Outlook.com email and Excel Pivot tables

Sorry, the title of today’s post is a bit misleading, Outlook.com has nothing to do with pivot tables.  Let me explain.

I was reading another blog about Office 365, which I’ll blog about at a later date.  Office 365 led to Outlook.com as an alternative to Gmail.  I have a Gmail account and a Yahoo account.  I had already switched from Yahoo to Gmail a couple of years ago, and thought I’d give Outlook.com a try.  The account is free, like Yahoo and Gmail, but, I was getting tired of targeted ads.  I’m not sure the new email interface is better, but, it is different.  I’ll probably blog more about the pros and cons after a week or two trial.

The Excel pivot table part of today’s blog is about a Udemy free course about Excel pivot tables.  I was already somewhat familiar with the subject, having used the feature for work.  I had used it on an older version, so, I wanted to see what Excel 2010 and 2013 had added to the feature set.

The only problem I had with learning new stuff is that I didn’t really have a place to try the new stuff.  I still work for a large corporation with Excel 2007 on my laptop.  Not wanting to use my work PC for freelancing and not having a current version led me to pricing a copy of MS Office.  Not bad prices for home use; but, I wanted to see what I could do with Office 365 and see if that might be cost effective.  I’ll blog more about that in a day or two.

To end this blog I want to mildly complain about the volume of email I see from Udemy.com.  I see at least one or two emails per day telling about my progress in a particular course, and what a great discount I can get on other courses.  I don’t mind the marketing, but, really? Every single day?

I’ve found a technical writing course in iTunes U, which I’ve downloaded; so that will be a blog post or two.  I’m also trying to find some Freelance related YouTube videos. 

Well, as all can see, I’m still a work in progress for this freelance world, trying to learn the latest and greatest.