You can create a
document in a Teams file space (from “New”, select the document type); but, if
you want to use a custom template (or if you just didn’t think of it and started the document on your computer),
you can also save an Office 365 document to Microsoft Teams.
For the Teams file space to appear in the save dialogue, you’ll need to be following the SharePoint repository that underpins the file space. From the Files, select “Open in SharePoint”.
In the upper right-hand corner, click “Not following” to
follow the site.
The change may not be reflected immediately on your computer
– if your Teams space does not show up yet, wait an hour or two. Select “Save
as” from the Files ribbon bar.
Click on “Sites – Windstream Communication”. The Teams space you followed will show up in the SharePoint sites list. Click on the team name.
Then select “Documents”
From there, you will see the name of each channel. Select
the appropriate one, then navigate to the location you want to store your
document. Give the document a name and click “Save”
The document will be saved directly to your Teams space.
Applications can generate data in formats that aren’t quite useful – glomming multiple fields
together to make something unusable. And asking people to type information can
yield inconsistent results – is my name Lisa Rushworth, Lisa J Rushworth, or
just Lisa? Excel has several functions that allow you to produce consistent,
usable data (without copy/pasting or deleting things!)
Flash Fill
Flash
Fill will try to figure it out for you. Add an empty column (or more) and manually
type one or two values. On the “Data” ribbon bar, select “Flash Fill” and Excel
will use the data you’ve entered into the row to figure out what should go in
the rest of the row.
The guesses aren’t 100% accurate – especially if your
information is not consistent – but it’s a lot
easier to delete the handful of things that are obviously not zip codes …
Than to work out a formula that extracts the same
information
Text to columns
Text to columns uses the fixed-length file and delimited
file import wizard on a column of data – essentially treating that column as a
file to be imported. In this example, a DateTime value is provided in a way
that Excel only sees it as a string. And, frankly, I am not interested on the
exact hundredth of a second the event occurred. What I really want to do is group these creation dates by day, so all I
need is the date component.
If you want to retain all the data, you’ll need to insert empty
columns to the right – otherwise the data being split out can overwrite existing data. In my case, I only want to keep one of the new columns.
Highlight the column that holds your data. On the “Data”
ribbon, select “Text to columns”
Select if the column should be split based on a fixed width
definition or a delimiter and click ‘Next’
Indicate the proper delimiter – in this case, I need to use ‘Other’
and enter the letter T. A preview of the split data will appear below – make sure
it looks reasonable. Click “Next”.
For each new row, you can
specify a data type. Or leave the type set to “General” and Excel will try to
figure it out.
If you do not need to retain the data, select “Do not import
this column (skip)”. Click “Finish” to split your column.
Voilà – I’ve got a usable date value.
Notice, though, I have lost my original data. If you want to
retain the original data, create a
copy of the column. In this example, I want to know how many e-mail addresses
use each domain, but I want to have the e-mail addresses in a recognizable and
usable format too.
Text to columns will still replace the values from the selected column. But the copy will
contain the original text.
You can even use Text to columns to sort out odd data that doesn’t actually get split into multiple
columns. In this example, negative values have the minus sign after the number …
which isn’t actually a negative
number and isn’t usable in calculations.
Pick a delimiter that doesn’t appear in your data, and you’ll
only have one column. When selecting the data format, click “Advanced”
Make sure the “Trailing minus for negative numbers” checkbox
is checked and click OK.
And we’ve got negative
numbers
Right, Left, Mid, and Search Functions:
You can also use the Search
function in conjunction with Right,
Left,
and Mid
to extract components of column data. In this example, we have first and last
names. Since there are a few middle initials in there, we cannot just split on
the space character.
These formulae aren’t perfect – Mary Ann will have ‘Mary’ as
a first name – but
Working out where to start the text extraction and the number
of characters to extract can get complex. I’ll usually include the Substitute
function to simplify things a little – the zip code, in this case, is whatever
is left over after we find the city and state.
Producing columns with the city, state, and zip code from
the ‘Location’ column.
How many times have you clicked a second time expecting to “paint” your format only to realize the format painter is a one-click deal-e-o. Well, it’s not — you just have to know the trick to ‘locking’ it on. Double click the format painter button — now you can paint as many things with the format as you like.
You’ve encountered some odd error in an application and need to send IT support a picture. Or you’rewriting documentation. There are lots of reasons you need a picture of your computer screen. You can hit the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard (even hold Alt and hit print-screen to isolate the image to the active window). But did you know Microsoft Office programs can do that for you? On the ribbon bar, select “Insert” and locate “Screenshot”
Click on one of the “Available Windows”, and an image of the window will be inserted into your Word document, Excel spreadsheet, Outlook e-mail, or PowerPoint presentation.
