When people think of Microsoft’s Office Assistants, one character usually springs to mind: Clippit — more commonly known as ‘Clippy’. The anthropomorphic paperclip became one of the most recognisable characters in software history, appearing in millions of copies of Microsoft…
Today, I asked Copilot to go and sit on the naughty step. I’ll tell you why… Recently, it’s become a regular thing for me to do what I call a ‘cross-pollination exercise’. It’s basically a weekly process where I take…
20/12/2025: “I think a sub-45 [10K] is within reach in 2026.” So it proved, as I beat my 45:38 from then with a 44:45 today — a 53-second improvement. I haven’t budged from my weekly routine: one 10K at slow-medium…
Custom formatting is a great way to control how values are displayed, but formats are designed to sit on a single line, which isn’t always ideal. Take a football match summary, for example. You might want to display the day,…
Excel’s calculation engine just got upgraded. And it’s the biggest change since dynamic arrays came about at the back end of the last decade. Formulas can now respond to the active cell, something that previously required VBA. As a result,…
Some people are very prescriptive about how things should be done. They’ll tell you there’s a ‘proper way’ — a set process you’re supposed to follow. But the reality is, that so-called proper way doesn’t always hold up. Recently, I…
