Formatting endnotes in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style

If you are using Microsoft Word to write a paper adhering to the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) guidelines for citations that appear in the endnotes section of the paper, references to endnotes should be made in the paper using Arabic numerals at the end of sentences with the numbers put in superscript.

Example

Ludwig considered it an honor that his books were among those burned by the Nazis in 1933.¹

Endnote

1. Emil Ludwig, Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (New York: Alliance Book Corporation: 1940), 49.

You can configure Microsoft Word for CMS style citations by clicking on the References tab and then selecting a Chicago option for the Style option. Microsoft Word 2010 lists "Chicago Fifteenth Edition" as the CMS option.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/office/word] permanent link

Counting the number of rows in a table in Microsoft Word

If you wish to determine the number of rows present in a table in Microsoft Word 2010 on a Microsoft Windows system, highlight all of the rows in the table by putting the mouse pointer in the top or bottom row and then dragging it downwards or upwards until all of the rows are highlighted. Then right-click and select Table Properties. Under the Row tab you should see the number of rows listed.

If you don't see the row count, click on the Table or Column tab and then go back to the Row information by selecting the Row tab again. You should then see the row count displayed.

[/os/windows/office/word] permanent link

Extracting images from an Excel spreadsheet

I needed to extract two diagrams from a worksheet in a Microsoft Excel workbook. The diagrams appeared to have been put in the worksheet as an image through a copy and paste operation. I could right-click on an image in the sheet and choose "Copy" or "Save as Picture" and for the latter option I could choose PNG, JPEG, PDF, GIF, or BMP for the "Save as Type" value, but I wondered what type of file Excel was using for the embedded image. The file was a .xlsm file, which like a .xlsx file is an Office Open XML (OpenXML) file format that can be "unzipped" to reveal the constituent files within it by renaming the file to have a .zip filename extension or copying the file to a new file with a .zip extension - see Zipping and unzipping Excel xlsx files. So I copied the file giving the new file a .zip extension and then extracted the contents of that file by unzipping it. I then had a file named "[Content_Types].xml" and the following directories in the directory where I had extracted files from the zip file:

_rels
customXml
docProps
xl

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/office/excel] permanent link

Viewing and Editing Defined Names in Excel 2013

To view or edit the defined names in the Microsoft Excel 2013 spreadsheet program, you can take the following steps:

1. Click on the Forumulas tab at the top of the Excel window.
2. From the Formulas menu, select Name Manager. In the Name Manager window, you can see the defined names.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/office/excel] permanent link

Using downloaded Visio stencils with Visio 2016

I needed to add a Juniper SRX Series Services Gateway to a network diagram created with Microsoft Visio 2016, so I downloaded the SRX Series stencils from Juniper Networks Product Icons & Visio Stencils page. The downloaded file was a ZIP file, so I extracted the contents of that file. Within the .zip file were two .VSS files: Juniper Branch SRX Series.vss and Juniper Data Center SRX Series.vss. On a Microsoft Windows system, if you wish to make shapes within a .vss file available within Visio, you can copy the .vss files to the My Shapes directory within the Documents directory for the account you are using. To then access the shapes, click on More Shapes on the left side of the Visio 2016 window, then select My Shapes. You should then see the names for the .vss files you added to the My Shapes directory listed.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/office/visio] permanent link

Day of the week for dates in Excel and Calc

If you wish to display the day of the week, i.e, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., that corresponds to a particular date in Microsoft Excel you can simply format the display of the date using a custom format of ddd. E.g., in Microsoft Excel 2013, if I have dates in column A displayed in mm/dd/yyyy format, but I also want the day of the week corresponding to those days to appear in column B as shown below.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/office/excel] permanent link

Searching for text in the subject of a message with OWA

Using Outlook on the web, aka Outlook Web App (OWA)and Outlook Web Access, to check my email on a Microsoft Exchange server using a web browser, I can use the search function to search for a string that may be part of a word in the subject of a message. But I can only search for that string if it occurs at the beginning of a word. E.g., if I'm looking for any message that has "CRQ000000473568" within the subject of a message, I can use either of the two searches below to successfully find such messages.

Subject: CRQ000000473568
Subject: CRQ*

I can use the asterisk as a wildcard character to represent one or more of any character.

But if I use either of the following search parameters, the relevant messages won't be found.

Subject: *473568
Subject: *473568*

The search function doesn’t provide a search option that will allow you to search for text in the middle or end of a word. It only find items that contain a word that begins with your search string.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/office/outlook] permanent link

Importing contacts from PST file into Outlook 2013

The following steps can be used to import contacts from an Outlook .pst file into Outlook 2013:

1. Click on File.
2. Click on Open & Export.
3. Select Import/Export.
4. When the Import and Export Wizard window opens, select "Import from another program or file" and click on Next.

   

5. Select "Outlook Data File (.pst)" and click on Next.

   

6. Browse to the location of the .pst file and then click on Next after selecting the option you prefer in regards to how Outlook should deal with any entries that duplicate existing entries in your contact list. The options are as follows:
   • Replace duplicates with items imported
   • Allow duplicates to be created
   • Do not import duplicates

   

7. At the next step, you can select the folder to import from. You can also decide whether you wish to import any subfolders from the imported file; the default value is to include subfolders. You can also choose from the following 2 options:
   • Import items into the current folder
   • Import items into the same folder in

   

   For contacts, you may want to import them into the Contacts folder in Outlook, so can leave "Import items into the same folder in" selected for the appropriate email account.

