If you use Excel 2007 (Currently my company has not upgraded yet), you might be interested in reading the thread below from the google user groups:

Microsoft Excel 2007 Calculation Bug

It looks like a problem with the floating point representation of certain numbers. Fortunately, from what I can see this specific problem is unique to 2007, so if you haven’t upgraded yet you should be ok. Otherwise, if you use 2007 I’d read up on it to see if this affects you in any way.

So I decided I’d try and get myself out of 2003 by upgrading my Microsoft Office Professional suite to the 2007 version. However, I really wanted to try it out first before I committed to upgrading. The question is: Where do I find it? Surprisingly enough, Microsoft actually offers a free 60 day trial for the different 2007 Office components. Better still, these trials provide full functionality as opposed to the watered down versions you sometimes get with trial software. I was a little surprised because I don’t remember Microsoft offering free trials of their previous office versions (I could be wrong though, it’s been awhile since I bought one).

Here’s the link to the download page: Microsoft Office 2007 Free Trial. I’m going to download it and give it a test run, I’ll post my thoughts at the end of the trial run.

This is a passionate plea from not only me, but millions of other people who have to deal with Excel spreadsheets on a daily basis: Please refrain from using 8000 colors if you’re creating a spreadsheet. I received a spreadsheet the other day and there was at least 15 different colors used to differentiate the data. The result was that it took me twice as long as it should have to review it. This is a disturbing trend that seems to be getting worse, and I really want it to end.

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I thought I’d mention this site, as it’s a great resource for Microsoft Office articles. Basically, it aggregates these articles from multiple sources (with the author’s permission) and provides a little synopsis for each one and a link to the original article. I like this site because it’s quick loading and it provides an easy to use interface. Another good feature is that it’s not littered with ads like a lot of the other aggregation sites out there.

It’s definitely worth perusing if you have a chance, as there articles on a ton of different Microsoft Office related topics. Here’s the link:

Microsoft Office Reporter.

I came across this functionality the other day when I was trying to convert some data I had in a Microsoft Word document into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The problem was that although the data was in columns in the Word document, it wasn’t actually in a table. This means that when I tried to copy a row into Excel, instead of it going into three columns the entire row went into the first column. It was a major problem for me because there was a significant amount of data, and I didn’t have time to try to hand copy it row by row into Excel. Fortunately for me, this is when I found out about the Text to Columns feature in Excel.

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The word Backend is usually used to refer to the part of a system that the end users or clients don’t see. Take buying airline tickets online as an example. In this instance, the person buying tickets online only sees the web page. What they don’t see is the database behind the web pages and the services that get kicked off when they click “Buy”. This is what we refer to as the backend of the system.

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This particular tips comes from the fact that I’ve been asked this question several times now in the last few days alone, so I thought it would be a good idea to post it here: How do you put a Carriage Return in-between lines of text in a single cell? In other words, how do you use the Enter key like you would in Microsoft Word?

The answer to this is simple: Use Alt + Enter. When typing in your cell and you want to create a blank line before the next line of text starts, hold down the Alt key and press Enter. This will insert a blank line (like in Word) instead of shifting the focus to the next cell.

As I have talked about in previous articles, there are many areas where Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel overlap. Because of this, there exists the ability to quickly interchange data between the two programs. In this article, I’m going to go over a few simple steps to transfer all of the data from a table in an Access database to an Excel spreadsheet.

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Most of the time, your installation of Microsoft Office will come with a decent size collection of Clip Art. However, there are some occasions where your default collection won’t do, and you need something specific. While you can find other images online to suit your needs, this can sometimes be a hassle (searching for a specific picture, being able to download it for free, etc). That’s why your online search for Clip Art should start with….Microsoft (I know, it’s shocking)!

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When working in a spreadsheet, nine times out of ten you’ll end up inserting a row. In fact, you’ll more than likely be inserting multiple rows at a time. However, if you just highlight where you want to insert and use the Insert command, only one row will be inserted. This can be annoying if you are trying to insert multiple rows at one time. Fortunately, you aren’t consigned to “one row at a time” hell just yet. Microsoft Excel does allow you to insert multiple rows in a single click.

It’s quite simple to accomplish this by following these steps:

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