Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

As Office 2010 becomes more prevalent in the workplace (most of our clients either have or will be soon updating to it) so the use of the ribbon has become more natural and intuitive for people. It is certainly much more intuitive than the old menu driven interface.

Play a fun game called Ribbon Hero 2 that allows you to learn the fastest and best ways to do various common tasks in the various Office Apps. My kids are using this to learn the interface and some of these common tasks. I have even learnt some things in the 5 minutes I have spent playing it so far! Download Ribbon Hero 2.

Take the first step in growing your Excel Skills. Microsoft have created a series of learning videos that assist new users to Excel to grow their skills

Learn how to create your own Excel Macros with a free training course. Ideal for the entry level person who wants to explore macro writing for the first time. Note this doesn't create efficient code, but its a start to understanding how the VBA code interacts with Excel.

PowerPivot for Excel - if you have looked or used PowerPivot (See my review of Power Pivot) than this page has some good links for additional resources.

Ok so that title was a little contrived – and only because my wife bought the classic Jules Verne book yesterday along with Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Louisa Alcott’s Little Woman and Jack London’s Call of the Wild.

This article has a bunch of cool Microsoft Excel related content from all around the world.

10 worst Microsoft Excel practices. Michiel has created this list, but I certainly wouldn’t rank them the same way.

My Top three would be:

• Linked spreadsheet files (workbooks)
• Merged Cells
• Combining reports and data tables on the same worksheet – Michiel’s number 9. The other two don’t even make his list.

Allen Wyatt has a great article providing some VBA code to detect errors in conditional formatting formulas. This is a very practical solution to a very real problem.

Doug Klippert has posted some code from Peter Beach an Excel MVP that will create a list in Excel of all the folders on a drive and their sizes.

Andrew Engwirda has added some cool chart tools to his free Excel Tools. (News flash – he might come back to work for me! – Stay tuned)

Dick’s Daily Dose of Excel has two interesting posts (well lots actually but two I picked out) – the first written is on displaying image galleries in the ribbon written by Ron de Bruin, and the second titled Elle’s birthday.

Joseph has a very good explanation written for the new Excel 2007 tables of how not to break your summing formulas. The same concepts apply in Excel 2003 for the auto sum function using the Sigma button the toolbar.

Oh and that’s a photo of Kitty pretending to be interested in spreadsheeting techniques. Kitty is a business analyst working for Jethro.

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.