The CONCATENATE function

The Concatenate function concatenates texts in different cells and allows you to write them in one single cell. Texts can be edited in a very flexible way with the Concatenate formula.

In this manner, you can freely change any field you want in the formula and get the desired result.

The arguments of the formula consist of successive textual expressions.

=Concatenate(text1, text2,…)

You can select the texts to be concatenated from the related cells one-by-one.

In the example bellow, the address is created by concatenating the Strict, Street and Number. When the A2, B2, and C2 cells are concatenated directly, it created the MerkezAyazma37 result.

To see a more familiar result like Merkez Strict Ayazma Street Number:37 (this is the Turkish way of writing an address), what can we do?

You can write textual expressions like “Street”, “Strict” into the formula with the long method.


*When you need to write a text with the keyboard into the formula, you need to write it into a double-quote (“ ”). Using texts in ” ” in Excel is pretty strict.

A more efficient method for it to be reusable, editable and controlled centrally is to write strict, street, number information into a cell and use that cell as a reference.

Click here to take a look the the details of the Concatenate formula.

In addition, it to possible to concatenate without using a function. You can use the & symbol as a concatenation operator. It works similar to the concatenate function and allows you to concatenate the texts directly.

We have learned how to concatenate texts above. In addition to this, we might want to separate concatenated texts as well.

You can separate texts written in one cell into separate cells with the Convert Text to Columns function. So, it works the opposite way of the Concatenate function. Click here to read our article about Convert Text to Columns.

Introduction to Digital Forms with MS Forms

Communication with your employees and customers, and tracking and analyzing it  play an important role in determining your strategies. You can quickly prepare and share e-form with MS Form while digitalizing. You can take a look at this article to read business scenarios with MS Forms and practical examples in detail.

Your forms that you work on by logging it with your user information are stored in a secure environment. Since you keep your forms in a digital environment, every action you take is saved immediately. For this reasons, your forms don’t get lost or deleted.

10 Outstanding Skills of MS Forms:

  1. The form can be previewed on the mobile phone or computer.
  2. You can receive an e-mail notification when your form is responded.
  3. You can add rules to your form. With these rules, you can change the questions according to the answers given to the questions. Thus, the question displayed by the user changes according to the answer given by the user.
  4. Answers can be analyzed by question-based or person-based custom charts.
  5. Responds can be viewed on the Excel list.
  6. The background color or picture of the form can be customized.
  7. When you delete a form, it goes to the recycle bin. Thus, you can activate the form for reuse whenever you want.
  8. You can make forms with points. You do not have to show the scores to the person who answered the form. When you want to show it, you can show it as soon as the form is answered.
  9. The user can be allowed to respond the form multiple times.
  10. The questions can be mixed within themselves. The options of the questions can be mixed within themselves.

MS Forms Screen

You can start creating your own form by click the New Form button here. The forms shared with you or group forms can be viewed in this screen.

Create a Form

We can divide a created form into 6 main topic.

  1. Questions
  2. Answers
  3. Preview
  4. Theme (Design)
  5. Share
  6. Setting

We can start by naming the Form first. You can add your company’s logo or an image suitable for you company’s concept through the add image button right next to the name of your Form.

Add Form Elements

The questions type you will add to your poll with the Add new button look like this:

There are 4 standard question types.

  1. Option
  2. Text
  3. Rating
  4. Date

You can view more question types by clicking the arrow button on the right corner. These are other question types like Ranking, and Likert.

You can add an image for the form element you have added.

The buttons in the upper right corner are:

  1. Make a duplicate of the question (default)
  2. Delete the question (default)
  3. Change the order of the questions (default)

In the lower right corner:

  1. For questions with options; allows markings multiple options
  2. Requires the question to be responded (default)

If you think that you have completed the form when you are done adding the questions, you are ready to share it.

It is enough for you to click the Share button on top right and copy your form’s link  and then send this link to the people you want.

Even if you share your form, any change you make is active all the time. People who you shared it with always see the latest version of your Form.

 

Create Poll Rules with MS Forms

Polls play an important role in enabling communication with your employees and customers, tracking and analyzing or determining business strategies. You can easily and quickly prepare and share e-forms with MS Form during your digitalization process.

In this article, we will be talking about adding rules to the Forms polls. You can manage polls based on questions by adding rules. You will be able to manage the next question that will be displayed depending on the answer user gave to the questions.

How Does It Work?

For example, while collecting personal information of the employees:

  • The What is your license class? question can be displayed if Yes is chosen from the Yes/No options of the Do you have driving license? question.
  • Detailed questions like the Ages of the children, Number of children can be displayed to the user when the Married option is chosen from Married/Single of the What is your marital status? question.

