Category: Office

Remove Microsoft Word Index Entries

Ian Grieve2 minute read5 Comments

Microsoft WordI’ve written a few books over the last few years; I use Microsoft Word as it is easy to work in and easy to convert to PDF. Some of the books I have written have been self published. Doing it this ways means that I need to do all of the layout and formatting, such as creating the index.

On occasion, I have had a need to remove the index and re-add; this is most often when I am writing a new edition of a book. I’ve done a fair bit of searching for ways of doing this and have used a couple of different approaches.

One of the early approaches I came across was to use VBA to strip the index entries out, but more recently I found another, much simpler, way of doing it using find and replace.

Press Ctrl+H to open the Find and Replace dialog; in the Find what box, type ^d XE:

Find and replace

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Disable AutoSave OneDrive and SharePoint Online Files by Default on Excel

Ian Grieve1 minute read1 Comment

OneDriveI recently got a new laptop at work which meant getting all applications installed. Previously I’d had Microsoft Office 2016 installed; on the new laptop I got Microsoft Office 365 which came with AutoSave enabled by default in all of the applications, such as Excel and Word, for files opened from SharePoint Online:

Microsoft Excel autosave on

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Reformat Number into Dynamics GP Account Number

Ian Grieve2 minute read0 comment

Microsoft ExcelA few weeks ago, Steve Endow retweeted about formatting a number in Microsoft Excel into a Microsoft Dynamics GP account number (I can’t find the tweet now, unfortunately). I had a fiddle around with this and it works fine for display, but the underlying data is still a number; it is just the display which has been changed to a formatted number.

However, with only a couple further steps, the account number can be correctly reformatted. I’m going to step through this one from the start; the basic premise is that we have some account strings which are not formatted; e.g. they do not have the segment separators or leading zeros:

Microsoft Excel with unformatted data

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Creating An Outlook Item Shortcut

Ian Grieve1 minute read0 comment

Microsoft OutlookEarlier this month I did a post on command line parameters to create an Outlook item (such as an email or appointment). In that post I mentioned it was easy to create a shortcut for them, but realised afterwards, that it might be beneficial to cover creating the shortcut.

To create a shortcut, right click on the Windows desktop, and click on New » Shortcut:

Windows right-clickcontext menu

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Shortcut Command Line Parameters For Outlook Email, Appointments, etc.

Ian Grieve2 minute read2 Comments

Microsoft OutlookI’m currently setting up a new laptop and re-creating all of the shortcuts I am used to having, which includes shortcuts not only for Outlook itself, but also for the types of items. For example, I want to use the Run window and type EMAIL and have a new email window open.

Creating the shortcuts is straight forward, but you need to know the command line parameters:

Appointment:
   /c ipm.appointment

Contact:
   /c ipm.contact

Email:
   /c ipm.note

Note:
   /c ipm.stickynote

Task:
   /c ipm.task

I wish the email one was email instead of note as I never remember it on first attempt.

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Microsoft Dynamics GP Crashes/Closes When Emailing After Microsoft Office Update

Ian Grieve2 minute read0 comment

Microsoft Dynamics GPEarly last week, the Dynamics GP Support and Services Blog posted about a problem whereby Microsoft Dynamics GP will crash when emailing after the latest Microsoft Office update.

This officially effects all versions from Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 RTM onward, but one comment on the above blog post says it also effects Dynamics GP 2010.

The Microsoft Office update which causes the problem is:

  • Office 365 – Version 1811 (Build 11029.20079) – Standard
  • Office 365 – Version 1811 (Build 11029.20045) – Insider Edition
  • Office 2019 – Version 1811 (Build 11029.20079)

To check your version of Office, launch Microsoft Outlook, click File then Office Account; on the right hand side of the screen is a section for About Outlook:

About Office section showing version number

There are two options to resolve the issue (you should only have to apply one of them):

  • Revert/Rollback Microsoft Office to the last build.
  • Rename Dynamics GP Code folder and run a Repair (this will remove 3rd Parties).

Instructions for both options are available on the Dynamics GP Support and Services Blog.

We’ve found that for clients with the problem, rolling back the version of Microsoft Office fixes the issue.

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Find Unique Records in Microsoft Excel

Ian Grieve2 minute read3 Comments

Microsoft Excelnot very good with Microsoft Excel. People often think that I am becuae I can concatenate data and write if statements and other formula, but, beyond this, my knowledge is very shallow.

There are things that I know you must be able to do, but have no idea how. As such, I often default to loading data into SQL Server to manipluate. When dealng with large quantities of data, I think this is still the best thing to do, but for smaller datasets, using Excel makes more sense.

There may be a number of other posts, covering fairly simple functionality in Microsoft Excel, that I post in future as reminders for myself.

The first of these Excel tips, is identifying unique data. In Excel this is actually quite simple (once you know how).

If I wanted to identify how many unique vendor ids I had in a dataset, I can do this in only a small number of steps.

Select the columns containing the data I want to search; in this case, the Vendor ID and Vendor Name columns. Select the DataSort & Filter section, click Advanced:

Microsot Excel

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Removing Blank Lines from Microsoft Word

Ian Grieve2 minute read1 Comment

Microsoft OfficeI recently had to read a large Word document which had apparently been written by someone who doesn’t know how to use Microsoft Word. Intead of using paragraph spacing they had inserted blank lines.

I know in the scheme of things, this is a relatively minor gripe, but in a large document it is still annoying.

However, there is a simple way in Word to remove blank lines.

Using the Find and Replace tool, in the Find what box type ^p^p and in the Replace with box type ^p; hit Replace All and all double line breaks will be replaced with single line ones:

MS Word Find and Replace

To my eyes this makes the document far more readable which is important for a large one.

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Change Microsoft Office Serial

Ian Grieve1 minute read1 Comment

Microsoft OfficeIf you ever have problems activating Microsoft Office 2013 you might need to change the licence key, but this cannot be done through the front end.

Instead, there is a command you can run at the command line to change the key:

cscript "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\OSPP.VBS" /inpkey:officekey

Replace the highlighted section above to the new key you want to put in place; once done you can then log into Office and activate the software online.

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