Excel Online lets you view, edit and share your Excel workbooks from anywhere and it is free as part of Office Online or available for collaborating securely across your organization as part of an Office 365 subscription. We are pleased to announce several updates that help you with some of your most common spreadsheet tasks, including new ways to format data, use hyperlinks in your spreadsheet and explore data using PivotTables.
Read on for details about each one of these new and exciting improvements.
New ways to format data
Data comes in all shapes and forms. Excel Online now offers more number formats to display your data. To display the full list of format options, under the Home tab, click the Number Format drop-down and then select More number formats or right-click in a cell and select Format cells.
The beauty of using Excel Online is that it looks and feels like the Excel desktop experience you already know and love. Similarly, the Number Format dialog has the same options as the Excel desktop as we always try to keep the same and familiar user experience across all Excel platforms.
We know that currency formats are very common in spreadsheets, so we have made it easier for you to find the most common currency formats for your data. When you click the $ sign, under the Number Format section of the Home tab, you will find a list of the most common currencies with access to more accounting formats.
Connect your spreadsheet to more places using hyperlinks
You can now do more with hyperlinks in your spreadsheet when you are using Excel Online. For example, in addition to connecting a URL, you can now hyperlink to a place in the document or an email address. To display the Edit Hyperlink dialog, click Hyperlink under the Insert tab. Alternatively, right-click in the cell and select Hyperlink.
Summarize and group data using PivotTables
PivotTables (and Pivot Charts) are one of the most productive tools that Excel has to offer because they make it quick and easy to summarize and group your tables of data in any way you like. With this update, you can do more with your PivotTables with settings to change the way you summarize your value fields. If you would like to see the average sales amount instead of total sales amount, then the Value Field Settings is your dialog. You can launch the dialog from the Value menu in the PivotTable setting pane.
The Value Field Settings dialog consists of two tabs. The SUMMARIZE VALUE BY tab allows you to change the summarized value type.
The SHOW VALUE AS tab enables you to change the type of calculation used in the PivotTable value fields. For example, instead of its absolute value, you can view the percentage out of the grand total.
If you don’t like the value name, or if you wish to shorten it, you can rename it in the Custom Name text box.
Faster filtering in PivotTables with search
Just like regular tables in your workbook, you can filter data in your PivotTable for quick analysis. Now, Search dialog includes a Filter dialog to help you easily find the values you want to display. You no longer need to scroll through a list of hundreds or thousands of values to find what you are looking for. Search as you type makes your experience fast and friendly.
Saving your last viewed workbook
When you save a workbook and then open it with Excel Online later on, we keep you on the same sheet you last viewed, making it faster for you to keep moving with your work.
On-premises availability
On-premises users will also be able to benefit from the improved experience that we’re building for the cloud. All you need to do is have SharePoint deployed and then integrate it with the upcoming release of Office Online Server. In the future, you can expect to see frequent updates coming to on-premises in parallel to being released to the cloud.
Try them out yourself
Try out these new features and see how they can help you do more with Excel from anywhere! Do you have ideas on other features and improvements that you’d like to see in Excel Online? Visit our Excel UserVoice and let us know what you think!
Word 2013 is packed with custom content possibilities, from brochures to newsletters to labels. One of these opportunities is a dynamic, fillable form, that designates fields for you or others to fill out. It’s easy to create one of these forms from Word’s online template gallery, and the video above shows you how.
To start, you’ll need to ensure the Developer tab is visible in your Ribbon:
1.From the File tab, click Options.
2.Select Customize Ribbon.
3.On the right-hand side, under Main Tabs, check the box next to Developer and the Developer tab will appear in the Ribbon.
Next, you need to download a form template.
1.From the File tab, click New.
2.In the Search online templates box, type the name of the form you want, or just type “form” to view your options.
3.Click the template that you want to use and select Create.
Now, you have a form that you can fill out or send. If you need to make edits to the form, select the Design Mode button from the Ribbon. Check out this support article for instructions on more advanced customizations you can add to your form.
Collaboration capabilities in Office 365 have taken the suite from the old office standard to something truly great. While a lot of collaboration still takes place via email, and in newer tools like OneNote, the Word document still reigns supreme for content creation requiring multiple contributors.
The three tips below span both Word Online and Word 2013. If you have the opportunity to create a collaborative document in Word Online, check out the video and post for tip #1.
If Word 2013 is required for your team, you can still take advantage of collaborative elements like tracking changes and communication via comments, as described in tips 2-3, and manage the version control and storage in a way that works for your team.
1. Use Word Online to Seamlessly Co-Author Documents
There are various ways to co-author a document in Word Online–the exact methodology is up to you. For example, two users might co-author a document at the same time, with each assigned different sections. Or, a group leader may take the primary authoring role, with one or two remote group members following along from home with the document open. Check out this video for an example of how Word Online co-authoring is experienced.
