Category: Tips & Tricks
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Find WLAN password from the command line
If I’ve been there once, I’ve been there a thousand times; I’ve connected to a wireless network with my computer, but want to connect with my phone, too. The only problem is that I don’t know what the WLAN password is. Luckily, you can find the password to networks you’ve connected to using the command…
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Excel: Allow dividing formulas to fail gracefully
I’m sure I’m not alone in having had this happen: I was using Excel to make some quick calculations, and got #DIV/0!-errors for some rows because one of the fields I’d been dividing by was empty. Sometimes you don’t have all the information you need for every single row, but you still want to have…
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Paste text without formatting
I recently had a long term collaboration with a number of colleagues, where part of what we did was produce, edit, and agree upon finalized versions of text. We applied various formatting such as color, cursive, and bold to track the status of specific text blocks. At the end of it all, we needed to…
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Excel: Format cells based on content
As a union steward, one of the many things I do on a regular basis is evaluate key indicators of the company financials. I do this by plotting a few numbers from the accounting reports into Excel, and then run them through some standardised analysis to identify the performance of key indicators. These indicators are…
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Excel: Automatically set width and height
If I’ve been there once, I’ve been there a thousand times; I’ve got a spreadsheet in excel with varying widths and heights that don’t fit the data. Now, sure, you could go in and correct it manually – but that’s not only boring, it’s a pain it the behind. Luckily, there are keyboard shortcuts to…
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Excel: Merge cells without losing data
If you’ve ever attempted to merge cells that hold data in Excel, you will almost certainly have encountered this warning: This can be annoying when you’re trying to combine data in multiple different fields, such as first and last names. Happily, there is a formula (in Excel, there’s more or less always a formula) to…
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Use browser profiles for more efficient operations
One of the complicating factors of my job is that I need to use the same tools, with different user credentials, often at the same time. For example, most of the companies I and my colleagues support use services that have some sort of integration with Microsoft Azure. As a result, I need to log…
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A better way of finding users’ group memberships
More than six years ago, I wrote a post, detailing how I could identify users’ Active Directory group memberships. While the method I detailed certainly works, it isn’t as simple as it might have been. Having recently found myself needing to perform that very same task again, I decided to revisit this topic, to show…
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Excel: Calculate percentage
I need to calculate what percentage one number is of another on a relatively regular basis. Luckily, it is relatively easily done using functions in Excel. Here’s how: For the purposes of this example, let’s assume that the source number (i.e. the one which we are comparing with) is in field A12, and the number…
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Excel: Combine two columns
While analysing an Excel sheet the other day, I needed to combine two columns so that I could get names in the format firstname lastname (the list had been provided as lastname,firstname). As it happens, doing so is relatively easy. You do it on a cell by cell basis, by using basic excel commands. If…
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Start a new Google Doc/Sheet/Slide deck straight from the address bar
I recently learned of a nifty little trick for users of Google’s Workspace services (i,e. Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms etc.): You can start a new document, spreadsheet, slide deck and so on from the address bar of your web browser. Simply enter the appropriate command (below) into the address bar, hit return, and watch as…