Are you confused by how Excel handles percentage formatting, or by percentages in general? It's okay, you're not alone.

In this post, find out more about how Excel displays percentages, and learn basic techniques for calculating percent decrease, percent increase, and percent change.

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Look who's heading back to college? With some nifty computer tools for students and teachers, I reenter the college scene to demonstrate some of the magical things OneNote can do, showoff a free graphing calculator called Microsoft Mathematics 4.0, and a nifty PowerPoint tool found in Office for Mac 2011. Watch (and read below for links to learn more).

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For those of you already in the throes of back to school shopping you know that it can be expensive and confusing! Luckily, Windows and Office have a few great back to school offers for students this year and this blog post has tips that will help to put you ahead of the curve.

Oh, and did I mention the FREE Xbox 360?

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We’ve been talking a lot about why Office 365 provides the best cloud productivity experience for customers of all sizes across the PC, phone and browser (see also previous post Office 365 across the Mac, Safari and iPhone ). Office 365 was designed with today’s fast-moving mobile worker in mind, and being productive today means being able to work on the go when you are without your PC. Email, Contacts and Calendaring with Exchange Online in Office 365 For those on the go, anytime access...

For parents interested in purchasing new PCs for their kids, take a moment to read this guest blog post by Chris Dawson, ZDNET Education Technology columnist. He unravels the mysteries of RAM, processors, and more that will help you select the right PC for your needs.

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Ben Clothier at http://accessexperts.net has a two-part review of the evolution of Access working with SharePoint. Part one is an overview of the Access/SharePoint integration. Part 2 is an in-depth look at Access data storage in SharePoint.

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For Kelvin Dueck, a Math and Science teacher from the town of Pitt Meadows in Canada, using OneNote 2010 on his Windows Tablet PC has turned out to be one of the best-ever teaching solutions he could have hoped for — both inside and outside of his classroom.

After Kelvin had sent a spontaneous letter to a member of the OneNote team here at Microsoft, Office writers Michael C. Oldenburg and Jennifer Bost wanted to learn more about this teacher's story and packed up for a road trip to British Columbia.

Read the full blog post to meet Kelvin and his students and to watch the video that Michael and Jennifer filmed during their visit.

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Last month I attended the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) 2011 conference in Philadelphia. For three days I worked the booth and walked the halls listening to the questions that teachers and school IT professionals were asking.

Get the scoop on what we were demonstrating at the Microsoft booth. If you weren’t able to attend ISTE and have a question, feel free to post your question as a comment on this blog. I’m interested to hear what technologies have piqued your curiosity.

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David Salaguinto is the renaissance man of my floor. He has dreamed up the Office Comic, was the first “guest” of Office Casual, and a future project I’ll be telling you about soon. For now, he has Getting Started Office 2010 Screensaver. Pretty good for a guy hired to write about Publisher and Word. I interviewed him during the Microsoft Store celebration for the first anniversary of Office 2010.

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New to PowerPoint 2010, artistic effects can make your photos look more like sketches, drawings, or paintings. Here's a video that describes how to use them:

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