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.
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.
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!
There are a lot of tools we use at work that are silly
overkill in your personal life – I don’t want to open a Remedy ticket for every
squeaky hinge! But some of our tools are quite helpful away from work too – making
flyers in Word or using Excel to keep track of the softball league standings. “Is
Teams useful in my personal life” seems like a purely hypothetical question –
it’s not like I can invite the rest of the Parent Teacher Organization to join
us here in Teams (and even if I could, that’s hardly an appropriate use of
company resources!). But did you know Microsoft offers a free version of Teams?
Signing up for a free account, you don’t get access to all of the Teams features we’ve got here
– you cannot schedule
meetings, record
meetings, there isn’t a Planner board, you don’t have access to the full
suite of Office 365 applications. But you do
have a Teams space, can use the integrated apps and connectors, have some file
storage space, have persistent chats in channels, and can even have group
audio/video calls.
Don’t use your company e-mail address to sign up – this will
need to be your personal address.
If you don’t already have a Microsoft account associated
with the e-mail address, you’ll be asked to create a new Microsoft account.
Otherwise you’ll be asked to sign in to your Microsoft
account.
Supply your name, organization name, and country of origin.
Read the terms of use and privacy statement. Assuming your use complies with
the terms of use and the privacy policy is acceptable, click “Next”
It will take a few minutes for everything to be set up. Once
your personal Teams organization is built, you can invite others to join. Click
on your avatar in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and select “Manage
org”
Click “Invite others to your org”
And enter their e-mail addresses
They will get an e-mail message inviting them to join your
Teams org.
You’re ready to start using Teams – add tabs to websites
your group commonly uses, set up connectors, create new channels, chat, video
calls, share files. You can even add new Teams to your organization.
Everyone added to your org is automatically able to access
the default Teams space (the one with the name of your org). Teams spaces you create can be private or public,
just like at work – but you can also select “Org-wide” which automatically
joins any newly-added individuals to the Teams space.
One drawback to retaining all of your chat and team discussion content is that there’s a LOT
of content … which makes it challenging to find a specific discussion or
comment. Luckily, Teams data is easily searched. At the top of your Teams
application (or website), there is a long gray bar. Click in it and type a word
or phrase to begin searching. Using multiple words will find conversations
containing both words, to find a phrase place the phrase “in quotes”. Hit enter.
You’ll see messages that contain the words or phrase –
notice this includes both chat messages and channel discussions. Each search
result has a reference letting you know where the discussion is located, and
you can click on the item to switch to the chat or channel discussion.
If your search returns too many results, click on the little
funnel – you can refine your search results with a filter – a specific
individual, a time frame.
In addition to searching chat messages, you can search files.
Just click on “Files” and you’ll see files with names or content that contain
your search terms. Again, you can see where the file is located, and you can
click on the file to preview the file.
Click on “People” and you’ll find, well, people who work here.
This is a name search – you cannot search for “stats” and see people with whom you’ve
had discussions about statistics. Search for a last name, a first name, or a
name in “last, first” format.
If you click on a person, you’ll see the conversations you
have had with them, as well as any shared files, an org chart for their
position in the company, and their channel posts for the past two weeks (‘Activity’).
If you haven’t chatted with them before, you can start a new
conversation too.
As I’ve been writing these “Did you know” blog posts, I’ve needed
sample data to demonstrate how a function works. In Excel, that’s easy enough
as there are RAND()
and RANDBETWEEN(iLow,iHigh)
functions. But how do you get sample text in Word? I used to just paste in part
of a public domain work (as a cultural aside – the twenty years of copyright
protection added under the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act are up this
year, so the list of public domain works is expanding again). But what if you
don’t have the original Anglo-Saxon Beowulf laying around?
Microsoft Word has a rand() function too – type =rand(#Paragraphs,#Sentences)
The example here generates two paragraphs that are five
sentences each.
Hit enter – the formula is replaced with random text.
(This works in PowerPoint too). If you want some different text, try the lorem(#) function — the number in the parenthesis is the number of paragraphs — that uses the lorem ipsum paragraph as the content source.
Formulae in Excel aren’t always easy to decode – even a
relatively simple formula, like the volume of a right rectangular pyramid below,
can be a little cryptic with the A2 type cell identifiers.
You can name ranges and use range names to make a formula easier to understand. Highlight a data set – in this case, I am highlighting the “length” values – column A. On the “Formulas” ribbon bar, click on “Define Name” (you don’t need to hit the inverted caret on the right of the button – just click the ‘define name’ text).
Supply a name for the range – in this case, I am calling it “Base_Length”
(range names need to start with a letter or underscore and cannot contain
spaces). Click OK to save the range name. Repeat this operation with all of the
other data groups – in my case, I named Column B “Base_Width” and Column C “Height”.
Use the name instead of the cell identifier – as you type
your formula, the range names matching your typed text will appear.
It is now a lot clearer
what this formula means – base length
times base width time height all divided by three. Which is the formula to calculate the volume of a right rectangular
pyramid.
The calculated answer is the same either way – but this
makes it easier to figure out what exactly you were computing when you open the
spreadsheet again in six months 😊 (Or share the
spreadsheet with others).
There are times when it is easy to tell who is speaking – there aren’t a lot of women in my group, so “the female voice” is usually me. My friend Richard is generally the only person with a New Zealand accent on any call (although someone who didn’t grow up in a Commonwealth country may have trouble distinguishing him from the guy from Australia). And after you work with someone for a while, you learn the voice and lexical nuances of colleagues. The rest of the time? I end up pausing the conversation to check who it was that volunteered to serve as my tester and clarify who is going to be getting back to me next week. In a Teams meeting, though, you can quickly tell who is speaking – and respond with a much friendlier “thanks, Jim, for offering to help”.
When you join a Teams meeting, you’ll see up to four large tiles
with meeting participants. If there are more than five participants (you don’t show
up on your own view!), the remaining people will be represented by smaller
images in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
When someone is speaking, their tile will be highlighted in
a purply-blue and a brighter highlight circumscribes their image.
The four large tiles represent the most recent speakers, so
you will notice who is in these four tiles change throughout the call. And, yeah,
it’s possible for more than one person to be talking at a time – you’ll have
multiple highlighted tiles.
There is another place to view who is speaking. On the right-hand
column, click to enter the participant pane.
The current speaker will be bolded.
Bonus Features: Sometimes
I’ll start a large call and have trouble getting everyone’s attention to start the call. In the participant pane,
you can click “Mute all” to mute all
participants. N.B. Any participant can do this – so don’t test it in the
middle of a real discussion!
And just like meetings through the PSTN system or other web-meeting
platforms, you’ll get the occasional person typing without hitting mute. Or speaking
to someone who popped into their office. Or experiencing feedback on the connection.
In Teams, it’s easier to identify who
is causing a disruption – they are going to be highlighted as speaking.
Once you’ve identified the source of the noise, click the
not-quite-a-hamburger-button next to their name and select “Mute participant”.
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.
