We all know Excel is great for doing calculations but it is also handy for managing lists of data which means being able to filter information to find what you are looking for. When Excel 2007 came out there were significant changes to how the Autofilter works.
Here are two tutorials on filtering using the Autofilter feature one on Excel 2003 (which works for Excel 2004 and 2008 for Mac) and the other for Excel 2010, which works the same way for Excel 2007.
If you have large worksheets when you scroll from side to side and up and down you cannot see what is in the top row and first column. Thankfully Excel has a couple of features to help sort this out. These are freeze panes and split windows.
Excel is great for storing lists of data and you may need to manage that data by sorting it into order. Here is how you can sort data in Excel by doing a quick sort or by adding levels to sort by one column and then sort by another level.
This is one of those things I get asked about on a regular basis. It is when someone has two lists and they need to check that they have the same data. It could be an old list that needs to be compared to a new list. It would be tedious to do this one by one just visually when you can use the VLOOKUP function in Excel to do the work for you. In the video below I show you how to do this.
Have you wondered if your wifi or broadband is going as fast as it should. I often hear people saying that they don’t get the speed they expect when they get broadband. The provider quotes them a speed and then they don’t seem to get anything near it. This is changing a bit with the new cable offerings but you still might not be getting what you expect and this may have nothing to do with your broadband provider.
With so many people having wifi now the problem could be that neighbours wifi routers are interfering with yours and slowing it down, however, there is something you can try to speed it up. In the video below there are three websites I mention the links are below the video.
Conditional formatting allows you to automatically get Excel to change the appearance of some cells based on their values. This is particularly useful if you need something to stand out so that as you scan the worksheet you are quickly drawn to what you are looking for. Here in part 1 I get you started with highlight cells rules, data bars, color scales, icon sets and top-bottom rules. You will also see how to clear a rule.
In part 2 we take a look at how to manage rules and how to customise the formatting of a conditional format. You can also delete and manage rules, change icons in an icon set and see more conditions.
Have you got some data in an Excel worksheet that you have going across in a row but would prefer to have in a column or vice versa? Many times I have seen people copy cells one by one into the place that they want the data and in some cases I’ve seen people retyping the data.
Quite often the data has come across like this because it has been imported from a database, text or csv file.
However, it is easy to fix and this is possible using the transpose feature in Paste Special. Here in this video tutorial you will see how to do this and how easy it is.
A new iPhone is here and so is iOS 6 for other iPhones and the iPad and there are some changes that you are going to like and one or two you might not. One change that you might not like is that there is no more YouTube app.
You’re now saying “but I use that all the time” like I did. When I downloaded the test version of iOS 6 I couldn’t believe it. It seems that the license to use it has expired, YouTube is owned by Google and have let it expire. But there is no need to worry as you can use Safari just like you use YouTube on any browser on your computer. By the way Safari has a lot more tabs on the iPad, I’ll come back to this. There is also the Chrome app where YouTube works too.
It’s also rumoured that Google are making a YouTube app which will replace the app we lose and will be downloadable from the App Store, I’ll let you know when or if that happens. But it doesn’t really matter if it works on the Chrome and Safari browser.
So back to the Safari browser, not only does it seem faster but it also has a lot more tabs on the iPad that you can have open at the same time. Currently you can have eight, but with the iOS 6 version I counted 24. That’s a lot more browsing. You can also jump back more than one page at a time, see the video below.
Also if you have an iCloud account and use it on all your devices including your computer you can see open tabs on your other devices and computer. That’s neat and I’ve been using that. Whilst using my iPad I can pick up where I left off when I was using my iMac and vice versa.
Another feature I really like is the VIP option in Mail, something you may have already used in Mountain Lion. Check it out in the video below.
Before iOS 6 you could only have one mail signature for all your email accounts on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, assuming you have more than one email address. However with iOS 6 which come installed on the iPhone 5 you can now have a different signature for each email account. See the video below to see how.
There was another thing that caught my eye when I downloaded the test version was I couldn’t get to my podcasts that I’d downloaded. I watch a number of podcasts and also wondered how people were going to download the Jargon Free Help podcasts. This has been sorted with the recent addition of the Podcasts app from Apple, and actually I like it. It organises them a lot better. Watch the video below for more on the new Podcasts app and how they are now organised.
The stores such as iTunes and the App Store have also been redesigned which is an improvement too. I’ll have to do a podcast to show these in action.
The iPad now has a Clock app with world clock, alarm clock, timer and stopwatch. For both the iPhone and iPad Clock app you can set it to play a music track rather than a ringtone. See how to use it in this video.
How many times have you been woken in the middle of the night because of a phone call or text message, or seen a work email flash up as a notification after hours thats annoyed you. Well now there is the Do Not Disturb feature that remedies this. You can specify when time you want the do not disturb to start and what time to end. During this time time the device will not alert you to texts, calls or emails. You can set it to receive calls from favourites when do not disturb is switch on, if someone is not one of your favourites and they call twice within three minutes it will ring assuming that the call must be urgent.
When you get a phone call on your iPhone and you are busy you can send a text message to let them know you will call them later or set a reminder to call them in an hour or when you leave, get home or get to work.
If you’re doing a presentation or you need to do some work without being distracted or notifications are simply bugging you then you can temporarily switch them off easily.
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