1. Background

In the rapidly evolving field of Generative AI, SLM/LLM fine-tuning and implementing RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) techniques have become essential for achieving high-performance and domain-specific applications. Creating synthetic datasets for these purposes is crucial as it allows for the generation of tailored training data that addresses specific gaps and nuances in the target domain, which might not be adequately covered by existing datasets. This approach enhances the model’s ability to understand and generate relevant and accurate information, ultimately leading to more robust, reliable, and context-aware AI systems that can better serve users’ needs in specialized areas.

Generating high-quality datasets from diverse formats of raw data, such as PDFs, CSVs, and TXTs, especially those containing a mix of images, tables, and text, presents several significant challenges. This is mainly because the extraction process itself is complex, as each format requires different parsing techniques to accurately retrieve and interpret the content. PDFs, for instance, can have varied structures and may not follow a standardized layout, making it difficult to consistently extract text and images. Additionally, handling tables within PDFs is particularly challenging because they can span multiple pages and have complex cell structures.

If you want to improve the performance of your model using a seed dataset generated from raw data as a baseline, you may need data augmentation to generate high-quality synthetic data. But there is a risk of introducing biases or inconsistencies during the augmentation process. Augmented data needs to be representative of the diversity and variability present in the real-world data. If not carefully managed, augmentation can lead to overfitting, where the model performs well on augmented data but poorly on actual data, or it can amplify existing biases in the dataset. In this blog, we share in detail the methodology and code snippets that will help you solve these challenges.

2. Constructing a Seed Dataset

2.1. Overview

The task is to preprocess and convert this heterogeneous data into a structured format suitable for fine-tuning or RAG. This involves extracting and cleaning text from various file formats, converting tables and images to text using Azure AI Services if necessary. This dataset is used as a seed dataset for fine-tuning or RAG and serves as a baseline to improve the performance of domain-specific use cases. Here’s an easy to follow hands-on for you based on a typical use case. All of this code is uploaded here.

PDF

make_qa_multimodal_pdf_docai.ipynb: (Recommended) Generate QnA synthetic dataset from a Complex PDF using Azure AI Document Intelligence.
make_qa_multimodal_pdf_oss.ipynb: Generate QnA synthetic dataset from a Complex PDF using Open source (Unstructured toolkit for this hands-on). To run this file, you first need to install the required packages with startup_unstructured.sh. The installation will take a few minutes.
make_qa_only_image_multiple_pdf.ipynb: Generate QnA synthetic dataset from multiple PDFs – Image-heavy PDF.
make_qa_only_image_pdf.ipynb: Generate QnA synthetic dataset from a PDF – Image-heavy PDF.

CSV

make_qa_csv.ipynb: This is the general case. It is not difficult to create a QnA dataset by reading and chunking with CSVLoader.
make_qa_image_url_csv.ipynb: This is another common case. If image url information is included, change this url to a summary result for that image.

Let’s take a look at the contents of the most representative make_qa_multimodal_pdf_docai.ipynb.

2.2. Separate the PDF pages

Separate the PDF pages into “Text”, “Image”, and “Mixed” with text, image, and table by using analyze_pdf_page_content(…)

def analyze_pdf_page_content(pdf_path, text_length_thres=600):
document = fitz.open(pdf_path)
page_analysis = defaultdict(list)

for page_num in range(len(document)):
page = document.load_page(page_num)
text = page.get_text(“text”)
image_list = page.get_images(full=True)

text_length = len(text)
num_images = len(image_list)

if text_length > text_length_thres and num_images == 0:
content_type = ‘Text’
elif text_length <= text_length_thres and num_images > 0:
content_type = ‘Image’
else:
content_type = ‘Mixed’

page_analysis[content_type].append(page_num)

return dict(page_analysis)