8. Click on Finish to complete the process.

For creating a contacts list PST file from the prior version of the application which can be imported into Outlook 2013, see Exporting contacts from Outlook 2010.

[/os/windows/office/outlook] permanent link

Workday function

Sometimes you may need to determine the number of work days from one date to another in a Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or Apache OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet. E.g., you may need to exclude Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays from a calculation. All three spreadsheet programs provide a WORKDAY function that you can use to calculate dates based on business work days rather than just the total number of days from a start date. For Microsoft Excel on both Microsoft Windows and OS X and Google Sheets, the syntax for the WORKDAY function is as follows:

WORKDAY(start_date, num_days, [holidays])

For OpenOffice Calc, you need to separate the parameters with a semicolon rather than a colon. I.e.:

WORKDAY(Start_date; num_days; [holidays])

If you separate the parameters with a comma in Calc, it will display Err:508.

"Holidays" is enclosed in brackets to indicate it is an optional parameter, you would not actually include the brackets if you specified holidays.

The arguments to the function have the following meaning:

• Start_date - Required. A date that represents the starting date for a calculation
• num_days - Required. The number of nonweekend and nonholiday days before or after the start_date. A positive value yields a future date while a negative value yields a past date.
• holidays - Optional. An optional list of one or more dates to exclude from the working calendar, such as state and federal holidays and floating holidays. The list can be either a range of cells that contain the dates or an array constant of the serial numbers that represent the dates.

E.g., I need to determine the date when work requests that should be completed within 5 business days after approval should be completed. I can display the required implementation date for each request in a worksheet by using the formula =WORKDAY(cell,5) where cell holds the approval date. E.g., if the approval date is in cell A2, I can set the formula for the required implemenation date to be WORKDAY(A2,5) for Excel or Google Sheets or WORKDAY(A2;5) for Apache OpenOffice Calc.

If there was no date in cell A2, Excel will display January 6, 1900 in the cell holding the implemenation date, e.g. 1/6/00, if the date format is D/M/YY (day/month/2-digit year), but OpenOffice Calc and Google Sheets will display January 5, 1900. Microsoft Excel stores dates as sequential serial numbers so they can be used in calculations and, by default, uses January 1, 1900 as serial number 1. If you have a date field containing January 1, 2008 that is equivalent to 39,448, which you would see if you put that day in a cell formatted to hold a date then changed the format to be a number. January 1, 2016 is 42,370. January 1, 2008 is 39,448 days after January 1, 1900 and January 1, 2016 is 42,370 days after that date.

Why do Google Sheets and Apache OpenOffice Calc show January 5, 1900 as the calculated date when there is no date in the start_date field while Microsot Excel displays January 6, 1900? Long before Microsoft became a dominant player in the spreadsheet market, Lotus 1-2-3 from Lotus Development Corporation was a dominant spreadsheet in the personal computer market. There was a bug in Lotus 1-2-3 due to the developers assuming that the year 1900 was a leap year; it was not. When Microsoft released Excel they had to compete with Lotus 1-2-3, the then dominant spreadsheet for personal computers, so Microsoft needed to ensure that spreadsheets created in Lotus 1-2-3 returned the same results in Excel, so for compatibility retained the incorrect assumption regarding the year 1900 - see the Microsoft article Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year and Excel Date Conversion (Days from 1900) regarding making an allowance for that incorrect assumption. Google Sheets and Apache OpenOffice Calc did not retain that incorrect assumption regarding the year 1900 and so you will see January 5 used in certain calculations in those spreadsheets where January 6, 1900 is used by Exel, which is why sometims you may get differing results for date calculations between those spreadsheet programs.

If an argument to the workday function is not a valid date, e.g., 2/30/16 for February 30, 2016, which is not a valid date, you will see #VALUE! displayed by the function in all three spreadsheets. In all three spreadsheets, if days is not an integer, the number is truncated to an integer value. E.g., if you used the formula =WORKDAY(A2,5.7) you would get the same result as entering WORKDAY(A2,5).

[/os/windows/office/excel] permanent link

Outlook Web App (OWA) not wrapping text

When I attempted to forward an email message I received in the Microsoft Outlook Web App (OWA), which I had accessed in the Firefox browser on a MacBook Pro laptiop, I found that the text I was typing was not wrapping, but kept extending across the window where I was typing additional information I wanted to add to the message. I copied the text I was typing and closed the window and then attempted forward it again. When I pasted the text I had been typing into the message, the same problem occurred. Microsoft has an article titled Wordwrapping does not work in Outlook or in OWA email messages that describes the problem.

The Microsoft article states the problem can occur if there are extra space characters in the message, i.e., if you have two or more spaces right after one another, e.g., if you type fast and inadvertently type an extra space or more. The solution listed in the article is to compose the message as plain text rather than HTML or to remove the extra spaces. Since I was using an Apple OS X system, I hit command-F to search for "  ", i.e., two spaces. OWA reported that there were such instances in the message. In this case, I simply discarded the message I had been typing and opted to start fresh with the foward process for the message, retyping the text I had intended to add to the forwarded message and the problem didn't occur this time.

If, instead, you wished to opt for the alternative of composing the email as a plain text message, you can look to the right of "Options" in the window where you are composing the message. You will see "HTML" there; you can change the selection to "Plain text", instead.

Though, when I tried to recreate the problem by forwarding the message again and purposefully typing extra spaces at verious points in the text I was adding, the text wrapped as I expected. I.e., I could not recreate the problem.

[/os/windows/office/outlook] permanent link