gHacks technology news » microsoft excel

Microsoft Excel Add-In To Trim Spaces

Martin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:17:53 +0000

Spaces are usually not a problem in Microsoft Excel. They usually occur when importing data from another source and are either located at the beginning or end of the data. These spaces can become a huge problem for users who have to process the data further as spaces can pollute the results.

The Trim Spaces add-in for Microsoft Excel has been designed to clean spaces from data that is located in an Microsoft Excel file. To be more precise: The Excel add-in will remove trailing or leading spaces in the data and leave the other spaces in their places.

All it takes to remove spaces from Excel cells is to select the cells that should be processed by the add-in and to click on the run button afterwards. This will automatically process all select cells and remove leading and trailing spaces from these cells. A report is generated in the end that is listing the number of processed cells and the cells that have been trimmed.

The Trim Spaces add-in for Microsoft Excel is compatible with the last four major released of Microsoft Excel (that is Excel 2007, Excel 2003, Excel XP (2002) and Excel 2000).

Microsoft Office Live Workspace Add-in

Martin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:59:48 +0000

Microsoft Office add-ins add a wide variety of features to Microsoft’s Office. Most are designed to add functionality to specific programs like Microsoft Word, Excel or Outlook. The Office Live Workspace add-in is an official add-in that is being developed by Microsoft. It provides Microsoft Office users with the ability to upload their documents to the Microsoft Office Live Workspace on the Internet.

This does mean that an account at Microsoft Office Live Workspace is required before the add-in can be used. The service is free on the other hand and it takes only a few seconds to signup for it. Windows Live account users can use their account to signup for Microsoft Office Live Workspace. The service is currently in beta and provides access to 5 Gigabytes of storage space for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that can also be edited on the website.

Office 2007 users find the option to upload their documents to the Microsoft Office Live Workspace and to open documents from the online storage space under the Microsoft Office button in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Office 2003 and XP users get a new Office Live toolbar that provides access to three buttons that offer the functionality to open documents that are stored at Microsoft Office Live Workspace, save documents so that they are stored online and to open the Office Live Workspace website.

The Office Live Add-in itself is compatible with Microsoft Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP.

Tags: excel, microsoft excel, microsoft powerpoint, microsoft word, microsoft-office, office 2003, office 2007, office live, office live workspace, office workspace, office xp, powerpoint, word

How To Open Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets Without Excel

Martin — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:22:20 +0000

There are quite a few ways of opening Microsoft Excel spreadsheets if Microsoft Excel is not installed on the computer system. The article will outline several popular ways of opening Excel spreadsheets so that the contents can be at least read and printed. Several of the methods even allow to work with the contents of the spreadsheets as well.

All ways of opening Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can be divided into an online and offline category. The online category usually requires an account at some website before the spreadsheets can be worked with.

Computer Software Programs:

Excel Viewer [link]

Microsoft’s own Excel Viewer can be used to view Excel 2007 (xlsx) and earlier Excel spreadsheets. It has a download size of 74 Megabytes and uses the same core that Microsoft Excel uses which ensures a good compatibility with all Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Open Office [link]

Open Office is considered to be the Microsoft Office alternative. It is a free Open Source office suite that can be used to open Microsoft Office document formats. The module needed to open Excel spreadsheets is called Calc and supports the new Excel 2007 xlsx format but also older Microsoft Excel documents.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack [link]

Users who have a previous version of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Excel installed (that is pre-Excel 2007) can use the Microsoft Office compatibility pack to add support for the Excel xlsx format so that these spreadsheets can also be worked with in previous versions of Excel.

XLS Viewer 2.30 [link]

The XLS Viewer has a tiny size of just 1 Megabyte. It can open, display and print xls, xlsx and ods documents that have been created with Microsoft Office or Open Office. The computer program seems to have slight problems displaying complex spreadsheets correctly.

Online Tools

Google Docs [link]

Google Docs has only recently added support for the Excel 2007 xlsx format. The online service was able to work with standard xls documents before but the new feature makes it possible to open and work with all Excel documents in Google Docs.

