Office Technology

Four web destinations to help you navigate terminals, master baggage claim, compare taxi and car fares, and have your itinerary always at your fingertips.

It’s hard to know exactly what new tech ideas will make the biggest im­­pact on business in the near future and change how we do things. But, according to John Brandon, here are a few worth keeping an eye on: predictive technology, HTML5, high-resolution displays, social analytics, speech for business, business-ready storage.

Q. Can I do a more complex search in Outlook than just a few keywords or sorting by columns?

PowerPoint isn’t the only game in town. Our favorite alternatives to PowerPoint:  SlideRocket,  Google Docs and  Prezi.

Q. Why don’t tasks automatically set reminders?

Make text larger with this shortcut ...  Quickly change to smaller text in a place holder by selecting the text and ­hitting Ctrl+Shift+< ... Draw a shape and quickly make it a navigation button ...

Say you're trying to use an Excel spreadsheet to track weekly wages for office employees. It's simple enough to create a formula (hours x hourly rate) that calculates wages for someone who works 40 hours or less. But what if someone works 45 hours one week?

Q. This SUMIFs formula keeps getting an error that says, “The formula you typed contains an error." Here’s what I wrote: -SUMIF(C2:C278,>1000). What is causing the error?

In Word, the clipboard works well when you’re working on contracts, legal documents or policy documents that reuse certain language ... In Excel, it can be useful to copy and paste column headers and other static text. However, it can be quite confusing to understand how it behaves with formulas.

If you spend any time at all on Twitter, you’ll eventually run into this problem: It’s overwhelming. A person can easily be consumed by constantly scanning the scroll of a Twitter feed. You can’t possibly read it all, of course. The solution: Twitter lists.