Text-heavy page can be processed with open source (e.g., PyMuPDF) without the need to use toolkits like Azure AI Document Intelligence or Unstructured.
Image-heavy page can be converted the entire page to images and let a multimodal LLM like Azure OpenAI GPT-4o summarize each page.
Mixed page uses Azure AI Document Intelligence to separate images, text, and tables. Azure Document Intelligence’s built-in models offer key features for document analysis, including:

Text Extraction: Identifies and extracts text from various document types.
Table Recognition: Detects and extracts table structures.
Selection Marks: Recognizes checkboxes and radio buttons.
Form Field Recognition: Extracts fields from forms.
Document Structure Understanding: Differentiates between titles, headers, footers, and other sections.
Multi-language Support: Handles documents in multiple languages.
SDK and REST API Integration: Provides tools for seamless integration into applications.

For more details, visit Microsoft’s AI Document Intelligence official page.

2.3. Mixed page processing

Now let’s look at how to extract information from mixed pages in detail.

Extract mixed pages as prebuilt-layout models and convert them to markdown -document_intelligence_client.begin_analyze_document(“prebuilt-layout”, output_content_format=ContentFormat.MARKDOWN, …)
Extract images using bounding boxes (x, y, w, h) stored in figure tags – crop_image_from_file(…). If the bounding box size is too small (is_bounding_box_larger_than(…)) or the image is a simple pattern with no meaning (image_complexity(…)), the image is not extracted.
Summarize the extracted images with GPT-4o. (understand_image_with_gpt(…))

Here is a code snippet that summarizes this briefly. Note that the actual implementation is more complex than this.

# Import necessary functions for processing
from util.preprocess import (
image_complexity, is_bounding_box_larger_than, crop_image_from_file,
understand_image_with_gpt, update_figure_description
)

if “Mixed” in analyzed_pdf_result:
pdf_mixed_path = path_to_mixed_pdf

# Open and analyze the PDF file with Azure Document Intelligence
with open(pdf_mixed_path, “rb”) as file:
poller = document_intelligence_client.begin_analyze_document(
“prebuilt-layout”, analyze_request=file, content_type=”application/octet-stream”,
output_content_format=ContentFormat.MARKDOWN
)

result = poller.result()
md_content = result.content

output_folder = “pdf_mixed_tmp”
delete_folder_and_make_folder(output_folder)
input_file_path = file_path

if result.figures:
for idx, figure in enumerate(result.figures):
figure_content = “”
img_description = “”

# Extract figure content from markdown
for span in figure.spans:
figure_content += md_content[span.offset:span.offset + span.length]

for region in figure.bounding_regions:
boundingbox = extract_bounding_box(region)
# Extract images only when the bounding box size is greater than a certain size.
if is_bounding_box_larger_than(boundingbox):
cropped_image = crop_image_from_file(input_file_path, region.page_number – 1, boundingbox)
# Extract images only when the image complexity is high.
if image_complexity(cropped_image) == “Complex”:
cropped_image_filename = save_cropped_image(cropped_image, idx, input_file_path, output_folder)
try:
image_summarization = understand_image_with_gpt(client, aoai_deployment_name, cropped_image_filename, “”, max_tokens, language)
except openai.BadRequestError:
image_summarization = “”
img_description += image_summarization
# Update the figure tag in the extracted markdown document
md_content = update_figure_description(md_content, img_description, idx)

image_complexity(…) assesses the complexity of an image by analyzing its histogram entropy, Laplacian variance, and edge count. It converts the image to a format suitable for OpenCV processing, calculates the entropy of the color histograms, the variance of the Laplacian to measure focus, and the number of edges detected by the Canny edge detector. Based on these metrics, it classifies the image as either “Complex” or “Simple” depending on predefined threshold values for each metric. The code snippet is below.

