If you only use Excel to occasionally tote up the family budget, you probably don't appreciate how slowly it can run when dealing with massively large spreadsheets. The official Excel Blog looks at a common scenario -- making a series of calculations on a very large number of rows -- and examines which kind of macro will produce the quickest results. Turns out the obvious approach (moving through the data using an offset) is a lot less efficient than writing some slightly smarter code. Hit the post for the full details.

IBM is offering the public a peek at Bluehouse, an online office portal aimed at making it easier for employees to share documents and desktops, host web conferences, and reach out to clients from one location. Any sized business can sign up to try out the service, though not everything works at the moment. One notably cool feature is the "Live Charts," which does exactly what it sounds like. There's tagging, importing from Outlook or Lotus Notes, and a lot more to fiddle with. Bluehouse is free to use (for the moment), requires a sign-up.

Windows only: Evolution, the default office suite installed on most GNOME-based Linux systems, has a working port available for Windows systems. As its Linux fans know, Evolution has a serious focus on supporting and adapting to open standards: Full iCal support, IMAP access (I got a Gmail account working in minutes), integration with Pidgin's IM client, and support for GPG encryption. The big news for non-Outlook acolytes, however, is that Evolution can hook up to Exchange servers, though I haven't been able to test that personally. You also get contacts, memos, and tasks in the Evolution suite, and they're pretty robust in their own right. Evolution's Windows port is a free download for Windows systems; note that, while it installs, some have reported buggy operation in Vista.

Free micro-messaging service Yammer, winner of the TechCrunch50 start-up conference's top prize, creates a private Twitter-like service for companies, filtered by work-assigned email addresses. Just like with Twitter, you can send direct messages and tag replies with "@" symbols, but Yammer adds a few organisational and corporate tools to the mix, including topic tagging, clients for BlackBerries and the desktop (through Adobe Air), and an IM interface. You obviously don't want to be posting up gossip or gripes here, as not only can anyone with a corporate email sign up, but if a company wants to buy in, they get administrative control over the network. Still, Yammer looks like a great way for a company (or any group with private email addresses) overwhelmed with "Taking off early Friday" emails to keep people in the loop with less clutter.

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The Asylum blog compiles some solid advice on how to call in sick, even if you don't meet the traditional definition of "sick"—take that how you will. One of the best bits of advice involves the timing of your sick day, as noted by the editor of the Save the Assistants blog:

Pick a random Tuesday or Wednesday for your fake illness. At a lot of companies, there are mysterious sick waves on the day after a long weekend or on a really beautiful day in the summer. You can get away with that once in a while, but if you only come down with the flu on really beautiful Friday afternoons in the summer, everyone will be on to you. Taking off a day in the middle of the week will also make it less likely that you have 400 emails to sort through all at once when you come back from your elongated holiday.

Valid point, and the others are worth keeping in mind also. Photo by Perfecto Insecto.

As anyone who works in an industry that uses Microsoft Office exclusively can tell you, there are certain Office annoyances that grate on your nerves over time. For me, one of the biggest Office annoyances is the Clipboard bar that decides to dock itself to the side of whichever Office application I had the misfortune of using Ctrl+C in.

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Web site WebToMail sends full web pages to your email on demand. Why? Let's say, for example, you're sitting behind a nasty internet filter at work that won't even let you access your friendly, productivity-enhancing Lifehacker. Just fire off an email to send@webtomail.co.cc with the URL of the web page you want in the subject (http://lifehacker.com.au). A few minutes later, you'll receive an email back from WebToMail with the contents of the URL you requested conveniently embedded in the email. The results vary depending on the email client you're using; in Gmail, you don't get nicely styled CSS, but you do in desktop apps like Thunderbird. Seems like a worthwhile utility to add to your IT lockdown toolbox.

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Weblog Apartment Therapy describes how to create a table of contents for your file cabinets to help make your filing system cleaner and easier to use. It's actually a very simple idea: You just print the different folder tab names of your file cabinet onto a piece of paper you can place on top of your cabinet to give you a quick overview of what's inside. The biggest hurdle to a clear, organised paper filing system is a lack of easy access, and Apartment Therapy's simple table of contents method attempts to remove one more boundary to easy filing. If you're serious about fixing up your filing cabinets, check out our extreme filing cabinet makeover.

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Feel like Outlook is a bit too keen to tell you every time you get new mail? Trying to be more disciplined in when you check email? The Outlook Team Blog has a handy guide to how to switch off the various notifications within Outlook. This isn't a particularly obvious process, but the post also promises improvements in the future:

They're a bit hard to find in our Options dialogs, and that's something we hope to address in a future release of Outlook.

When you're copying and pasting something to or from a Microsoft application such as Word or Outlook and you want to remove the formatting there is a quick keyboard shortcut to do so. Rather than use the mouse and the Paste Special button, you can simply paste the text, highlight it, and hit Ctrl+Space to remove the formatting and convert the selection into plain text. (Australian editor adds: I still think it's easier to just paste with Control-V, hit Ctrl-Shift-F10 for Smart Tags, and select 'Paste text only' -- much faster if there's a lot to select.)

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