We're sure you know someone who sits in front of a computer all day--your co-worker, accountant, spouse--who would appreciate being distracted for 10 seconds by an animated Valentine's Day card. We've brought you one courtesy of Sandra Johnson, a MVP PowerPoint genius. Check out theWiz website to see her wizardry for yourself. ...(read more).. more »

Five math whizzes from the same city go to Harvard to study business and only one becomes a CEO of his own company. You want to use visuals in your PowerPoint presentation to help tell their story to budding entrepreneurs at an upcoming event. In this short video, Bruce Gabrielle shows you how to use the Transitions and Artistic Effects features .. more »

VLOOKUP Week has ended. The brainchild of Excel MVP Bill Jelen, the idea inspired all things VLOOKUP, including VLOOKUP odes, haikus, vampires, and a way to track shark attacks. Setting all fun aside--Excel experts created a crazy number of useful and innovative applications of VLOOKUP in seven days.  Now Bill wants you to vote for your f.. more »

Sometimes all it takes to get your world under control is checking off tasks on a list. Office.com has lots of already-made checklist templates to meet your needs, including those for general projects, travel planning, or daily tasks. But if you're a Type A personality, making your own list is the first step to regaining control. Word can .. more »

When someone needs a new resume, he or she either starts from scratch or searches the Web for a template. What they don't know is that access to free resume templates is hiding in plain sight in Word. All you have to do in Word is click New, look under Office.com Templates, and make your pick. The trickiest part of creating a resume is gearing it .. more »

Outlook search boxA common problem with email searches is that they can return too many results. For example, entering someone’s name may return matches where the name appears in parts of the message’s body even though you meant to look for messages from that person. It can be also hard to enter other criteria to help narrow your search, such as w.. more »

We wanted to let you know about some good news from the Exchange team.They've released a new administrative tool called PST Capture that helps IT administrators manage .pst files">.pst files. It lets them search across networks to discover .pst files and then import them into Exchange Server or Exchange Online.So what's a .pst file? ...(read more).. more »

Recently, we released a small update to the software that connects the Outlook Social Connector to Facebook. If you already use the Outlook Social Connector to connect to Facebook, you can get the software update in our download center. If you don't use Outlook Social Connector, you should try it out. It integrates your contacts and email messages .. more »

When all your slides look alike, your entire message can be blurred. At the end of your presentation, you want your audience to remember your main points most, and if they remember some of the details, that's a plus. By making key slides distinctive, you can help people follow and retain the content in your presentation.  PowerPoint MVP Ellen F.. more »

PowerPoint experts are always sharing tips with each other, including how to improve each other's presentations.Presentation designer Krzysztof Baszton contacted Bruce Gabriel to show him more elegant ways to print white lines in PowerPoint than the ones Bruce presented in his previous video. ...(read more).. more »

Back in the day, clear and concise text was the key to a good presentation. But the game has changed. People expect your slides to dance. Well, not really dance, but they certainly expect some animation here and there. That's why we've added two new lessons on PowerPoint animations to our PowerPoint skills builder--a free video training .. more »

Do you belong to LinkedIn? Did you know that LinkedIn has lots of Excel user groups where Excel trainers, developers, financial modelers, and even Excel blackbelts compete to out geek each other--or just share information? ...(read more).. more »

JP Pinto! Congratulations! His post was one of seven chosen by Bill Jelen as the most innovative ones published during VLOOKUP Week. He won a copy Bill Jelens book Microsoft Excel 2010 In Depth. You can find links to all seven posts and see the voting results in our wrap-up post of VLOOKUP Week. ...(read more).. more »

Here is the recording from this week's free Office 15-Minute Webinar about simplifying data in Excel. You can join our webinars live at 9:15 am PDT. Click http://aka.ms/offweb for complete information.   What you will learn at Tuesday’s webinar Using Conditional Formatting Adding Sparklines Better charts for presentations A new tool .. more »

The Word 2010 gallery makes adding a basic table of contents quick: Click the References tab, click Table of Contents, and then click the gallery table of contents you want. But what if you want more? What if your table of contents needs to provide different information--more levels, or fewer levels? What if you want a table of contents at the .. more »

Why does formatting sometimes get messed up when you cut and paste text? And what is that thing that appears at the end of the last sentence every time you paste-like a fly returning to honey. That thing--the Paste Options button--is your friend, a worker bee and not a fly whose only job is to follow your formatting instructions. Learning how it .. more »

In Microsoft Word, you can convert a table into text, and vice versa. In this video, you'll learn how to change names and addresses in a table into a list separated by commas.    If you just want the text version of the instructions, read the full post....(read more).. more »

The 2 GB file size problem associated with MS Outlook has discomfort Outlook users by corrupting their data or making them inaccessible. Outlook splitter has proved to be a key resolver in this issue as it splits large Outlook file into small parts... more »

For our last blog post of the year, we took a look back to see which ones you read the most. It’s no surprise that the top five were tips—the shorter the better for reading at work....(read more).. more »

If you are writing custom function for XML export – do not forget to replace predefined XML characters, else XML parsing function may fail. There are only 5 characters, so function looks pretty simple: Function XMLSpecialChars(ByVal varText As Variant) As String   varText = varText & ""   varText = Replace(varText, "&", "&")  .. more »