# Function to calculate complexity using variance of Laplacian and Canny edge detection
def image_complexity(img, laplacian_var_thres=500, edge_count_thres=10000, total_entropy_thres=5.0):

if isinstance(img, Image.Image):
img = cv2.cvtColor(np.array(img), cv2.COLOR_RGB2BGR)

##### Histogram entropy
hist_b = cv2.calcHist([img], [0], None, [256], [0, 256])
hist_g = cv2.calcHist([img], [1], None, [256], [0, 256])
hist_r = cv2.calcHist([img], [2], None, [256], [0, 256])

# Normalize the histograms
hist_b /= hist_b.sum()
hist_g /= hist_g.sum()
hist_r /= hist_r.sum()

# Calculate histogram entropy
entropy_b = -np.sum(hist_b * np.log2(hist_b + 1e-7))
entropy_g = -np.sum(hist_g * np.log2(hist_g + 1e-7))
entropy_r = -np.sum(hist_r * np.log2(hist_r + 1e-7))

# Total entropy
total_entropy = entropy_b + entropy_g + entropy_r

### Laplacian variance
gray_img = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
laplacian_var = cv2.Laplacian(gray_img, cv2.CV_64F).var()

### Canny edge detection
edges = cv2.Canny(gray_img, 100, 200)
edge_count = np.sum(edges > 0)

if laplacian_var_thres > laplacian_var_thres or edge_count > edge_count_thres or total_entropy > total_entropy_thres:
return “Complex”, laplacian_var, edge_count, total_entropy
else:
return “Simple”, laplacian_var, edge_count, total_entropy

2.4. Construct QnA Pairs

We can leverage the azure-ai-generative package. The QADataGenerator class in this package makes it easy to generate QnA synthetic questions. However, using this class as is has the disadvantage of not being able to use custom prompts, so we inherited from it and created the CustomQADataGenerator class as follows.

import os
from azure.ai.generative.synthetic.qa import QADataGenerator, QAType
from typing import Dict, List, Tuple, Any, Union, Optional
from azure.ai.generative._telemetry import ActivityType, monitor_with_activity, ActivityLogger

activity_logger = ActivityLogger(__name__)
logger, module_logger = activity_logger.package_logger, activity_logger.module_logger

class CustomQADataGenerator(QADataGenerator):
def __init__(self, templates_dir: str, **kwargs):
self.templates_dir = templates_dir
super().__init__(**kwargs)

def _get_template(self, filename) -> str:
logger.debug(“Getting prompt template from %s file”, filename)
filepath = os.path.join(self.templates_dir, filename)
with open(filepath, encoding=”utf-8″) as f:
template = f.read()
return template

def _get_messages_for_qa_type(self, qa_type: QAType, text: str, num_questions: int) -> List:
logger.debug(“Getting prompt messages for %s QA type”, qa_type)
template_filename = {
QAType.SHORT_ANSWER: “prompt_qa_short_answer.txt”,
QAType.LONG_ANSWER: “prompt_qa_long_answer.txt”,
QAType.BOOLEAN: “prompt_qa_boolean.txt”,
QAType.SUMMARY: “prompt_qa_summary.txt”,
QAType.CONVERSATION: “prompt_qa_conversation.txt”,
}
filename = template_filename[qa_type]
messages = self._get_messages_from_file(filename)
input_variables: Dict[str, Any] = {“text”: text}
if qa_type == QAType.SUMMARY:
input_variables[“num_words”] = 100
else:
input_variables[“num_questions”] = num_questions
messages[-1][“content”] = messages[-1][“content”].format(**input_variables)
return messages

def _get_messages_for_modify_conversation(self, questions: List[str]) -> List:
messages = self._get_messages_from_file(“prompt_qa_conversation_modify.txt”)
questions_str = “n”.join([f”[Q]: {q}” for q in questions])
messages[-1][“content”] = messages[-1][“content”].format(questions=questions_str)
return messages

All you have to do is put your own prompts into a text file and you’re done. There are some prompt examples at this link.