2. Track Changes in Word 2013
Tracking changes in Word 2013 is an key part of the collaboration process in Office, especially important as documents are easier than ever to share and access. If you’re responsible for editing and marking up a document, follow the steps in the video above. You can also change the markup view in order to make it easier to edit, or make it look more friendly to your recipient.
3. Add, Reply to, and Complete Comments in Word 2013
Adding, replying to, and completing comments are key elements of collaborating and communicating in Word 2013. Comments and revisions got a makeover with Word 2013, with a much more streamlined look and feel and improved functionality. Comments now include long-requested functions like replying and marking as complete. The video above provides the steps to add and reply to comments in Word 2013, as well as mark them as complete.
The genius that happens every day in the offices of the world requires a certain amount of focus. Unfortunately, most offices are awash with both physical and mental distractions that pull our attention away from the task at hand. To help you identify common pitfalls, we’ve zeroed in on the top five productivity killers in the modern age. Better still, we gathered expert advice on ways to block out the noise and get to work.
1. Social media
Rieva Lesonsky, CEO of GrowBiz Media & com, admits her primary distraction is self-inflicted. “Social media can take me off task, especially Twitter. (I’m addicted.)”
It happens to the best of us. You’re at a lull in your work, and you get that nagging sensation that something amazing might be happening on Facebook. Why not take a quick peek, just to make sure the world’s not passing you by? These brief breaks may seem harmless enough, but making compulsive social media checks during the day can add up to hours a week of lost time.
Instead of checking Facebook or Twitter throughout the day, try scheduling your social media time after lunch and limit it to 15 minutes. Having a special time slot for checking out the latest hijinks of Grumpy Cat will leave the rest of your day free for more productive endeavors. And if you really can’t help trying to scratch that itch, consider blocking your most visited social websites with your browser’s security settings.
2. A crazy commute
If you live or work in a large city, the morning commute can be an exercise in extreme frustration. What should be a 15-minute drive can turn into an hour or more of unproductive stress during rush hour.
Fortunately, thanks to cloud computing, working remotely is easier than ever. With web-based software and collaboration tools, office workers can get everything done even when they’re miles away from home base. More and more, corporate leaders are warming up to the idea of telecommuting as remote employees report higher productivity and morale. Even if you can’t work remotely all the time, you may be able to slightly shift your work schedule so you’re not traveling at rush hour, or just handle the first hour of your workday from home before you hop in the car.
3. Loud-mouthed colleagues
Who can’t relate to this scenario: you’re just settling in for some hard-core focus time to bang out a monthly report when the guy in the next cubicle starts in on a high-volume recap of last night’s episode of Game of Thrones—and you haven’t seen it yet (spoiler alert!). Working in an office can be great for collaboration and easy communication, but not so great when you’re doing focused solo work. Diplomatic requests for quiet might buy you a few minutes of peace, but let’s be realistic: some people do not possess an inside voice. Treat yourself to a pair of noise-canceling headphones and crank your favorite background tunes or soothing sounds from a white-noise website like Noisli.
4. The unfocused workday
You may have a truckload of work, but without a clear plan of attack, you may leave the office that night wondering what you got done and why you spent time on the wrong tasks. Ramon Ray of Smart Hustle Magazine zeroes in on the root of the problem. “Lack of clear understanding and planning. When I’m clear and highly organized, things flow!”
Jeff Marcoux, CMO lead for Worldwide Enterprise Marketing at Microsoft, agrees. “Randomization is the killer of productivity.” To get his house in order, he spends the first 10 minutes of his day making an explicit to-do list, following guidelines set out in this Harvard Business Review article. If you have trouble organizing your tasks, check out a mobile productivity tool like ToDoist or LeanKit.
5. Email
It’s impossible to avoid in the modern workplace, but email is as much a hindrance as it is a help. Andy Karuza, owner of BrandBuddee, notes, “being ‘too connected’ can be a major productivity killer. This is because task switching wastes lots of time from having to reset your train of thought and pick up where you left off on the previous task.”
Answer emails and social media messages together at the top of the hour. Knock them all out at once and then wrap yourself up again in that Excel spreadsheet you were working on.
Your email inbox forces you to switch focus from your task at hand, wasting precious minutes of your targeted energy. Karuza suggests taking a structured approach. “Answer emails and social media messages together at the top of the hour. Knock them all out at once and then wrap yourself up again in that Excel spreadsheet you were working on.”
You may also be doing work that is better done by a machine. Try to automate some basic email tasks to help you prioritize your inbox so those sprints of replying to email are as efficient as possible.
Whether you’re working from home or at the office, there’s always something there to distract you. Identifying your own biggest distractions is the first step to eliminating them. How do you conquer your workday productivity killers? Share your secrets on Facebook or Twitter.
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