Microsoft offer a series of supervised exams to test the knowledge of users of the Microsoft Office suite. Craig & Joe put their knowledge to the test this week and convincingly passed the Outlook 2016 and Excel 2016 exams respectively!
​Congratulations Craig & Joe!

I recently came across this signature generator web site. You can make professional and good looking signatures for Outlook, Exchange, Office 365, Gmail and more - all for free. You can thank me later!

Free Email Signature Generator
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You should see David's Outlook calendar. Never a blank space! And here is some of what he has been doing in recent months.

• June – PowerBI consulting: the “marketing for good causes” firm needed to analyse data, so they sent me the documents (multiple excel files with 300,000-600,000 rows of data) and I used PowerBI to link sheets & produce stunning interactive data visualisation reports & glean insights.
• June – Training: a 5 week training program where many participants have transformed the way they do email, note taking, to do lists & other speed up tricks.
• May – I have taught Excel & Word to RUPP students in the “Master of Science in Biodiversity Conservation”
• February – Training presentation skills with PowerPoint where participants learn the secrets that make their presentations into the 5% of presentations that are good.
• creating an interactive dashboard for Impact hub’s annual questionnaire, only because the PowerBI dashboard is interactive can we see that respondents who made 10+ new connections through the Hub are the ones who feel inspired & developed.
• Compliance PowerBI dashboard: this business used to manually create lists (such as which suppliers have an audit soon, or which are top or high priority for each country. PowerBI now does that all for them.
• Teaching: Taught a course on NUM’s international business program
• A well-known UK mid-tier accounting firm worked with David to implement PowerBI for analytics
• Excel and Office Suite training for many students and organisations
• A training course on PowerPoint using the Office 365 exclusive features that have transformed the way modern presentations look (e.g. 3D graphics, movie like transition effects, 1 click for redesign ideas)

​Time to take a break David!

Joe has been slaving over a hot Mac (booting to Windows 10!) developing up some interesting solutions for a number of different clients. This is on top of his QuickBooks work for clients. Some examples are:

• an online solution for student tracking in a ‘technical and vocational education and training’ programme.  We created an online database tracking students/trainers & enterprises from pre-sign up through to post training support.
  
• Building web data collection forms using Office 365 Power Apps to keep track of all open interventions & target tracking within a program project
  
• helping with Xero sales tax and depreciation set up & reconciliations
  
• Creating VBA code to convert data into correct format with data validation to help reduce time and errors when uploading the data into an accounting system
  
• Creating a logistics template spreadsheet with advanced formulas/tables/lists/validation and a more visual output to help reduce time and errors when creating a quote.
  
• re-working a “Supply chain” spreadsheet to better keep track of what stage the order is at whilst reducing the human error involved with data input and reducing input time.

Please contact Joe today and ask him if he can assist you with your data management needs.

Seeking to migrate from their unsupported version of Microsoft Exchange 2007, Dynamic Pharma contracted Xlconsulting to move their 170+ users from their on-premises email server to Microsoft Exchange Online. This was successfully achieved over two weekends (one weekend per company) with zero data loss and minimal impact on the general staff. Xlconsulting assisted the Dynamic Pharma IT staff during and after the migration to ensure a smooth on boarding process with minimal inconvenience. The two companies also purchased licenced copies of Office 365 Business for the staff, the always up-to-date feature enhanced version of Office 2016.
Xlconsulting welcomes Dynamic Pharma, and sister organisation Agrotech Vita, to Office 365 and all its benefits!

In late 2015 — to much fanfare — Microsoft released the latest version of their productivity suite: Office 2016. Most of us were not compelled to rush into a relationship with this new platform; we were content and comfortable with our current setup, and didn’t feel the need to shake things up. You know, the old “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach. And now, one and a half years later? Is it finally time for all of us to suck it up and make the switch?

Reason #1 — It’s the new standard
Reason #2 — Older versions won’t last much longer
Reason #3 — Our businesses need to gravitate toward collaboration

​Read the full article here.

Microsoft recently conducted a productivity survey and the results are interesting and informative. And(!) they created a really impressive interactive results survey using their own PowerBI tool. Read the article and the click on the PowerBI chart on the Microsoft web site today!

10 Things You Never Knew About Copy & Paste. That's the title of David's new blog post on the Think Productive web site - the people behind the Productivity Ninja books.
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Tip 1: The Format Painter isn’t just for text
MS Office’s “Format Painter” is essentially copying & pasting formats only. It is handy not only with text, but also if you want to replicate the formats numbers, shapes & pictures.

You can read the other 9 tips on the Think Productive web site today.

Microsoft launched Office 365 in Cambodia today! From their blog announcement:
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"Today, we are announcing the availability of Office 365 in 10 new markets: Bhutan, Cambodia, Greenland, Guadeloupe, Laos, Maldives, Martinique, Mozambique, Myanmar and Vatican City. With this launch, Office 365 is now available in 150 markets and 44 languages.


More than 1.2 billion people around the world use Office—at school, at work and in their personal lives. As our service expands, we are mindful of the incredible and increasing diversity of Office users. This latest market expansion required innovative engineering work to create new languages, cultures and currencies.
Our team works tirelessly to meet the highest levels of security, compliance and feature parity so that we can deliver the same first-class experience in Office 365 to every market where it’s offered. We plan to launch a further 97 markets over the next year. Stay tuned for more updates.
—Tom Batcheler, @TomBatcheler, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 team"

Contact Xlconsulting for all your Office 365 needs!