Now, you can easily create a QnA dataset for fine-tuning using the code snippet below. Of course, you can also use it for RAG with just a little modification of the code.

import os
import asyncio
from collections import Counter
from typing import Dict
from azure.ai.generative.synthetic.qa import QAType
from util.qa import CustomQADataGenerator

model_config = {
“deployment”: os.getenv(“AZURE_OPENAI_DEPLOYMENT_NAME”),
“model”: “gpt-4o”,
“max_tokens”: 2000,
}

qa_generator = CustomQADataGenerator(model_config=model_config, templates_dir=f”./prompt_template/{LANGUAGE_CODE}”)

concurrency = 6 # number of concurrent calls
sem = asyncio.Semaphore(concurrency)

#qa_type = QAType.CONVERSATION
qa_type = QAType.LONG_ANSWER

async def generate_async(text: str) -> Dict:
async with sem:
return await qa_generator.generate_async(
text=text,
qa_type=qa_type,
num_questions=3, # Number of questions to generate per text
)
input_batch = mixed_chunks + text_chunks + image_summaries
results = await asyncio.gather(*[generate_async(text) for text in input_batch], return_exceptions=True)

question_answer_list = []
token_usage = Counter()
for result in results:
if isinstance(result, Exception):
raise result # exception raised inside generate_async()
question_answer_list.append(result[“question_answers”])
token_usage += result[“token_usage”]

print(“Successfully generated QAs”)

The screenshot below is a Q&A result extracted from sample raw data, you can see sample results in this folder, all of the sample raw data is based on articles I have written or data I have generated, so there are no license issues. If you are doing a PoC/MVP, please prepare your own dataset.

Below is a comparison of the results before and after fine tuning of GPT-4o without RAG for a Korea customer PoC. GPT-4o is available to a small number of customers as a private preview as of July 2024. This is the result of creating a set of 16 questions and answers for PoC and comparing three indicators of Similarity, Coherence, and Fluency in Azure AI studio. The values of the indicator are on a scale of 1-5, with higher values being better.

3. Synthetic Data Generation

After fine-tuning with the generated dataset from the above section, a baseline was established, but the performance requires improvement due to a lack of data (e.g., there are only 1,000 samples in the dataset). In this case, a synthetic dataset must be created by applying data augmentation techniques to enhance performance. The data augmentation technique utilizes the representative techniques announced by Microsoft: Evol-Instruct, GLAN (Generalized Instruction Tuning), and Auto Evol-Instruct.

Evol-Instruct: Generate diverse instructional data to augment the dataset from the seed datset.
GLAN: Apply generalized instruction tuning to expand the variety of Q&A pairs.
Auto Evol-Instruct: Automate the generation of synthetic data to scale the augmentation process.

3.1. Augment your dataset – Evol-Instruct

The Evol-Instruct concept developed by Microsoft aims to enhance the capabilities of LLMs by automatically evolving instructions to various complexity levels, instead of relying solely on manually created instructions. This method involves several key components and steps:

Instruction Evolution: Starting with an initial set of instructions, the model uses a LLM like GPT-4o to iteratively rewrite these instructions into more complex versions. The evolution process involves two types of instruction enhancement: in-depth evolving (adding constraints, deepening, increasing reasoning steps) and in-breadth evolving (generating new, diverse instructions).
Response Generation: After evolving the instructions, the LLM generates responses to these newly complex instructions, ensuring that they are reasonable and understandable by humans.
Instruction Elimination: The process includes a step to filter out any instructions that fail to evolve properly, ensuring only high-quality, challenging instructions remain.

This open-source implementation is based on the WizardLM paper and h2o-wizardlm. We added the following features to the original implementation:

Modified it to be able to call Azure OpenAI by adding the AzureGPTPipeline class.
The prompt has been refined and modified to support multiple languages. Use -language argument for other language. (e.g., -language Korean)
Made it possible to create questions only when necessary. A better strategy is to create questions and answers separately. Use -question_only argument. (e.g., -questioin_only True)
Prevented infinite loop. mutate() in the original implementation determines the validity of the augmented statement and repeats the loop until it is valid. However, this process takes a very long time and there is a problem in that the loop repeats infinitely in certain situations.

