If you need to list and track information collaboratively, Lists is designed to give you the kind of lists many people manage in Excel, with more list-specific options and less complexity. 

It’s a great tool for managing events, onboarding employees, issue tracking, contact lists, scheduling content for your website, handling travel requests and inventory management.

Lists feels a little like Excel: Laying data out in rows and columns, formatting columns to show numbers, currency or text, using grid view to select and edit individual or multiple cells, and getting quick data visualizations with conditional formatting based on rules that highlight a cell or row.

And you can colour code updated items in blue or use red to make sure you spot missed deadlines and payment dates. You can also flip the view to a calendar or make it look like a planning board organized into different categories.  You can use Lists on your phone as if they were mini apps without the awkwardness of tapping in and out of spreadsheet cells, or build a Power App that turns the information in the list into an actual app.

What’s the difference between Lists, Planner and To Do?
Planner has boards for organizing tasks, and To Do has lists for organizing tasks.  Lists isn’t a replacement for either of those, even though it sounds similar.

According to Mark Kashman (Microsoft Senior Product Manager in the SharePoint team) “Microsoft doesn’t view Lists as a task app like To Do or Planner or a calculation analysis app like Excel, it is a part of the portfolio of broader collaborative work management: To track a lot of different types of information.  One of the most important distinctions is the flexibility of Lists and its integration points with the Power Platform.  You can configure forms and flows unique to Lists, while To Do and Planner are oriented around helping track tasks for individuals or the team.”
“For most users, Lists offers a no-code approach to tracking information to help visualize or organize using views, filters, formatting, rules for notifications and content collaboration with Lists plus Teams,” Kashman shared. “For those that need more flexibility, Lists offers a low-code approach within via JSON and integrations with the Power Platform.”

PS: When writing this article – there are a few different versions of Lists (Personal, SharePoint, MS-Team) but Microsoft are trying to bring these together

Have you tried renaming a sheet and Excel just doesn’t take the ‘name’?

Well, Excel has sheet naming rules, and they include:

• A sheet must have a name, even if you leave the default name.
• Sheet names are limited to 31 characters.
• There are a few special characters—[ ] / \ ? * :—that you can’t include in a sheet name.
• Don’t start or end a sheet name with the apostrophe character (‘)
• You can’t use an Excel reserved word (such as, History)

Here are some of my favourite short keys in MS-Word …

1. New Document .. [Ctrl + N]
2. Open a Document .. [Ctrl + O]
3. Switch Open Documents .. [Ctrl + F6]
4. Remove all styles from paragraph .. [Ctrl + Shift + N]
5. Need to prevent two words splitting over two lines .. [Ctrl + Shift + spacebar]

If you are learning to type or just want to check your typing speed - try this site out 

Here are a couple of short cuts that you may not have used in Excel before

1. Go to ..  [F5]
2. Save as ..  [F12]
3. Apply currency formatting to selected values ..  [Ctrl + Shift + $]
4. Apply percentage formatting to selected values ..  [Ctrl + Shift + %]
5. Hide a column ..  [Ctrl + 0]
6. Hide a row .. [Ctrl + 9]

1. Consider your audience – what they know, what they want, what they need, how they’ll use it.
2. Anticipate your readers reactions
3. Plan the message with the MADE format in mind (see formula below)
4. Draft quickly your message
5. Then edit for content, layout, grammar, clarity, conciseness and style (see extra notes below)

Where the MADE formula = Message, Action, Detail (Who, What, When, Where, Why, How, How much?), Evidence (Optional enclosure or attachment)

Extra Notes for Point 5:

• Selecting the right medium to communicate
• • Know when to send an email
  • Know when to pick up a phone
  • Understand the dangers of email – misunderstandings and major faux pas
• Follow the rules of email etiquette to create the proper image
• • Check multiple email accounts promptly
  • Avoid using all uppercase or all lowercase
  • Never double-space your entire message
  • Highlight responses in colour to aid reading
  • Cut and paste rather than hit “Reply” on long continuing emails
  • Be wary of humour or sarcasm
  • Allow cool-off time before sending a flame or any emotional message
  • Use receipts sparingly
  • Don’t Forward sensitive messages or copyrighted articles without permission
  • If you don’t have something to say, don’t say it – not all emails deserve a response
  • Use a signature block or line
  • Limit your signature block
  • Limit emoticons or smileys

    : )     – smile

     : (     – sad, anger, disappointment

     ; )     – winking, just joking

Have you ever opened a document in MS-Word to find that it is not formatted the way you want?

Well the secret keyboard combination to ‘stripping’ the formatting is Ctrl + Shift + N.

Now be careful not to press Ctrl + N as this will open a new document and you will get a fright as you may think that Word has deleted your document!!!

Ctrl + Shift + N works on the paragraph your cursor is in, so if you want to do the whole document at once, try pressing Ctrl + A (to select the whole document) and then try Ctrl + Shift + N.

NB: The originator may have done so much formatting that you may need to do this keyboard combination several times in a paragraph to remove all the formatting!!!

Quick disclaimer: depending upon how the style of “normal” is constructed you may still not like the formatting that happens but at least you will have non-formatted document to work with.

Needing a calculator (type in) 2*8+45

Needing a conversion rate (type in) aud in euro

Needing conversion for cooking (type in) 5lb to kg

Needing to know the time in another city (type in) time in new zealand

Looking for how many (type in) seconds in week

Looking for an airline flight status (type in) qf623 flight status

Looking for education information (type in) business model site:edu

Looking for a definition (type in) define:ethics

Multi-tasking is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. It’s important to understand what it is, and why it doesn’t work.

Multi-tasking is when we juggle multiple things (thoughts and actions) at the same time. It may surprise you to hear, people who multi-task are less productive than those who just concentrate on one project a time.

Stanford University research confirms that multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time. The researchers found that people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information, or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time.

This was supported by a Harvard Business Review, which indicated multi-tasking leads to as much as a 40% drop in productivity, a 10% drop in IQ, and increased stress levels (Bergman, 2010).

Perhaps there is no better example that illustrates why multitasking doesn’t work than a distracted driver.

My favourite piece of software is Notepad.

It is a free Microsoft application and you will find it by clicking on Start and type Notepad

Why is it so good? How many times have you found something on the Internet such as the correct spelling of ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger’? You copy and paste it into your Word document only to find that it has font changes, hyperlinks etc attached to it. However, if you paste it into Notepad and then do a [Ctrl + A] and a [Ctrl + X] from there, you will find where ever you paste into, the text will be clean and matching the format of your document!