One Small Win can BOOST Your Productivity
Human nature is when we feel overwhelmed, we just want to resolve it. When overwhelmed with technology, clients and students want to try and get better at everything at once. However, that approach doesn’t relieve the pressure, it increases it. It is surprising simple to quickly reduce your stress. Identify the one program causing you the most grief, and start there. Is it your inbox constantly open and dragging your attention away. Perhaps it is editing Excel formulas and wondering if they are doing what they are supposed to. Maybe it is a Word document that you can’t quite get …
Want to be More Productive? You Don’t Need an All Day Course… Here’s why…
People often think that to become more “productive” they need to enrol in a full day training course, usually at an intermediate or advanced level because they’ve been using Excel for a few years. This generally means blocking a day out in their calendar and preparing themselves for information overload! But the truth I wish more people understood is that: It’s not full day training you need. You need a few better tips. Having been a trainer who delivered full day training programs, I know all too well how much attending a full day training session actually increased rather than …
Before You Use AI: Questions Every School and Small Business Should Consider
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an everyday workplace tool. It doesn’t matter if it’s for drafting emails, summarising documents, analysing information, or creating draft marketing content, AI has become part of daily life in schools and businesses. For many organisations, the focus is understandably on what AI can do. However, an equally important question is whether there are clear expectations around how it should be used, particularly in small business or schools settings. Before we start, this article is not designed to provide any legal, business, privacy, cybersecurity, or educational advice. Rather, it offers a few things to consider for …
Should you use Excel for the Web or Excel Desktop and What’s the Difference?
With Microsoft 365 we have two main ways to access Excel, on the desktop, which means it is loaded onto your laptop or desktop computer or on the web, which means you access by going to www.microsoft.com and logging in. Note: If you are in a corporate environment, you may just click and Excel opens but you may not actually be sure what version of Microsoft Excel 365 you are using! That’s OK….in this post I want to help explain the versions and the differences. Whilst foundationally they are similar, Excel 365 for the web and Excel 365 desktop have …
What’s the Simplest Way to Create a Pivot Table in Excel if I’m Not a Math or Numbers Person?
If someone says “pivot table” do you break into a cold sweat and your hands get clammy??? You are not alone. The good news is with Microsoft Excel 365, creating and working with pivot tables is nowhere near as hard or scary as it used to be. In fact, it can be one of the fastest and simplest ways to truly make some sense of your data without needing to be a math guru! Let’s work through it together. What is a Pivot Table? A pivot table is simply a table that summarises a big list of data and presents …
7 Strategic Tips to Compress Images in Word and PowerPoint Without Ruining Your File
In this blog post we explore why you should consider reducing the size of images in Word & PowerPoint files and how to do it without ruining your presentation or documents as well as some practical tips to make sharing documents and presentations faster and simpler. Large file sizes can slow down documents or presentations in many ways. Regardless of whether you are emailing your presentation, sharing a document with colleagues or presenting online, Microsoft PowerPoint & Word can help reduce your file size and speed up data transfer minimising file issues. 7 Strategic Tips to Compress Images in Word …
How to Format a Document in Word Without Messing Up the Layout
Introduction It can be both stressful and tricking formatting documents in Microsoft Word. Even more so when a change is made and it unexpectedly messes up your layout. It doesn’t matter what type of document you’re working on, a proposal, report, or workbook, maintaining a clean and professional format is vital. In this post, I outline a step-by-step process, with a little bit of fun, to guide you through formatting your Word 365 documents without messing up your layout. Step 1: Style Like You Mean It! Minimise manual changes to documents by using Word 365’s inbuilt document styles to create …
Excel Flash Fill: Save Time by Joining Data in Seconds
Introduction Ever found yourself having to manually combine data in Excel, use concatenate or to retype or manually combine cells with data in Microsoft Excel 365? If you have, then you will love this blog post on an Excel 365 feature called Flash Fill that makes it easier to complete and flash fill common tasks. Flash fill was first introduced in the 2013 version of Microsoft Excel 365 and is available in Excel 365. It is an amazing tool that detects patterns in the data you are entering into cells in your work sheet and offers the opportunity to fill …