You can easily convert your jsonl file from the previous section with convert.py and augment your dataset with evolve.py.

#!/bin/bash

INPUT_FILE=”../seed/samples/advertising-oai.jsonl”
SEED_FILE=”seed.jsonl”
COLUMN_NAMES=”Instruction”
NUM_ROWS=10
MAX_LEN_CHARS=256

python convert.py –input_file “$INPUT_FILE” –output_file “$SEED_FILE
python evolve.py –seed_file “$SEED_FILE” –column_names “$COLUMN_NAMES” –num_rows “$NUM_ROWS” –max_len_chars “$MAX_LEN_CHARS”

Seed instruction – after running convert.py

{“idx”: 1, “Skill”: “Distributed training on Cloud”, “Difficulty”: 5, “Instruction”: “What version of TensorFlow was used in the evaluation?”}
{“idx”: 2, “Skill”: “Distributed training on Cloud”, “Difficulty”: 5, “Instruction”: “What is the first step to prepare the validation set for ImageNet training?”}
{“idx”: 3, “Skill”: “Distributed training on Cloud”, “Difficulty”: 5, “Instruction”: “What is the purpose of the script ‘preprocess_imagenet.py’ and how is it executed?”}

Synthetic instruction – after running evolve.py (shows only 10 samples)

[
{
“input”: “Could you determine the specific learning rate value (LR) recorded at the 7000th iteration within the hvd_train_log?”
},
{
“input”: “Can you provide the accuracy and precision metrics recorded at epoch 37 in the model training logs?”
},
{
“input”: “Could you elaborate on the process and specific steps needed to resize the TFRecord training dataset for ImageNet utilizing the provided scripts, including any potential challenges and solutions?”
},
{
“input”: “Could you outline the sequential procedures to be followed post-data transformation to ensure both the reliability of data backup and its continuous availability, requiring detailed verification and contingency planning?”
},
{
“input”: “Could you explain the primary function and broader implications of using the ‘nohup’ command, especially in the context of manually downloading the extensive ImageNet dataset, along with potential advantages and disadvantages?”
},
{
“input”: “What is the purpose of using the ‘nohup’ command when manually downloading the ImageNet dataset?”
},
{
“input”: “Can you explain the rationale behind not performing the resizing to 224×224 for the RecordIO format, and discuss any potential consequences and alternatives?”
},
{
“input”: “What are the underlying reasons that make a supplementary EBS volume of 1.0TB advisable for efficiently handling the ImageNet dataset? Please elaborate on the factors involved.”
},
{
“input”: “Taking into account both cost-efficiency and performance, what is the recommended EC2 instance type for storing the ImageNet dataset and why?”
},
{
“input”: “What is the purpose of the script ‘preprocess_imagenet.py’ and how is it executed?”
}
]

Example datasets are placed in this folder. Please try the minimal example first and configure your dataset by referring to the tunable parameters.

3.2. Improve the generalizability of your model – GLAN

Catastrophic forgetting, also known as catastrophic interference, occurs during SLM/LLM fine-tuning when a model trained on new data overwrites the knowledge it previously acquired, leading to a significant drop in performance on earlier tasks. This issue is particularly prominent in scenarios where the model needs to adapt to diverse and potentially conflicting data distributions without losing its ability to perform well on initial tasks.

GLAN (Generalized Instruction Tuning) addresses catastrophic forgetting by leveraging a systematically curated taxonomy of human knowledge to generate synthetic, diverse, and comprehensive instruction datasets. Specifically, GLAN uses a pre-curated taxonomy of human knowledge and capabilities to generate large-scale, diverse instruction data across various disciplines. This taxonomy mirrors the systematic structure of human education, breaking down knowledge into fields, sub-fields, and distinct disciplines, which are then used to design syllabi for different subjects. These syllabi detail key concepts for each class session, enabling the generation of diverse and comprehensive instructions. Here is GLAN’s key features:

Taxonomy Creation: A detailed hierarchy of human knowledge is built using LLMs and human verification.
Subject and Syllabus Generation: LLMs generate a list of subjects and detailed syllabi, breaking down subjects into class sessions with key concepts.
Instruction Generation: Homework questions and their answers are generated based on the syllabi, ensuring broad coverage and diversity.

