Tech Tips

Transcription Okay, so I have a CSV right here, also known as a comma-separated value file. And let’s say I wanted to change the delimiter in this file from commas to semi-colons. Now there’s not many rows in this particular file, so I could almost manually do it, but what if you want to do it quicker than that? Well I could do a find replace, so for example I did CTRL+F in this case in Notepad++, and then went to replace, I’m going search for comma, and I’m going to put semi-colon to replace it, but the problem with that, if I replace them all, you’ll notice that the names had commas in them, Kiley, Terra, and now that’s … Read more

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Transcription Let’s say you’re in Excel, and you want to select all the rows that are in your sheet. You could just use your mouse, select the first option, click, hold the left mouse button, drag, and then pull all the way down. But you know, you might have a bunch of rows that you’re dealing with, and you don’t want to do this manually. Well thankfully there’s an easy way around this and I just wanted to show you guys. So if you go back to the top, for example, and you select the first cell and then hold shift on your keyboard, and use the arrow keys, here I’m pressing to the right, you can see that I’m … Read more

Transcription So today, I’d like to show you that the VLOOKUP function, by default, is really not as precise as you think it is, unless you understand how it works. The same applies to HLOOKUP. So, as you can see, the file in front of you right now is kind of like a phone book – on the right hand side, you can see I have names and their associated phone numbers. I can scroll down, you’ll see I have a bunch of these. And on the left-hand side I have a few features – so there’s a text box here that we’ll be interacting with shortly. This is where I can type in a name, and if there’s a … Read more

Transcription So have you ever been in a situation where you try to double-click an Excel file, and it just doesn’t open? Watch this, if I double-click File2, nothing happens. You do see the wheel going in Windows, so it’s actually working, but nothing’s happening. What’s also puzzling about this is that if you check the task bar here, Excel’s not flashing, nothing’s flashing, it’s like nothing need my attention… so what gives? Now to understand why this is happening, let’s click the Excel icon in the taskbar. So here you can see that I was already updating a file called File1.xlsx, and the file we were trying to open is actually File2. Now what’s interesting here is that there’s … Read more

Transcription Hi everyone. Let’s say I needed to take a screenshot of this, what you’re seeing right here, the Google search page, but more specifically, the Web Store button and I wanted to explain to someone that hey you can remove this, you can get rid of this button. Well, the way to do that is you have to hover on it, then you press this, then you press remove. Simple, right? Well, the problem is, if I want someone to know how to do this, often what works best is having a screenshot, so if I want a screenshot, I have to kind of like hover on this, to make sure that the triple dots are visible, the button … Read more

Transcription “So starting with Windows 10, Microsoft got really comfortable with showing ads for apps, games, and, you know, Bing searches, things like that, in Windows. They’re trying to, of course, push their own products, push people to buy stuff in the Windows Store because they get a cut, things like that. So from their perspective they think they are being helpful, they’re offering us these “suggestions,” but personally I find these suggestions really irritating, because I don’t want sponsored content appearing everywhere as I’m working. So here’s 3 different places where we can turn off these helpful “suggestions,” and I’ll also show you how to keep your lock screen clean in Windows, so that you don’t have like these … Read more

Transcript “Hi everyone. Let’s say you’re working in Excel Online, and you find that you’re not able to see enough of the document at a time. Alright so, by saying, by Excel Online I mean in the browser, right? So this is an Excel document open in a browser. It looks a bit ridiculous of course because there’s a giant smiley face, but the idea behind this example is that let’s say I need to see many rows of data at a time, and I’m just not able to see them all in the browser… what can I do to improve the situation? In this case we’re just going to use the smiley as an example. What do I do … Read more

Description This video is a fresh take on my “Reducing Email Attachment Sizes With Compression” video, posted April 20th, 2011. Since then, things have changed – it was time to revisit it. As mentioned in the video, I had difficulty uploading the partial 7z files to Gmail as attachments. I’m not sure why – your mileage may vary. 7z would be preferable because it likely has more compression options, and even without instructions I like that searching for “7z” will inevitably lead you to conclude that it’s related to 7-zip whereas “zip” is more of a household term. I’m not sure that all applications that handle zips can handle the multi-volume approach done by 7-zip. Transcription “So let’s say you … Read more

Transcript “Hi everyone. In this video, I’ll be showing you how to convert old Office files into their newer formats. So by old files I mean the DOC extension, the XLS extension, or the PPT extension, how to convert those into their X equivalents. So DOCX, XLSX. So what happened is, in Office 2007, Microsoft introduced these newer formats, the X formats, so it’s possible that when you encounter old Office files, that you sometimes have to convert them to the newer formats – there’s a number of reasons why you’d want to do this, but let’s say you need to do this. Let’s start the Word document, let’s open it up. Once it opens up in Word, it’s actually … Read more