the recipients and provide a message summary so attendees have a clue about what you want to meet. Did you know that you can reply to a message with a meeting request? All message recipients are included in the invitation, and the message content is copied into the meeting request.

Web Mail:

Click the drop-down next to reply and select “Reply all by meeting”

A new meeting request will be constructed – complete with attendees (addresses in he ‘to’ line become required attendees, cc’s become optional attendees), a meeting subject, and the entire e-mail thread in the meeting body.

Outlook:

In Outlook, click on the “Meeting” button in the ‘Home” ribbon bar.

Again, a meeting request is created with attendees, subject, and message content.

Anything you can do in a manually created meeting request can be done here – if you want to add a Teams meeting space or set up recurrence … this is a normal meeting request, it’s just got a lot of information pre-populated.

Did you know … you can change Word’s built-in Styles?

Using Styles in Word has some advantages – one-click to apply a variety of format options, the “Navigation” tool provides quick access to “heading” items, the automatic table of contents uses “heading” items too (and you can instantly update automatic table of contents data as new content is added and page numbers change) – but what can you do if the predefined text format doesn’t fit your document?

Themes

Under the “Design” ribbon bar, you will find an array of themes.

Selecting a different one changes the colors, font faces, font weight, and font sizes used throughout the document. You can change your document to look like this

Or this

Customize Styles

What if the styles still don’t fit your document? I, as an example, prefer my headings bolded and sub-headings both bolded and italicized. You can customize a theme to match your specific preferences.

On the ribbon bar, select “Home”. In the “Styles” section, right-click on the style component you want to change and select “Modify”.

Modify the style component as desired – change the font face, make it bolder, change the size, change the color, add a little more space between lines, whatever you want. Click the box to ‘Update Automatically’ and, if you want to use this customization in other documents, select the radio button that says ‘new documents based on this template’. Click “OK”.

Sections of your document using that style component will be updated. I have customized all of the style components – normal, headings, title and subtitles, quotes, etc.

On the ribbon bar, select “Design”. Click the “Themes” drop-down and select “save current theme”.

If you want to use your theme on every document you create, click “Set as Default”.

Click ‘Yes’ to confirm the change.

Did you know … Outlook can display the time in multiple time zones?

In one of my prior jobs, I worked in Boston. I had colleagues in Hawai’i. Scheduling a meeting was a mental undertaking – 8AM in Honolulu is 1PM in Boston (and I had to count through Alaska, the west coast, the mountains, the next one over, and then me all.the.time). Beyond the time wasted figuring out what time it is elsewhere … you forget to think about it when you’re in a hurry. I’d book the guys in Hawai’i for mid-morning meetings at dark-o-clock, and the guys in Hawai’i would schedule mid-afternoon meetings that were 8PM for me. The Outlook calendar can show two time zones concurrently – both reminding you that time zones are a ‘thing’ and quickly showing you what time it is over there.

Click “File” on the ribbon bar

Select “Options”

Select “Calendar” from the left-hand navigation bar. Scroll down and find the ‘Time Zones’ section. Check the box to ‘show a second time zone’, and select that other time zone. I add a label both to my time zone and the secondary one. Click OK. If you have the monthly update channel, you’ll be able to select a third time zone too.

Now check out your calendar:

Did you know … you can ignore entire conversations in Outlook?

You can! Of course, you don’t want to ignore important conversations; but we’ve all been accidentally included on message (or been caught up in the dreaded reply-all blizzard) and been inundated with messages that really can be ignored.

Within the Outlook client, click on one of the messages. On the left-hand side of the ‘Home’ ribbon, click “Ignore”

Or from within the message, “Ignore” appears on the left-hand side of the “Message” ribbon bar.

If you haven’t previously selected “Don’t show this message again”, you will see a warning that the entire conversation and all future messages will be moved to “Deleted Items” … click “Ignore Conversation”

If you change your mind, all of those messages are in “Deleted Items” and you can easily move them back.

If someone changes the message subject, those messages become a new thread that you’d need to ignore again. When you’ve been erroneously included on some message, the subject rarely changes … but I usually have to block five or six different threads in reply-all blizzards.

Did you know … you can increase the maximum number of “undo” operations in PowerPoint?

I am a big fan of “undo” – highlighted something to copy it but missed the ‘ctrl’ part of ctrl-c? Undo! Editing an image and drew a line the wrong place? Undo! Change some verbiage and regret the modifications? Undo! (I’ll generally copy the stuff I’ve added into a new document before I start hitting ctrl-z {the keyboard shortcut for undo} and incorporate a few of the new ideas into the original text.) Occasionally, you run out of undo-able operations. If you are saving to OneDrive, SharePoint, or Teams, you can use the version history to get back to your original content. But did you know that PowerPoint allows you to increase the number of undo operations available?

Click “File” on the ribbon bar and select “Options”

Select “Advanced”. Under “Editing options”, you will see a maximum number of undos – this value defaults to 20.

You can increase it up to 150 – although higher numbers can adversely impact performance, so stick to a lower number unless you really want to undo a hundred operations!