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Have you heard of Office 365? If not you are probably living under a luddite bush as the advertising is everywhere. From popping up in Skype (now owned by Microsoft) and being named sponsor for the recent V8 Supercar Tasmanian Round (in Australia) to TV spots and Billboards as well as YouTube Office 365 is an integral part of Microsoft's big bold new direction.

Microsoft’s vision in the 80s was “A PC in every home”

Today it is “A continuous cloud service for every person every device and every business” Kevin Turner - Microsoft COO, WPC10

With business users now often having more powerful PCs at home then on their desktops large businesses are often lagging behind. In the past small business was given the crumbs from Enterprises table. Now the tables have well and truly turned. With Office 365, Microsoft have created the opportunity for agile small businesses to utilise the power of cloud computing and enterprise level IT architecture for a fraction of the cost on a monthly subscription.

Lets go through the benefits and features.

• Access email anywhere on any device – using Exchange as the backend for email management and storage
• Shared calendars and out of office messages (not available in standard Outlook)
• Share documents with version control and security management to people in and outside your organisation
• Full High Definition video conferencing

We have been working with Office 365 for a long time (from long before it was marketed as that) and are busy installing it in many of our customers organisations.

Here is a slide show presented recently to a small business network group.

A poem I wrote in 1998 to two good friends who lost a baby just a few days after birth.

Mere words are never enough

We wish we were there to hold you and share in your loss

In this bittersweet time as Jesus takes your precious daughter to a better place

 

We hold you up in our prayers

Our love for you is not as strong as His

Let His arms enfold you and strengthen you in ways we never could

 

The life of your daughter was short

But she touched our lives in a very special way

May she sing with the angels in heaven tonight in praise to God

© Timothy Miller 1998

Like most people I have lots of little stressors, things to think about and do, tasks and responsibilities. Nothing exciting there.

So its really nice when i can escape the morass of dealing with life and go and experience moments of full immersion in the outdoors. Today was one of those days. I was conscious of completely ignoring email, phone calls, clients, finances, staff and other things. I was completely in the moment, struggling with the pain in my legs, exulting in the adrenalin, revelling in the speed, the control and the fun of pelting downhill flat out, the detail of the tyre tracks on the ground in front of me, even the bluish green shine to large pieces of animal dung.

Today I joined a ride that was supposed to be a 68km round trio from Beerburrum to Woodford and back through the Glasshouse mountains. I didn’t make it back because i suffered some mild heat issues, and some major cramping. Didn’t stop me riding the first half though. and I loved every minute of not being in my home office.

Right now I’m loving being in the office with the aircon running and a cold drink at hand!

Here are some pics i got with the mobile while on the ride.

And a little video of the steepest uphill climb.

And finally here is the map and data from Strava.

This also applies to Office 2007 and 2010. Based on my original post Feb 2004 relating to Office 2003 and prior.

Most people know how to use copy and paste in Office. Or do they? Right click a selected item(s) and copy, then right click the destination and paste.

That is definitely the slow way. Keyboard people know about Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for Copy and Paste. (or CTRL+Insert / Shift +Insert)

But office has long had a Paste Special command that exposes a whole bunch more options for the pasting side of this command.

New Office, (2007, 2010, 2013) uses the Paste button in the ribbon to provide access (though there is still keyboard access with ALT+E+S).

Once you have something in the clipboard with the copy command, clicking the little arrow below Paste Icon in the ribbon gives you a lot more options. Each office application is slightly different  as to what you get.

Word has less options than Excel. Powerpoint and Outlook, Live Writer and Publisher etc. all use this feature differently. However each of them allow you to strip metadata (formatting etc.) from the actual text and just paste the text. This extremely useful when copying text from a web page, PDF file or some other heavily formatted document.

Hovering your mouse over any of the icons will give you a tool tip identifying it as per the example on the right.

And clicking the Paste Special link at the bottom brings up the traditional dialog box.

Ill take you through the main ones for Excel.

• Paste Special Formulas Use this when you want to copy a formula but don't want to change the editing on the target cell(s)
• Paste Special Values Use this when you want to convert a selection (or single cell) from formulas or links to just the current calculated value. Full resolution of formulas to maximum decimal places will occur even if formatting doesn't show it. This is useful to cut links from external files, replace temporary formulas with actual results etc.
• Paste Special Links Use this to quickly paste the link to an external spreadsheet by copying from that sheet and paste links into the target cell(s)
• Paste Operation - Multiply, Add, Divide, Subtract These are very powerful tools. Try this:
  Find a selection of formulas (eg sums at the bottom of a range). Enter 0 (zero) in a blank cell then copy that cell.
  Select the range you want to alter and Paste Special Operation Multiply. (You may want to click Formulas as well so as to not change target cell(s) formatting).
  This will add to your existing formula *0 (and any required brackets) and the result will become zero. This can be used in all sorts of ways, - eg dividing numbers by 1,000 to change $ to $'000 etc.
• Paste Special Transpose Use this to alter the orientation of a selection of cells. Copy a column and turn it into a row and vice versa.

You can also combine options from each section as per the example below.