Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I read bunches of excel tips and hints from other websites and every now and again I post links and details of the best ones. Here's a few good ones I have picked up recently.

Counting number of unique entries in a specified range From ExcelTip
Counting number of unique entries in a specified range is simple by using the SUMPRODUCT and COUNT functions.
The range can be all in one column or row, or may span multiple (adjoining) columns/rows.
The formula would be written as: =SUMPRODUCT((1/COUNTIF(A1:C5,A1:C5&""))) where A1:C5 is replaced with the range you want to apply the count to.

Microsoft Office OneNote 2007

I love OneNote.   When I first started working for Tim he asked me to sign up with a lot of things online, and start using different programs that I'd never even heard of before. One of those programs was 'OneNote'.  At first I didn't use it that much, I'm one of those people who don't really enjoy changing the way you do things. I found it more practical to write things down in my physical notebook that I carried in my bag, But since then I've personalised my OneNote and have been keeping heaps of information organised nicely in there.

MS Office Outlook Team Blog - Managing Automatic Meeting Responses. This is a good article on keeping your inbox free from meeting responses - great for cubicle warriors.

How to Search your PSTs with Vista's built-in Search. I have a large amount (several Gigabytes) of archived email stored in PSTs. This tip means that content is now searched by Vista without me having to have these PST files open in Outlook. - tip to Sarah from Channel 10.

EqualsSolved - putting me out of business! Microsoft Excel and web queries for the non IT pro.

Excel has made numerous changes in its conditional formatting between 2003 and 2007. Most of the new features I think are great, though there are a lot of problems with backward compatibility.

One thing I discovered this week is a trap for the unwary.

In Excel 2003 it was easy to create a conditional format for a cell, and then copy that cell or even just the formatting for that cell to other cells, and the conditional formatting would be copied also. Of course it pays to make sure that you correctly apply absolute and relative cell references in the conditional formatting if using formulas. And using paste special or the format painter you could copy just the formatting from once cell to another - including the conditional formatting.