Thanks to the feature, user will not see all the questions while collecting information from them and polls will be answered more quickly and consistently and interactive work will be executed.

How Is It Done?

First, you need to create the poll questions. After you create the poll questions, choose Branching within … that is next to the Share button on top right.



We have created the first question with 4 options.
The directing action is complete by choosing the next question that you want to be asked for each option from the list that pops open.

Your actions will be saved that moment and you will be able to test your scenario whenever you want with the preview feature.

Let’s analyze the scenario below.

For the 1st question
If the 1st option is chosen –> It will lead to the 2nd question
The 2nd question will be answered –> the form will be complete

For the 1st question
If the 2nd option is chosen –> It will lead to the 2nd question
The 2nd question will be answered –> the form will be complete

For the 1st question
If the 3rd option is chosen –> It will lead to the 3rd question
The 3rd question will be answered –> form will be complete

For the 1st question
If the 4th option is chosen –> It will be waited for the user to write a text into the Other field.

We have analyzed that the form questions can be connected to rules and the sort of the questions can be changed.

When you want to cancel the actions you have executed, you can reset your document by clicking Reset withing … that is on the top right of the same screen.

 

Microsoft Teams : Not-That-Frequently Asked Questions

Does Teams work Offline?

Nope. Teams an application that was developed to run online.

Teams Offline

 

When should I use Chat and when should I use Teams channels?

Chat groups are ideal to discuss and work on a project before sharing it in a channel. And the channels are recommended to be used in a more formal way since they bring more main groups like departments and projects together. For example: Creating channels for sharing success stories, announcements of the HR, splitting projects into phases is more efficient whereas using chat groups for daily flows would be more recommendable.

Tip: You can name the Chat groups to be able to find them easier later.

Chat Group

Teams

 

Where do the Deleted Teams Go?

The Teams are in a restorable environment called soft-delete for 30 days after they are deleted. But once that period is over, they are deleted completely. Each Team represent an Office 365 group and the files shared are stored in SharePoint Online Sites. And the chat in channels are stores in the mailboxes of teams.

Teams Architecture

 

Can Teams track and report user behavior?

Off course. There is Audit Logs in Office 365 Security & Compliance Center (protection.office.com) where all the Office 365 applications are tracked and can be reported. Teams activities can be also tracked with Cloud App Security, Azure Sentinel or PowerShell (Search-UnifiedAuditLog) apart from this method.

Audit Logs

 

Can I set a profile picture for Guest users?

Yes, but not within Teams! You can execute whatever update you wants through Azure Active Directory/Guest user accounts or use the Set-AzureADUserThumbnailPhoto cmdlet. Defining a default profile picture for all guest users can be a good way to indicate the users outside your company.

 

Can I send and announcement to multiple teams simultaneously?

Yes. The Format option is shown with the letter A at the bottom of the channels. When you lick it, you can share announcement with different channels of different teams by using the “Share in multiple channels” option.

Announcement

 

Does it make sense to use Teams instead of e-mails?

Teams is a very useful application for cooperation within the company and with first-degree partners. With chats, online meeting, co-authoring on a file and integrations, it gets to be a roof platform and increases productivity. But, since e-mails are still a common language for chats and between companies, it is not completely dispensable.

Teams vs Outlook

 

Why can I not blur my background in meetings?

The precondition to blur your background is a computer with Advanced Vector Extension 2 (AVX2) graphics. If your computer doesn’t meet this precondition, you cannot use the blur feature. You can also try to use the blur feature with the Ctrl+Shift+P shortcut.

Blur

 

Is there a limit for a Teams message size? If yes, what is it?

It is approximately 28 KB (media not included). This limit is for the e-mails sent to the Teams channels, messages that come from connectors and applications and all the messages that you can send by copy-pasting.

Limits

 

Why are the mail addresses of channels are so weird?

Team mail addresses work under the teams.ms domain connected to a different tenant Microsoft administrates, not to Office 365 tenant. Mails sent here are not sent to users one by one. Instead, they are sent to the mailbox of the channel a gets to be sent as a message to the channel via a connector. Apart from that, it is also stored in the SharePoint Site connected to the team, hence as a .eml file under the Files of the team.

Channel mail addresses

 

What is Priority Access?

Priority Access is the messages that you receive the notifications of when you state your status as Do not Disturb and turn off Teams notifications. You can set the people whose notification you will always receive through the Privacy tab of Teams settings. Urgent Messages are among the notification with priority and can be sent by anyone. Urgent messages can only be sent in Chats, not in channels.

Priority Access

 

What do Bots do in online meetings?

