How-To Geek

Excel is usually filed under spreadsheets, yet its formulas and macros can carry software that goes well beyond budgets and pivot tables. From schedulers to games to financial dashboards, these three kinds of programs show how far a workbook can stretch before it needs a separate application.

There was a time when creating automations on your phone required powerful third-party apps with complex tools. Nowadays, most Android phones come with built-in automation features. You can easily set them up without much effort.

Microsoft replaced Battery Saver with Energy Saver in Windows 11 a couple of years ago. The new feature includes an always-on toggle that, if left enabled, can reduce your PC's performance without you even noticing. Combine that with a power mode set to favor efficiency, and your Windows PC might throttle itself even when it's plugged in.

My home network has grown into a small lab with computers, virtual machines, storage devices, and plenty of other things that occasionally decide to behave strangely. When something goes wrong, figuring out what happened can be difficult because the useful information may already be gone by the time I start investigating.

The Apple iPad is an exceptionally long-lived device. There's no reason to upgrade them frequently and in my personal experience these tablets don't show much battery wear over the years either.

Waze is one of the most popular navigation apps, thanks to its excellent live road alerts, traffic avoidance, and crowdsourced hazards and map corrections. If you use Waze for navigation, a few key settings are worth changing for the best experience.

Most people run a speed test the same way you check weight on a scale, as if one number tells the whole story. The number tends to look good, but it is a really narrow way to judge your connection quality. That Wi-Fi speed test has almost nothing to do with how a connection works in real conditions. It's better to know what it is doing before you assume it is correct.

It's a good time to be Guy Ritchie on Netflix. The Brit grit master has got a hit series, The Gentlemen, in its second season that's in the streamer's Top 10. Plus, the movie that series is based on is here, as is the recently added The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, both of which we have the details on below as part of this week's roundup that is decidedly savage.

For a single unit conversion, Google wins on convenience. But if I have a bunch of measurements to convert, I don't want a scrap of paper covered in random numbers, or to keep copying values out of a spreadsheet and back again. Excel's CONVERT function lets me keep the measurements, units, and results together, while reusing the same formula for as many conversions as I need.

Connecting your Android phone to a new Wi-Fi network is usually something you do without thinking. You find the network, enter the password, and get on with whatever you need an internet connection for. But that quick process can expose you to problems you might not notice until it's too late, especially when you're using networks you don't fully control.

If you've spent any time using the Linux terminal, you've probably used the grep command. It's what you use to quickly find a search term in a file or find all the files containing that term. It's useful, reliable, and fundamental to most terminal workflows. That said, grep is old — more than 50 years old. A lot has changed since then — our computing habits have evolved, and new technologies have emerged.

Are you always throwing out old USB cables? You’re not alone; cables and the ports into which they fit can be frustratingly delicate.

Controlling humidity levels in your home is extremely important. Its presence can contribute to wellness challenges, as well as affect the integrity of your home and possessions.

When you hear Kubuntu, you might think of the Linux-based operating system by the same name. But have you heard of Kubuntu Focus? It's a separate hardware-focused brand that sells machines with Kubuntu pre-installed and pre-configured. I've spent the last few weeks with the Kubuntu Focus Ar Gen 1 laptop and I have to say, I'm not all that impressed with the hardware.

The streamers are going all out for the last full week of September with a terrific lineup of new movies. First up is a music biopic about a landmark folk singer before he went electric. If you like rom-coms, you'll appreciate Prime Video's selection this week.

VS Code is one of the most popular editors out there—it is relatively lightweight, has an extension for everything, and has a core that is open-source. However, the actual download you get from Microsoft isn't; that version comes with telemetry, a proprietary license, and a marketplace that is limited to Microsoft's own builds.

Alexa and Google's Gemini are convenient, but they have trade-offs. You pay for convenience with your privacy, subscriptions, and sometimes even ads. Beyond the obvious privacy concerns, there is also a practical performance issue: most of the processing done by those types of devices takes place on cloud servers, which can introduce noticeable latency.

Sound matters. Among the many labels you’ll encounter when setting up a soundbar or home theater, “ARC” and “eARC” are sure to pop up. But what do they actually mean, and why should you care?

When you get a new phone or device, the first thing people think about is what to do with their current one. More often than not, they trade it in to get money back or lower monthly payments on their new device.

Months after the initial tease, the first Googlebooks are available to pre-order today. The Android laptops are as high-end as promised and can compare well against rival Windows PCs — at least, if you're heavily invested in the Google ecosystem.