It’s so easy to use Excel to calculate anything from invoice due dates to the number of years an employee has worked for an organization. In fact you can do lots of date math in Excel. The secret is that dates are actually just numbers formatted to look like dates. So in order to work with date math let’s first understand how that number formatting thing works.

If you’ve ever delivered a complex presentation, you know the value of being able to bring your audience back to a list of major topics like an agenda, so they know how far they’ve come and how much further they have to go.

It also helps them in connecting ideas together by layering in the way you intend. Well, this kind of interactive navigation is really easy in PowerPoint using hyperlinks.

A few months ago we took a look at Quick Parts as it pertains to Microsoft Word ... but did you know that Quick Parts are also available in Outlook??

When you're composing an email or a meeting or a task ... nearly anything! ... if you go to the insert tab in the text group, you're going to find a button called quick parts.

Have you ever done plug-and-play data anaylsis in Excel?

You know ... when you come up with a worksheet that has calculations based on variables ... and you just keep plugging in different values in those variables until you get the answer you like?

So, say for example, you're analyzing an investment or trying to determine the number of work hours it's going to take to complete a project.

Well, in Microsoft Excel there's something called 'Goal Seek.' It's one of the many data analysis tools available to you in all versions of Excel.  We're going to take a look today at Goal Seek in Office 2010, but the steps are identical in Office 2007. 

If you've ever had to change the logo on fifty slides — or the way a slide title appears on a whole collection of slides — you know what druggery that can be. Not to mention that moment of terror when you realize that you forgot to change one of the slides ... right in the middle of your presentation!

So, with Slide Masters these kinds of sweeping changes are really easy.

Now, I know a lot of you hear the words "slide master" and you associate it with something really hard to learn in PowerPoint. But it really isn't.

After this video you're going to be feeling a lot smarter about using Slide Masters to make your job a little easier.

Say "mail merge wizard" to some people and they cringe at the memory of messing around for hours with field codes or rolling the dice everytime it was time to generate output.

Well, the truth is Mail Merge has been pretty easy since Office 2003.

We're going to take a look at Mail Merge today from Office 2010. However, the steps are identical in Office 2007 and only slightly different to start in Office 2003.

One of my favorite new features of Office 2007 and Office 2010 is Quick Parts. Now, Quick Parts is available in both Outlook and Microsoft Word.

Let's look at 3 different ways to use Quick Parts in Microsoft Word...

In Excel 2007 and 2010 we have five new functions. One of these is "SumIfs."

Now, we may have used "SumProduct" or "Defunct" or even "PivotTables" in the past to get a sum of values based on mulitple criteria. SumIf was useful, but only if we had one criteria.

So, let's see how we use SumIfs to create a sum of values based on multiple conditions...

Did you ever go to a PowerPoint presentation where everything was flying across the slide and bouncing and changing color?

That would be an "over use" of animation. However, there are good reasons to animate.

If you've ever been to one of my PowerPoint classes, you've heard me say: "Animate, but only for a purpose."

So, one purpose to animate your PowerPoint might be if you had a topic that you wanted to cover one component at a time. And then summarize the topic by looking at all of the components again.

Let's see how we do that using Animated Bullets...

Did you ever receive a workbook from a colleague and you just couldn't figure out ... how it was doing, what it was doing, how the formulas worked or the worksheets connected?

I've got three tips for you to help you reverse engineer — or unravel the secrets — of a workbook you didn't create.

Let's see how we do that...