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OK, so I’m mainly posting this because it drives me mad every time I use a different PC and can’t remember how to turn it off. You know how, when you have a nicely-arranged slide containing plots, text and tables, and all you want to do is paste in the piece-de-resistance – a plot you made for a presentation a few weeks ago? Invariably, Powerpoint will promptly resize all your beautiful objects so it can wedge in the new one, thus rending pointless hours (minutes) of work.

There’s a simple solution! However, it’s not where you might expect it to be. Go to Tools> AutoCorrect Options… and then unclick “Automatic layout for inserted objects.” And lo, it will stop bothering you.

After winning a packet of Haribo for having the “most informative Skype mood message” during a recent 9 month project (you can imagine how exciting the other awards were…) I decided that it would be a good idea to continue the practice of updating all-and-sundry with my current location, the weather and my upcoming plans. I also, while musing on this, happened to notice that Skype now supports “rich” mood messages – meaning that you can use basic HTML to add bold and the like. Finally, being a bit of an Excel fan and a follower of Alex Schultz’s blog, I wondered how easy it would be to speak to the Skype API from Excel VBA.

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