Microsoft Office Blog by Chris Menard

Zoom admit Waiting Room users while in a Breakout Room

Zoom's Waiting Room & Breakout Rooms are both great features. One of the issues addressed with Zoom 5.4.9 released on 1/11/21, is if the Host was in a breakout room, the host didn't know if someone was in the Waiting Room. This issue has been resolved with this update from Zoom.

PowerPoint Presenter View in Microsoft Teams

Share PowerPoint slides in a meeting in Presenter View! If you're a presenter and choose to share a PowerPoint file in a meeting, you will have some behind-the-scenes capabilities with the new presenter view. As the presenter, you will see the current slide, your slide notes or speaker notes, and thumbnails of all the slides in your deck.

Today Function in Excel

The TODAY function is a date/time function that shows the current date based on your computer time. The TODAY function will update automatically.

Teams Channel Calendar now available - New Feature

Channels in Teams can have their own calendar. This is a great new feature that allows Teams members to quickly see upcoming channel meetings all in one place.

OneNote - Copy text from picture - 2 reasons to use this awesome feature

Microsoft OneNote allows you to copy the text from a picture or image. OneNote supports Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which allows you to copy text from an image or picture and paste it on your notes or another application, like Word or Outlook, so you can edit the text. Another incredible feature on OneNote and OCR is the text in the picture is searchable!

OneDrive Personal Vault brings added security

OneDrive personal vault works with Microsoft OneDrive for personal accounts. It is an added layer of security. Nothing in the vault can be shared, and it requires 2FA.

Three tips for getting started with Excel Charts

Charts in Microsoft Excel are easy. This short video shows three tips for creating charts. I'll cover two keyboard shortcuts for making charts, using Recommend Charts, and creating charts using Quick Analysis.

Tax Brackets Explained using Excel's XLOOKUP function

Tax brackets show you the tax rate you will pay on each portion of your income. There are seven tax brackets. The United States has a progressive tax system based on your Taxable income, not Gross income or Net Income. Your income is taxed at different rates with a progressive tax system.

PowerPoint - Free Stock Videos from Microsoft now in PowerPoint

Microsoft 365 subscribers have access to Premium Creative Content, an in-app library of royalty-free images, icons, cutout people, stickers that are available in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Excel. Now Microsoft has added Stock Videos for PowerPoint. The videos are subtle looping videos.

Email mail merge: personalized emails using Excel - Word & Outlook

Need to send personalized emails to individuals all at one time? That is called an "Email Mail Merge." I'm going to use Excel, Word, and Outlook - part of Microsoft 365 - to create and send bulk emails out. The order these apps are used would be Excel, then Word, and finally, Outlook.

ZOOM : share multiple applications at once

Zoom has released a new update - version 5.4.3 - on November 16, 2020. This includes a feature that allows you to share multiple programs at once! This is a great new feature because now you can share two or more programs at one time. In this article, I will show you how to share both Excel and Word programs at once.

Pre-assign breakout rooms in Zoom

Zoom has an update in release 5.4.0 that allows pre-assigned attendees to join after the Breakout Rooms have been started. Now they can also be automatically assigned to their Breakout Room. In this article on breakout rooms, I'll cover how to enable breakout rooms in settings, the four methods of assigning people to breakout rooms, and do a deep dive into pre-assigning participants to breakout rooms.