One of the primary ways that I use Outlook to save time at work. I’ll try to discuss some of the things that I do in upcoming posts but today I wanted to start with a fairly simple one. What is it?

Every day I send out emails with a postponed date. It’s a reminder to myself or others in the team of specific events, things to do, etc. Yes, I know that reminders can work but I personally feel like sending emails is much more effective.

So I use excel to send out these requests, it’s much easier to do and I’m able to send out tens of different ones in just a few minutes…! Take a look at the most basic spreadsheet:

Here is the code that I used:

One I click on the “send” button, the email appears in my outlook outbox:

If the date and time is already past, it is sent automatically and would appear in my sent items. There are many possibilities here such as using it for email reminders, sending emails later (no matter what the reason), etc.

You can download the spreadsheet here

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I still think it’s very strange that despite Excel being one if not the most used software in the world, there is little if any attention that is paid to it in school. It makes no sense. There are many things lacking in our schools and you could probably argue that things like basic finances, investments, learning basic coding and many other subjects should be looked into.

Learning Excel basics though seems even more obvious. These days, a large proportion of jobs require working with spreadsheets which are almost entirely Excel-based. Some use very simple spreadsheets while others have incredibly complex ones or even databases using more advanced software.

Being able to use excel basic and more advanced functions, to build macros can help get ahead and while it’s true that it’s possible to learn this stuff at work, it’s certainly a lot easier if you can start earlier.

How Did You Learn To Use Excel?

Did you learn at school? At work? With Books? I’m curious, please email me or comment below!

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I’ll need your feedback on this. I have been creating PDF files from Excel for some time without an issue. But clearly, many others are having problems getting this one done so I thought I’d take a look. What I do is simply click “save as” and then select “PDF” as my file type.

And voila! It’s done. The one issue that you might encounter is not seeing the PDF format as an option when saving. If that’s the case, simply install Adobe Acrobat (follow instructions here). Then, you might need to close down Excel, reopen it and give it another try.

If that still does not work, please write a comment and let me know, I’d love to try to help out.

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Suppose that you have a few hundred cells where you need to make a small change. Chances are that you will either require the help of a macro or an excel function in order to get it done. I was given a fairly simple task. A reader had a list such as the one you can see here:

He had to replace the “-“ by the following “.-.”. Basically, add a dot before and after. There are a few ways to get it done but doing it by hand was impossible (there were about 1000 different cells that needed to be changed). So what could I do? I decided to use the replace function. Herei s how it should be used:

=replace(old text,start num,num_characters,new text)

So basically for the first cell, I needed to do the following:

=REPLACE(A1,FIND(“-”,A1),1,”.-.”)

Why did I use “find”? Because I needed an easy way to find where the “-“ was located. You can see the end result here:

The replace function is fairly easy to use and can turn out to be very useful! You can download the spreadsheet here

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I have to admit, I did not have much understanding of XML up until a few hours ago. But I had read about the ability to use the importXML function in Google Docs spreadsheets and it looked promising so I decided to give it a try. I did use a few resources which I’ll be sure to link to at the end of this post. So what is ImportXML? It’s a function made available in Google Docs that makes it easy to make different types of web queries

How Does It Work?

The one downside is that using it requires some understanding of the html. But it can be extremely powerful. You can see 2 examples here:

#1-Imagine that I’m trying to get access to the list of all links in this page on a blog that I visit:

It’s certainly possible for me to get them all one by one or to download them in one way. Another option though is to do a simple ImportXML after seeing that these links were located inside of this code:

I did the following query:

=importxml(“http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/archives/”,”//div[@class='format_text']//li/a/@href”)

And you can see the result here:

How about another use? I have a few dividend-related sites and imagine that I’d need to know the top 20 sites for the keyword: “dividend investing”

I added the keyword in cell A1 to make it easy to change and then used the following function in B1:

=”http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=US&num=20&q=”&A1

This game me a list of 20 websites. Ideally, I wanted to have clickable links so I used the “find” function which I’ve discussed in Excel and then the “mid” function, you can see the result here:

Resources: ImportXML Guide for Google Docs (http://www.distilled.net/blog/distilled/guide-to-google-docs-importxml/#chapter1)

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