Category: Office

PowerPoint is not something I have used very often, but I am now doing webinars on at least a monthly basis at work. I’ve inherited some PowerPoint slidedecks from other people with some features I don’t like; one of those is having to click to display elements on slides. This is something which I now know to be animations and their removal is actually quite straightforward.

To remove an animation, select the Animations tab and then select element with animations; the Animation section of the action pane will show the type of animation currently selected; click None to remove the animation:

It doesn’t come up very often as I do a lot of work using SQL Server rather than Microsoft Excel, but every so often I do need to do some date manipulation in Excel.

The formula, below, can be used to get the first and last days of a month (typically used for accruals); I had to do some research to find the syntax for Excel only to be surprised that it was similar to that of SQL Server (although both are Microsoft products so I maybe should not have been surprised).

Get last day of this month:

=EOMONTH(TODAY(), 0)

Get last day of last month (same as above but subtract 1 within the function parameters to step back a month):

=EOMONTH(TODAY() , -1)

Get first day of this month (again using the EOMONTH function, but plus 1 outside of the function to add a day):

=EOMONTH(TODAY(), - 1) + 1

There is an alternate way of getting the first day of this month which uses a different function, but I find using EOMONTH easier to remember:

=TODAY() - DAY(TODAY()) + 1

The TODAY() function could be replaced with a table reference to calculate the first or last day of a month using other dates other than todays.

In the last post, I mentioned uninstalling and reinstalling an old version of Microsoft Office to stop Microsoft Dynamics GP crashing when sending emails using MAPI. However, you don’t need to uninstall Office to roll back the version.

There is a command you can run to roll Office back to a previous version. You can find out the version numbers for Office here and then run this command at an escalated Adminstrator prompt to roll back the version of Office (change the highlighted section to the version number to which you want to roll back):

"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ClickToRun\OfficeC2RClient.exe" /update user updatetoversion=16.0.12730.20236

Once the roll back of Office is complete, launch one of the products and select File » Office Account and then click Update Options » Disable Updates to stop Office being automatically updated:

With this done, Microsoft Office is rolled back to an old version and will not automatically update.

There are other approaches discussed online, but I have tested the above and it worked correctly for me where the others didn’t.

I was working on a new book recently and bolded a lot of important terms. I then remembered that I actually had a style created for key words and should have been using the style rather than simply using bold; I convert the Word document into a number of different formats and styles, rather than simple bold, works a lot better for the conversion process.

A 200 page book was going to be somewhat long-winded to go through and update, but then I remembered seeing some additional options in the Find and Replace window a while ago.

Hit Ctrl+H and then click the More >> button. Click the Format button and select Font…:

Continue reading “Replace Microsoft Word formatting with a style”