The author has implemented the concept of this paper from the scratch and made it public. Let’s take a look at the core concepts of the code.

generate_taxonomy(…): Generate a taxonomy of human knowledge and capabilities.
generate_subjects(…): Generate a list of subjects for a given discipline. Please refer to section 2.2 of the paper.
generate_syllabus(…): Generate a syllabus for a given subject at a specific level. Please refer to section 2.3 of the paper.
sample_class_sessions_and_key_concepts(…): Sample class sessions and key concepts to generate questions of varying difficulty.
generate_questions(…): Generate questions based on class sessions and key concepts using LangChain pipeline. Please refer to section 2.4 of the paper.
generate_answers(…): Generate answers to the questions using LangChain pipeline. Please refer to section 2.4 of the paper.
glan_instruction_generation(…): GLAN pipeline

This pseudocode for glan_instruction_generation(…) outlines the steps of generating or loading disciplines, generating subjects and syllabi for each discipline, creating questions based on the syllabi, saving the questions, and optionally generating and saving answers to create a comprehensive instruction dataset.

def glan_instruction_generation(args):

if args.generate_disciplines:
taxonomy_json, disciplines = generate_taxonomy(
max_number_of_fields=args.max_number_of_fields,
model_name=args.model_name
)
else:
disciplines = read_text_to_list(args.disciplines_filepath)

all_questions = []
for discipline in disciplines:
subjects_json = generate_subjects(
discipline,
max_number_of_subjects=args.max_number_of_subjects,
max_number_of_subtopics=args.max_number_of_subtopics,
model_name=args.model_name
)
for subject_info in subjects_json[“subjects”]:
subject = subject_info[‘subject’]
level = subject_info[‘level’]
subtopics = “, “.join(subject_info[‘subtopics’])

class_sessions, key_concepts = generate_syllabus(
subject, level, subtopics,
max_number_of_session_name=args.max_number_of_session_name,
model_name=args.model_name
)

questions = generate_questions(
class_sessions, key_concepts,
subject, level, subtopics,
model_name=args.model_name,
num_iterations=args.num_iterations,
num_questions_per_iteration=args.num_questions_per_iteration,
max_tokens=args.question_max_tokens,
batch_size=args.question_batch_size,
language=args.language
)
all_questions.extend(questions)

save_questions(all_questions, args.output_dir, args.language)

if not args.generate_question_only:
all_answers = generate_answers(
all_questions,
model_name=args.model_name_for_answer,
max_tokens=args.answer_max_tokens,
batch_size=args.answer_batch_size
)
save_instructions(all_questions, all_answers, args.output_dir, args.language)

This implementation supports all languages supported by LLM, so you can easily create datasets in your country’s language. Below is an example created with this code.

English language

Korean language 

Example datasets are placed in this folder. Please try the minimal example first and configure your dataset by referring to the tunable parameters.

The code snippet below is a shell script that generates a large synthetic dataset. If you are willing to pay enough PTUs, you can create your own datasets just by running this script.

# Initialize counter
counter=1

# Read disciplines.txt line by line
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n “$line” ]]; do
# Create the corresponding disciplines file
discipline_file=”disciplines_line${counter}.txt”
echo Created “$discipline_file”
echo “$line” > “$discipline_file”

# # Run the Python script with the current disciplines file
python generate.py
–disciplines_filepath “$discipline_file”
–language Korean
–max_number_of_subjects 15
–max_number_of_subtopics 30
–max_number_of_session_name 30
–num_iterations 15
–num_questions_per_iteration 18
–question_max_tokens 1024
–question_batch_size 9
–model_name_for_answer gpt-4o
–answer_max_tokens 2048
–answer_batch_size 9

