Cut Out Image from a Background in PowerPoint

To remove an image from a background or the cut the background away on a picture you want to re-use somewhere else used to be a tasks that involved Photoshop skills, a subscription to some online editing software or a small consulting fee to a graphic artist. Now with the latest version of PowerPoint (Office or Microsoft 365) you can perform this image editing task with just a couple of clicks (depending on the complexity of the image). This video will show 3 examples of how to cut a picture away from it's background from the simple to a bit more complex. See the timestamps to start from the simple example to the more complex. 1 - Gift Box (1:06) 2 - Pumpkin (9:40) 3 - Athlete (14:58)

Create Static Timestamp of Start / End Dates in Excel

If you're doing some project management and don't have a large budget, you'll probably end up using MS Excel as a poor man's project management tool. One concept in most project management timelines is the concept of estimated dates and actual dates. Usually you'd input the dates manually for these dates, but it would be nice to have the actual date entered "auto-magically" based on the value changes of another cell (i.e., when a percent complete is entered). But you don't want the actual dates to change after the initial value is triggered in that cell. This video covers a workaround using iterative calculations and sort of breaks a rule in spreadsheet design where you don't want circular references. In this case, we'll have to change the spreadsheet setting to allow for it. See the video to learn how to do this.

Add Percentile in a Pivot Table

Pivot Tables are a fantastic analytic tool in Excel to display data in a easily consumable format. They can quickly aggregate data into sums, averages and even standard deviations in the values fields of the pivot table. What if you wanted to rank data? Not by sorting, but in some "statistical" way? What if you wanted to get percentiles (like the 90th or 95th percentile)? You could create your own table with the PERCENTILE.INC or PERCENTILE.EXC functions to calculate it based on your specific criteria but then you'd need to maintain or update the range where those formula reside when there is new data. You can actually put percentile (or even quartile) data into a Pivot Table with the use of the data model and some DAX. Though data model and DAX sounds complicated, it's actually not to hard to use to get percentiles. See the video to learn how.