Bots have a lot of different responsibilities, specific to this question we can see that bots enable the connection between Teams and Stream. And also, a bot joins the meeting when it is started and when it is over, the bot send the record to Azure Media Services and then it is transmitted to Stream.

Page Redirect Actions

The Navigate function is used to switch between screens in PowerApps mobile applications.

How do you switch between pages?

By touching/clicking the items on the screen (with the user trigger)
Or automatically after a certain period of time (with a timer).

Usually the OnSelect property is used for all the actions that wanted to be executed the moment we “click”.

As an example, let’s take a look at how we switch to the next page when we click the next button on the page.

The page redirection action for the next button:

Navigate (target page, transition effect) will be written into the OnSelect property of this item.

You of course don’t have to write the Navigate formula to OnSelect all the time. We mentioned that different items have different properties. In this sense, properties like OnCheck, OnVisible, OnChange are used when necessary as well.

The OnCheck property can be used for a check box if you want it to work “the moment it is marked”.

CONCATENATE vs TEXTJOIN

CONCATENATE vs TEXTJOIN

 

Hello everybody!

In this article, I invite you to say goodbye to the old CONCATENATE function that when we wanted to add a space or any other character while concatenating the data, obliged us to do it one by one and thus that was very laboring, and say welcome to a more efficient function. If you need to join the data in multiple cells and add characters like a space, comma, semi colon, and hyphen; there is just one function that you need to use and that is the TEXTJOIN function.

 

WHAT DOES IT DO 

Like I mentioned above, you don’t need to click cells one by one and use an expression like ;” “; to add a space in between each time  or a statement like & ” ” & when joining with the & character in the textjoin function. It joins each cell in the selected cell range by adding the slicer we’ve indicated. This way, we can join the data in hundreds of cells easily as a text.

 

SYNTAX

TEXTJOIN(delimiter, ignore_empty, text1, [text2], …)

There are 3 main arguments in the function.

These 3 main arguments are required, the other arguments are optional.Now let’s take a look at what these arguments mean, i.e. what the function wants from us and what we will give it.

 

delimiter
(required)		 A text string, either empty, or one or more characters enclosed by double quotes, or a reference to a valid text string. If a number is supplied, it will be treated as text.
ignore_empty
(required)		 If TRUE, ignores empty cells.
text1
(required)		 Text item to be joined. A text string, or array of strings, such as a range of cells.
[text2, …]
(optional)

Additional text items to be joined. There can be a maximum of 252 text arguments for the text items, including text1. Each can be a text string, or array of strings, such as a range of cells.

 

WORKING CONDITIONS

  • If the resulting string exceeds 32767 characters (cell limit), TEXTJOIN returns the #VALUE! error.
  • It came with Microsoft Excel 2019. If you are using and older Office version, you will get the #NAME? error and thus not be able to use this function.
  • If you Office 2019 or Office 365, you can easily use this function.

 

USING THE FUNCTION

After we write the function name, we specify the delimeter. And then we will choose how it should behave about the possible blank cells in the cell range. And in the last arguments, we choose the cell range to be joined. Now, let’s take a look at its use together.

 

In the example below, we join the data between the A and G columns with a semi colon in between them.

 

As you see, it is as easy as that to join a multiple cell range in a single text with any character between them.

 

See you in another articles, bye. 🙋🏻‍♂️
You can share this post with your friends and help them get informed as well.👍🏻

Office App Has Been Renewed for Android and iOS

New Office App

Hello everybody,

Working from home has been inevitable during these times where online working systems have become prominent and even an obligation. Being able to work on one application while a lot of digital applications come into our life makes us faster and most productive in business processes.

At this point, we can say that all applications have become more visually appealing since Microsoft started to use Material design. Of course they also added very successful features to all applications. Now; Excel, Word and PowerPoint seem to have come together in one Office App in both Android and iOS devices. Which means that you will be able to access you Excel, Word and PowerPoint apps in one application.

 

 

Excel, Word and PowerPoint in One Single App

View, edit and share documents without having to change between multiple apps. We recommend you to try this new experience with its design and new features. 👍🏻

 

 

You can download the new application here:

 

New Features

  • Create PDFs from images or Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents instantly.
  • Sign PDFs with your fingers.
  • Take quick notes with sticky notes.
  • Scan QR codes to open links.
  • Take a picture of a documents and turn it into an editable Word document with one button.
  • Turn a table’s picture to an Excel e-table to be able to work with your data.
  • Let PowerPoint help you to create a presentation by choosing the pictures you want to use from your phone.
  • Create advanced digital images of white boards and documents with the Office Lens features that are integrated to the app.

 

 

You will love the promotional videos.🤗