Jon Hood

Recent Posts

Excel: Protect Cells and Lock Down your Spreadsheets

Posted by Jon Hood  /  June 9, 2015  /  Excel   —   No Comments ↓

How do you protect cells on a spreadsheet so that people can only select certain cells? How do you protect cells within a spreadsheet so other people can’t delete your formulas? Gain control of your spreadsheets! The best way is to protect your cells by unlocking them. Check out how to first unlock cells and then protect the sheet with a password. Then, users only have the ability so select the cells that you decide.

Take this Employee Mileage Reimbursement Form, for example. We only want staff members to be able to enter their name, month, commute miles, and other specifics about the expense submission. We don’t want them to be able to select cells that include formulas…only constant values that pertain to them. Once protected, the best practice is to save this document as a template. 

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Tags: Excel

Excel: Clean Your Sheets with TRIM and SUBSTITUTE

Posted by Jon Hood  /  May 21, 2015  /  Excel, Microsoft 365   —   No Comments ↓

Occasionally, dates or names won’t merge correctly into a spreadsheet. There are extra spaces, for example, and you may want to get rid of them. How do you clean up your spreadsheets quickly? Use the TRIM and SUBSTITUTE functions. Trim blank spaces and substitute text or blanks with something different and clean up hidden characters!

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Tags: Excel, Microsoft 365

Excel: Use the Fill Handle to Copy a Series

Posted by Jon Hood  /  May 18, 2015  /  Excel   —   No Comments ↓

How can you use the fill handle to quickly work with your data? There are lots of cool things that you can do to maximize your use of the fill handle to copy a series and save you time. How can you repeat and or copy data down? Well, by using the fill handle!

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Tags: Excel

Excel: Enable or Disable Touch Mode and Mouse Mode

Posted by Jon Hood  /  May 15, 2015  /  Excel, Microsoft 365   —   No Comments ↓

Working with a touch-screen device can present a challenge when working with the Ribbon in Microsoft Office Applications. You may wonder how to enable Touch Mode in Excel, for example. Can you make the buttons bigger? Absolutely. You can create more open space on the Ribbon so commands are easier to tap.

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Tags: Excel, Microsoft 365

Customize and Brand your Office 365 Web Based Sign In

Posted by Jon Hood  /  May 13, 2015  /  Microsoft 365   —   No Comments ↓

Can you customize the branding of the Office 365 Web based sign in experience? Yes you can with Microsoft’s release of Azure Active Directory (AD)!

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Tags: Microsoft 365

How to Add Office 365 Apps to the Apps Launcher Using Azure

Posted by Jon Hood  /  May 12, 2015  /  Microsoft 365   —   1 Comments ↓

Can you add Apps to the App Launcher in Office 365? With the continuous adding of new innovations and features by Microsoft, it is very easy to add single sign on apps to improve the user experience. For example, if you want to add a specific HR app to help users access tools without having to go to the external website, you can! Can you add a Twitter app to Office 365 for single sign on to your organization's Twitter account? Yes, you can! There are hundreds of apps to choose from.

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Tags: Microsoft 365

Why Use Office 365 Government?

Posted by Jon Hood  /  May 7, 2015  /  Microsoft 365   —   No Comments ↓

With the rollout of Office 365 Government, there are some interesting decisions to make when upgrading potentially old and expensive servers. There is an increasing need to find a long-term solution to meet governmental needs for compliance, modern mobility, collaboration, archiving and, of course, security. Office 365 meets all federal information security and privacy requirements. So why migrate to Office 365 Government? It is an opportunity to modernize, boost productivity, be more efficient and reduce cost.

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Tags: Microsoft 365

Excel: Use Flash Fill, Concatenate and Text to Columns

Posted by Jon Hood  /  May 5, 2015  /  Excel, Microsoft 365   —   2 Comments ↓

FLASH FILL: Excel 2013 has an awesome feature called Flash Fill. How does Flash Fill work? It gives you the ability to take a part of the data entered in a column of a worksheet table, type part of it into the next column over, and fill a series.

Excel detects patterns in your initial data entry! The application then figures out the data you want to copy and even offers a few choices to match exactly what you want. Fill a series without a formula! Instead of manually entering your data or copying and pasting, let Excel do the work. Here’s how...

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Tags: Excel, Microsoft 365

Introducing Skype for Business

Posted by Jon Hood  /  April 30, 2015  /  Industry News, Microsoft 365, Workplace Culture   —   No Comments ↓

When do I get Skype for Business? If you’re currently use Lync Online in Office 365, you’ll get Skype for Business sometime by the end of May 2015! It is automatically replacing Microsoft Lync as a robust and unified collaboration and communication platform. What is Skype for Business?

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Tags: Industry News, Microsoft 365, Workplace Culture

Excel: Right Click to Show a Vertical Worksheets List

Posted by Jon Hood  /  April 13, 2015  /  Excel, Microsoft 365   —   No Comments ↓

Some Excel workbooks contain many worksheets and it can be difficult to easily access them. Is there a way to make more tabs visible? You could certainly use the slider bar to navigate but that takes more time and can be tedious. Here is the easiest way to display multiple tabs in Excel for quick navigation.

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Tags: Excel, Microsoft 365

Sharing and Collaboration with Office 365

Posted by Jon Hood  /  April 7, 2015  /  KnowledgeWave News, Industry News, Microsoft 365   —   1 Comments ↓

In this introductory sharing and collaboration webinar, you’ll receive a tour of the user interface and the many Office 365 offerings. Our goal is to help you better understand how using Office 365 and SharePoint Online will streamline your workflow.

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Tags: KnowledgeWave News, Industry News, Microsoft 365

Enjoy Free Microsoft Services and Apps Using Any Email Address

Posted by Jon Hood  /  April 3, 2015  /  Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Microsoft 365   —   No Comments ↓

How do you create a Microsoft account using any email address? Is it required to have a Microsoft email address to sign in to Windows or use apps? No it isn’t!

You can use one email address to sign in everywhere!

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Tags: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Microsoft 365

Excel: IFERROR

Posted by Jon Hood  /  April 1, 2015  /  Excel, Microsoft 365   —   No Comments ↓

Why do you get errors such as #N/A, #VALUE!, #REF!, #DIV/0!, #NUM! and #NAME when you know the formula is correct? What is IFERROR? The IFERROR function is an easy way to fix or change the way an error message is displayed in a cell.

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Tags: Excel, Microsoft 365

Word: Enable or Disable Touch Mode and Mouse Mode

Posted by Jon Hood  /  March 13, 2015  /  Word, Microsoft 365   —   No Comments ↓

Working with a touch-screen device can present a challenge when working with the Ribbon in Microsoft Office Applications. You may wonder how to enable Touch Mode in Word, for example. Can you make the buttons bigger? Absolutely. You can create more open space on the Ribbon so commands are easier to tap.

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Tags: Word, Microsoft 365

Word: Automatically Insert Text with AutoText

Posted by Jon Hood  /  March 10, 2015  /  Word, Microsoft 365   —   No Comments ↓

How do you enter the same text repeatedly in a Word document? You can easily insert blocks of preformatted text using what is called AutoText, or what is sometimes referred to as Quick Parts. Check out the quick and easy way to create AutoText entries by adding selected text to the AutoText gallery. This is an awesome feature that allows you to drop in common text and saves you time by not having to type it in every time!

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Tags: Word, Microsoft 365