First thing: happy Easter!

 

Some spammers are very clever. I just received an e-mail from someone claiming to be “Liza Mecklenberg” from a company called EandJconsulting.net (others have received this offer from JPP Consulting), offering to pay $750 a month to place a banner ad on this web site. I could even choose which ad to place from a gallery on her own site.

 

It sounded too good to be true, and of course it was. My first tip was that no advertiser would make this kind of offer without knowing anything about how many visitors the site gets, whether they’re new or repeat visitors, how long they stay, what they look for, and so on.

 

The other tip-off was going to that site with my iPad, and getting a message that I had to access it with a regular computer, not a mobile device. Why? Because it’s a Java applet that displays the banner ads to choose. And guess what? The Java is infected with malware that will wreck your system and wreck your life. I didn’t even get near it.

 

I place part of the blame on Oracle, for not fixing the awful mess that Java has become. To make things even worse, some Java “patches” are actually malware in disguise. If you’re going to update Java, make sure to do it directly from Oracle (at java.com). But it’s an even better idea to uninstall Java unless you really need it.

 

 

In garden-variety algebra, there is no such thing as the square root of a negative number. That’s because a square root is a number multiplied by itself, and there is no number that you can square to create a negative number. If you square a negative number, the result is positive.

 

If you try to take the square root of a negative number in Excel, it throws the #NUM error:

 

But sometimes, you really do need the square root of a negative number to solve an equation, although it’s usually short-lived and gets canceled out.

 

Calculus provides a solution: an imaginary number, represented as i. So the solution to is 3i.

 

Excel doesn’t have a built-in way of handling imaginary numbers, so here is a way of calculating it using the ISERR function (determines if a calculation throws an error) nested inside the IF function. This technique also uses the ABS function to take the absolute value of a negative number. With a negative number in B2, the function is:
=IF(ISERROR(SQRT(B2)), SQRT(ABS(B2)) & “i”,SQRT(B2))

 

The formula says: if it’s true that the square root of B2 throws an error, then take the square root of the absolute value of B2 and append the letter “i”. If it’s false that there’s an error, then take the square root of B2.

 

 

There is a downside to this: when a cell contains a number and text, Excel treats the whole cell as text. That means you can’t do any calculations with the result.

 

 

My latest video course was just released by Total Training: Microsoft Office 2013 Getting Up to Speed. The course covers the new features common to all applications, and the new features specifically for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote.

 

As a way of celebrating, here is my all-time favorite tip for Microsoft Word: a quick way to rearrange lists of bullets, numbers, table rows and whole paragraphs.

 

 

 

In an AMA (Ask Me Anything) chat on Reddit, Microsoft VP Panos Panay said it’s fair to compare the Surface Pro’s battery life to a MacBook Air, not an iPad. His reasoning is that the Surface is a full-blown PC with an i5 processor, running a regular operating system and the same desktop applications as a workstation; it isn’t a tablet processor running lightweight apps.

 

But Panay hinted that a future hardware release might contain extra battery capacity built into the keyboard. That would require an enhanced connection from the keyboard to the tablet body, and that’s already in place.

 

 

It’s official: Microsoft Office 2013 is now available to the public. (It was made available to corporate customers a month ago.) Is it something you need?

 

Office has been around for so many years and so many versions, what features were left for Microsoft to add? For the most part, the answer is connectivity and collaboration. But that’s not all. Most of the screens have been streamlined to remove clutter, and of course there are new bells and whistles.

 

Most of the cloud connectivity revolve around services like SkyDrive and SharePoint. SkyDrive is free (with paid upgrades available) and targeted at individuals, and SharePoint can run either on a private intranet or as a paid service available from many providers.

 

And there are now four editions of Office. There is a traditional desktop edition, where you buy a license outright, install the software on your computer, and use it as long as you want without having to buy anything more.

 

As far as functionality goes, the traditional software looks and feels the same as Office 365. With 365, you pay for the software as a service, usually paying monthly. You’d use that if you need to run Office on a computer for only a short period of time, or if cash flow is an issue.

 

The Microsoft Surface RT tablet comes with a third edition of Office. Most of the functionality of that edition is the same as the desktop edition, but there are some limitations.

 

The fourth edition of Office are the Web Apps. These are free versions of the Office applications that run inside a Web browser (no surprise: best with Internet Explorer), and they have only the most common features. Web Apps aren’t new, but they have been updated for 2013.

 

My favorite, new features:

• Flash Fill in Excel makes it easier to enter repetitive data.
• Insert charts and PivotTables in Excel with just a couple of clicks.
• Create videos directly from PowerPoint (yes, the Mac has been able to do this for a long time).
• Word has threaded comment discussions, and documents edited with the Track Changes feature are less cluttered.
• Outlook has direct connections to social networks and can link multiple contacts.
• It’s easier to share workbooks in OneNote and connect with mobile devices. And it’s now easy to export individual sections and pages for other users.
• OneNote no longer gets incredibly slow, even with large notebooks open in the cloud.