Thinkfree [link]

Can be used to quickly view spreadsheets online.Supports both old and new Excel spreadsheets and various other formats.

Zoho Sheets [link]

Zoho Sheets is an online product that enables users to view and edit spreadsheets online.

Do you know of other online or offline tools that can be used to view spreadsheets? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: excel, excel viewer, google docs, microsoft excel, open-office, spreadsheets, thinkfree, xls, xlsx, zoho

Google Docs Adds Office Excel 2007 XLSX Support

Martin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:04:15 +0000

While Google Mail (Gmail) is already able to process Office 2007 file formats such as xlsx, docx or pptx by converting them to html format so that they can be viewed online Google Docs could not until now. This is kinda strange as one would think that Google Docs would be the primary application to display the Office XML formats. Google’s priority seemed to have been different. The developers have finally started to begin adding support for the new Office 2007 file formats beginning with the Excel 2007 format xlsx.

Not all pages have been updated in Google Docs with the information about the added Excel 2007 xlsx support. The upload page for example is not listing the new format as supported. The two other Microsoft Office 2007 file formats, that is Word 2007 with docx and PowerPoint 2007 with pptx, are not yet supported but it is very likely that the Google Docs team will add support for those file formats eventually.

The data transfer of the xlsx files produces good but not excellent results. The color highlighting of a test Excel 2007 file was for example not displayed on the Google Docs page of the document. The main information on the other hand were all displayed the way they looked in the real Office Excel document.

Tags: docx, excel, excel 2007, google docs, microsoft excel, microsoft powerpoint, microsoft word, microsoft-office, office 2007, office xml, pptx, xlsx

Learn Microsoft Excel: Smart Paste

Martin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 08:23:06 +0000

Ashish Mohta posted an interesting Microsoft Excel tip at his website that explained how to smart paste contents from Notepad into Microsoft Excel. The procedure is actually working with any kind of text editor not just Notepad.

When you normally copy paste contents into Microsoft Excel they will all be stored in the same cell in the Excel application. That is usually not the desired way of presenting the information. It is possible to copy and paste the contents into other cells or prepare the text in the text editor in a way that the contents are automatically copied into separate cells.

Pasting text into different Excel cells can be done by making use of the TAB key in the text editor. Pressing Tab represents a new cell in Excel when pasting the contents into Microsoft Excel. To create a four column layout in Excel one would simply write down the name of the first column, press tab, write down the name of the second column, press tab and so on.

The same holds true for additional rows. Just make sure to press tab only once even if the contents do not match in the text editor they will in Microsoft Excel. So even if the columns in the text editor will not look even they will be perfectly fine in Microsoft Excel.

Tags: excel, excel tutorial, Learn Microsoft Excel, microsoft, microsoft excel, notepad, text editor

Sendshield Prevents Private Data Leaks When Sending Office Documents

Martin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:42:17 +0000

Experienced users know that Microsoft Office documents can contain hidden information that can be revealed after enabling functions to see them in Microsoft Office products. This can include hidden rows and data in Excel spreadsheets, embedded information in Powerpoint presentations or revision histories in Microsoft Word documents.

Hidden data can have severe consequences for the sender or his company. Sendshield provides examples of companies who forgot to remove hidden data and the consequences that it had. You find examples for companies like Google, Merck, Microsoft (oh the irony) and the United Nations.

Sendshield acts as a proxy that analyzes every Office document, Word, Excel or Powerpoint, that is attached in Microsoft Outlook. It warns the user that the document contains hidden data and provides a convenient way to remove the data.

A red warning sign and a line appear beneath the attachments of that email which opens a new window that is displaying in depth information about the hidden data in the document(s). The user has the option to remove the data on a individual entry basis or all at once.

This process does not change the original document in any way which is a benefit of using Sendshield instead of manually editing the document.

Tags: microsoft excel, microsoft word, microsoft-office, outlook, powerpoint, sendshield, spreadsheet

gHacks technology news » microsoft excel

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