# Increment counter
((counter++))

# Delete the temporary disciplines file
rm “$discipline_file”

done < disciplines_sample.txt

The author has uploaded a synthetic dataset in Korean to the Hugging Face Hub under a public license. Korean customers are welcome to use this dataset as a baseline!

https://huggingface.co/datasets/daekeun-ml/GLAN-Korean

4. Conclusion

In the realm of Generative AI, creating and augmenting datasets for fine-tuning SLM/LLM models is a crucial step to ensure robust, reliable, and context-aware AI systems. This blog post outlined the process of constructing a seed dataset from diverse raw data formats and then applying data augmentation techniques such as Evol-Instruct and GLAN to enhance the dataset’s quality and diversity. These techniques help mitigate the challenges of extracting high-quality data from complex formats like PDFs and CSVs and prevent issues such as catastrophic forgetting during the fine-tuning process.

By leveraging advanced methods like GLAN, we can systematically generate comprehensive instruction datasets across various disciplines, enhancing the model’s performance without compromising previously learned knowledge. This approach not only improves the generalizability of the model but also ensures that it can handle a wide range of complex tasks effectively.

For those interested in exploring these techniques further and implementing them in their projects, all the code and examples discussed in this blog are available on the Azure synthetic-qa-generation GitHub repository. This resource provides a practical guide and tools to generate high-quality QnA datasets, enabling you to fine-tune and optimize your AI models for specialized applications. By following the methodologies and utilizing the tools provided, developers and data scientists can create robust datasets that significantly enhance the capabilities of their AI models, paving the way for more advanced and reliable AI solutions in various domains.

References

End-to-end hands-on labs: https://github.com/Azure/synthetic-qa-generation
Korean GLAN dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/daekeun-ml/GLAN-Korean
Evolve-Instruct paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.12244
GLAN paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13064
Auto Evolve-Instruct paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00770

​Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More 

In the process of building a sharepoint page based on the newsletter template and we replaced the default header background image several days ago.

Now when logged in cannot access the image edit overlay menu at all. This disappeared yesterday after reopening the page.

Screencapture inserted below for visual reference.

As can be seen on the standard page when it has been created the header element accesses a menu overlay with which to update or replace the background image asset. Screencapture inserted below for visual reference of this.

The question here is (a) what has happened to the page leading to the loss of editing functionality and (b) what can be done to restore this editing functionality. There is no way to copy web parts between two pages so we cannot simply create a new page and copy all other 44 web parts over to this new page.

​In the process of building a sharepoint page based on the newsletter template and we replaced the default header background image several days ago. Now when logged in cannot access the image edit overlay menu at all. This disappeared yesterday after reopening the page. Screencapture inserted below for visual reference.  As can be seen on the standard page when it has been created the header element accesses a menu overlay with which to update or replace the background image asset. Screencapture inserted below for visual reference of this.  The question here is (a) what has happened to the page leading to the loss of editing functionality and (b) what can be done to restore this editing functionality. There is no way to copy web parts between two pages so we cannot simply create a new page and copy all other 44 web parts over to this new page.   Read More

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Hello. I have a bunch of long columns I need to compare that they look similar. Im trying to use
Find & Select → Go to special and pick Column differences, instead of looking at one row at the time. There are some differences at the last decimal digits (shown below), but its so small difference that it doesnt matter. 

I have tried to remove decimals by using “decrease decimal places” for all the columns. But its not working as the whole decial number is still shown in the formula bar. Neither is the round function. 

How can I compare the columns in a fast and simple way?

​Hello. I have a bunch of long columns I need to compare that they look similar. Im trying to useFind & Select → Go to special and pick Column differences, instead of looking at one row at the time. There are some differences at the last decimal digits (shown below), but its so small difference that it doesnt matter. I have tried to remove decimals by using “decrease decimal places” for all the columns. But its not working as the whole decial number is still shown in the formula bar. Neither is the round function. How can I compare the columns in a fast and simple way?   Read More

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