Black Friday 2020: The Best Tech Deals

The holiday shopping season is approaching and many retailers will be participating in Black Friday sales. This guide can help you figure out where and how to shop to find the best bargains.

Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Many shoppers look forward to Black Friday and Cyber Monday every year. After all, it’s one of the best times to get that holiday shopping list whittled down without breaking the bank. The 2020 holiday shopping season is likely to look a little different than previous years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In years past, many retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Best Buy started Black Friday deals on Thanksgiving evening, but that will not be the case this year as they will be closed for the holiday

Even though shopping this year might shift from in-store to online for many, there are still plenty of deals to take advantage of. This guide

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Microsoft Excel: Huge update expands data types beyond just text and numbers

Excel customers can now import their own data directly to Excel and use it as a data type.

Businesses can now create data types from their own data in Excel

Image: Microsoft

Excel is receiving what could be its most significant overhaul in years, after Microsoft announced that the program will allow users create custom data types.

Historically, Microsoft Excel has only allowed users to work with text and numbers. This changes in an upcoming update, which will enable customers to import their own data directly to Excel and use it as a data type.

This means that organisations will be able to work with their own business data as data types, directly within Excel. By way of example, Microsoft said businesses who have a system for tracking customers can bring it into Excel, structured in a way that they define.

Data types can also be connected to live sources,

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Censored by China, under attack in America: what’s next for WeChat?

Four years ago, Bin Xie was happy to sing the praises of WeChat. The IT manager from Houston had seen his pro-Trump blog, Chinese Voice of America, go viral on the app. 

Today, Xie stands firmly behind the president, but his relationship with the platform that fueled his rise has soured. The shift didn’t happen when Trump announced that he would ban the app, though: it came in 2019, when Xie’s account was temporarily suspended after he shared the results of Hong Kong’s district elections in a WeChat group with the note, “The pro-China candidates totally lost.” 

For Xie, who had long been tired of writing in purposefully bungled Chinese to confuse the platform’s censors (“like a kindergartener,” he says), this was the final straw. He started encouraging his followers to leave for alternative apps. 

And he was far from alone. For years, many Chinese-American WeChat users have become

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