Microsoft Office moves into the Cloud

  By David H. Ringstrom, CPA Microsoft is beta testing a new subscription-based product called Office 365 that includes the following applications: Microsoft Office Professional Plus (Microsoft’s flagship productivity suite, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other applications); Microsoft Exchange Online (e-mail, mobile access, contacts, anti-virus, and anti-spam); Microsoft Sharepoint Online (collaboration tool for building …

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UPDATE: BlackBerry PlayBook means business

By David Ringstrom As iPhones continue to impinge on traditional BlackBerry territory, Research in Motion (RIM) is countering with a competitor to Apple’s famed iPad – a tablet known as the PlayBook will be released in early 2011. Geared toward business users, the PlayBook will serve as either a standalone device, or a larger screen …

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New spam attack attempts to disable security software

By David Ringstrom A virulent new e-mail threat is causing significant problems for large businesses and individuals. The infected e-mail messages entice recipients to click on a hyperlink to either a PDF or Windows Media (WMF) file. Doing so allows a worm to simultaneously exploit an infected user’s e-mail address book and attempt to disable …

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N() Function

The N() function allows you to embed notes within formulas, e.g. =SUM(A1:A5)+N(“Sums rows 1 through 5”). N evaluates to zero.

The Making of a Great Webcast Speaker

It goes without saying that if you are going to teach continuing education, you have to know your stuff. But the requirements of a good presentation go well beyond having knowledge of your subject—especially in an online presentation. Click here to read the full text of the article at AccountingWEB.com.

Moving Columns Trick

To move selected columns, hold the Shift down while you move the edge of your selection with left mouse.

Undo Comparision

Excel 2007/10 tip: Press Ctrl-Z repeatedly to undo your last 100+ actions. Even better, you can still undo actions after you save your file. In Excel 2003 and earlier you can only undo the last 16 actions, and saving your file clears the undo stack. You cannot undo renaming a worksheet name or deleting a …

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Start-up company aims to simplify small business cash flow management

By David H. Ringstrom Two graduates from University of California-Berkley have launched what they hope will become Mint.com  for small businesses. Jessica Mah and Andy Su have just launched inDinero, which offers to aggregate all financial activity for your business into simple dashboards. This is accomplished through daily, automatic updates so that you can log …

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What to do when Excel won’t let you insert columns

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA From time to time you might encounter the prompt that appears when Excel thinks you can’t add additional columns or rows. This occurs when Excel considers used range of the worksheet to encompass all columns or rows. In this article I’ll describe some techniques you can use to overcome this …

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Office 2010 has arrived! Customize your ribbon!

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA Office 2010 is now in stores and at www.office.com, so anyone can upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship productivity suite. Office 2010 provides numerous refinements to the new user interface introduced with Office 2007. As you might be aware, Microsoft abandoned a decades-old user interface comprised of drop-down …

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Two ways to determine your top customers in QuickBooks, Excel

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA Given the length of the Great Recession, your top customers today might not be the same folks who were your top customers even a couple months ago. In this article I’ll demonstrate two ways that you can determine who your top customers are based on total sales. The first technique …

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Transform multiple-line cell contents into columns in Excel

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA Sometimes in Excel you may encounter a situation such as that shown in Figure 1, where each cell contains multiple lines of data. It’s not a huge task to manually type a few records, but what if you have dozens or hundreds of records in this format? In this article I’ll …

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Some unlikely uses for Excel’s SUMPRODUCT function

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA While you may not be aware of Excel’s SUMPRODUCT function, those in the know often use it for its stated purpose: multiplying two ranges together and then summing the total. As shown in Figure 1, a single formula using SUMPRODUCT can replace the eight formulas listed in Cells D2 through …

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What’s the FREQUENCY? Using Excel’s FREQUENCY function

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA From time to time you may want to determine how items fall within specific ranges. For instance, a teacher may wish to know how many students earned A’s, B’s, C’s, and so on. A real estate portfolio manager may wish to know how many buildings fall within ranges of 250,000, …

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Excel Tip: Converting numbers formatted as <1> to -1

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA From time to time you may encounter financial data where negative numbers are enclosed in brackets, such as <100>. In most cases, Excel treats such numbers as text, which means such numbers won’t be included in totals or other arithmetic functions. Typically such numbers will be left-aligned, as shown in …

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