Use the “Screen Clipping”selection to grab part of a window. Minimize all of your Windows. Bring up the Window of which you want an image. Now bring up the Office document into which you want the image inserted. Use Insert => Screenprint => Screen Clipping, and wait a minute. Your Office document will be minimized, your screen will get washed out, and you’ll have a cross-hair instead of a mouse pointer. Click and drag to draw a rectangle around something. When you release the mouse, whatever is in that rectangle will be pasted into your Office document.
Wait – what about those rectangles I use to highlight the image? From the ribbon bar, select “Insert”and “Shapes”. I took a University course where debugging screen shots had to have the “important bit” highlighted with a red square – that stuck with me. You’ve got an array of shapes and colours available. Pick one. Draw the shape over your image – yes, it looks like the shape covers the important part. Draw it anyway. While the shape is still selected, click “Format” in the ribbon bar. Select “Shape Fill”
Select “No Fill” (you could also use a highly transparent fill colour if you’d prefer).
Click “Shape Outline” – pick a colour, and if the line is not thick enough select “Weight” to increase the line width.
When I’m writing documentation with a lot of images, I’ll still use an image editor and ‘print screen’. There are filters that just don’t exist in the Office image editors – sometimes I want to selectively blur screen text so my work conversations are not included in documentation. Sometimes I want to create a composite image. But for small documents – showing someone the error I get on their web site, “click here, type this” – using a single application is efficient.
Spend enough time reading temperature probe data, and you get to where you just know 23 is room temperature, and 82 is going to cook the CPU. And sure you can type “23 C in F” into Google and get the Fahrenheit equivalent, but that’s hardly efficient with a long list of values. You could look up the formula and have Excel perform the computation, too. But did you know Excel can convert between many units of measure without you finding the conversion formula?
Excel’s CONVERT() function allows you to display values in whatever unit is most familiar to you. Usage is convert(CellToConvert,OriginalUnits,DesiredUnits)
Voila – the values in your chosen unit.
If you use the units of measure in column headers, you can use the header cells as the current and desired unit of measure values — remember to use the $ anchors, otherwise copying your formula will not yield the right answer!
When you wanted to use an image as the background for a document, you often needed an image editor to lighten the picture – the image was too dark for dark text to be legible but too light for white text. Or you’d compose your PowerPoint slide with the image in one frame and the text in another.
Did you know, in the latest Office 365 Update, Microsoft added a feature that allows you to create faded background images within Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook? Within one of these programs, insert a picture into your work. Select the image. From the Picture Tools Format ribbon, click on Transparency
You can select one of the pre-set transparency levels or click on “Picture Transparency Options …” for finer control of the transparency level.
Move the slider (or type a number) to adjust the transparency level – 100% is invisible, 0% is the original image.
Voila – you’ve got a background image and legible text.
There are a lot of other image effects available – the vignette is the “soft edge oval” from the “Picture Styles” section of the ribbon bar. Many of the effects I’ve traditionally used Photoshop or Gimp to apply are also available in the “Adjust” section, so click around and check it out!
Using charts and images, data visualization, clearly and
efficiently communicates data. But when you’re trying to visualize statistics
for several items, your chart can be anything but clear and hardly efficient to read. In this example, I’ve
created a line chart depicting the monthly score for eight different people.
While you can pick out obvious high or low performance, there’s not a whole lot
of information being communicated here.
Did you know Excel can create mini-charts, known as “sparklines”
to visualize individual statistics and
compare statistics across items? Select the data that you want to compare. From
the Insert ribbon bar, look for the “Sparklines” section. I am going to use a “line”
style sparkline.
The data range will be selected. Enter the range where you
want the mini-charts to display – this can be the row under your data or the
column next to your data, or it can be some completely different location.
By default, the y-axis range for each mini-chart depends on the values of the data contained in the chart. This makes comparing the charts a little difficult – the scale is different. In the example below, scores in the 30’s don’t look different than scores in the 80’s.
Click on one of the mini-charts, and a “Design” tab will appear on the ribbon bar. Select it. Under “Axis”, change the minimum and maximum values to “Same for All Sparklines”.
Now you can see how individual performance varied as well as
compare individuals.
Blank values will show up as broken lines in the
mini-charts. If you do not want to display a gap, return to the “Design” ribbon
bar and select “Edit data”. Select “Hidden & Empty Cells”
Select what you want instead of gaps – you can treat null
values as zero or have a line drawn between the values on either side of the
missing value.
