Typing or formatting cells of repetitive data can be very boring, but Excel has an Auto Fill feature to make it easier by automatically filling in data for you. We thought we knew Auto Fill but it has some surprising and useful tricks. Auto Fill goes beyond simple incrementing numbers or dates which is what […]
Slowly but surely we’ve moving towards another name change for Office 365. The main Office consumer products are likely to be renamed ‘Microsoft 365’ and here’s just four indicators that a change is coming. This has been looming for some time. Microsoft has been mostly successful getting organizations and consumers onto annual payments ‘subscriptions’ for […]
Office’s Inspect Document is supposed to remove or scrub information being accidentally included in Word, Excel or PowerPoint files. It’s not perfect and misses out on some critical hidden information that can giveaway secrets. Details in images, layers and even highlighting. Document Inspector is at File | Info in Office for Windows. The feature was […]
Surface pens will now turn on the Draw tab in Word, Excel and PowerPoint automatically. When you pick up a Microsoft Surface Pen, the Draw tab in Office 365 will automatically appear to choose color, thickness of the digital ink. There are a few requirements, but they are pretty obvious: The Surface Pen has to […]
Word 365 for Mac is getting what’s called the ‘Edit PDF’ feature, already available in Word for Windows. Don’t get too excited, Word can’t really edit a PDF file and the results might not be what you want. The ‘editing PDF’ feature is now available to Office for Mac insiders (v 16.29 build 190830 and […]
Word, Excel and PowerPoint have options to stop people from changing a document, making them ‘read only’ in tech speak. These options protect your documents from unauthorized editing or even reading them at all. There are different levels of protection, they are all under File | Info | Protect Document. While they are mostly talked […]
Tucked away in Microsoft Office is a little used tag ‘Content Status’ or just ‘Status’ that could help manage and find Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in organizations. Unfortunately, Content Status is only used once in Office features. It’s supported in Windows Explorer if you know where to look. On the Mac it’s all but […]
PowerPoint has many choices for printed/PDF handouts to go with a presentation. Here’s a guide to the options spread in different places on the PowerPoint ribbon and menus. Quick PowerPoint Handouts Under File | Print is the basic handouts option to print slides and lines for people to handwrite notes. However those options do NOT […]
In long overdue news, Microsoft has finally agreed to synchronize email signatures between Outlook on different platforms. The news came in the form of a post on the Uservoice site: “We’re happy to report that we’re working on sync’ing signatures across devices. More details to come as we have them.” It’s not much. No timeline, […]
The ultimate in PowerPoint Handouts aren’t made in PowerPoint at all. Link a presentation to handouts in Microsoft Word, where you will then have all the Word formatting options available to you. You’re forgiven for not knowing this option existed, because it’s not immediately obvious and you need to go several steps down in menus […]
A funny story from satirical ‘The Chaser’ shows what could happen when corporate PowerPoint presentations are taken too far. LinkedIn executive presents moving PowerPoint eulogy at mother’s funeral “Before a packed congregation of relatives and friends, the senior executive paid tribute to his mother through a series of bullet points, graphic charts and bold-font mission […]
The famous game, Civilization, has been impressively recreated in Excel as Solly’s Cellivization. Civilization was an early computer game that started in 1991 for MS-DOS and has undergone many reincarnations for Windows, Mac and gaming devices now almost forgotten. Here it is in Microsoft Excel … Even with the power of modern computers and Excel, […]
If you don’t like the large Office Backstage pane, the older and more powerful Open and Save dialog boxes are still available via shortcuts. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort changing the Word, Excel and PowerPoint File panes to add more features and unsubtle hints to use OneDrive to save all documents. […]
Here’s a list of the known Office install/update error codes with possible fixes. All thanks to a diligent and long-suffering Office Watch reader. Ron S has compiled these lists from web sites and forums based on experiences of other people. Doesn’t Microsoft have all this? Yes, they probably do but not for public consumption. Microsoft […]
Teams is creeping into Outlook ribbons as Microsoft tries to promote its latest collaboration platform. Here’s how to get rid of it or any other Office buttons you don’t want. Some Office users have noticed Teams icons prominently appearing on their ribbons, like this one on the Outlook Calendar ribbon. Microsoft justifies this as ‘helping’ […]
There’s no direct ‘watermark’ option for PowerPoint Handouts which is a shame because it would be very useful to add ‘Confidential’, ‘Draft’, ‘Private’ or other very obvious notices. You can fake it with a little PowerPoint trickery. Add a Watermark Picture In short, make an image with the watermark text. The image can have text, […]
The newer File | Open panes include a Search option to quickly find Recent Documents by name. That means it’s practical to expand the Recent Docs list to a higher or maximum value in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. In any of the three programs go to File | Options | Advanced | Display. Over time, […]
Here’s this months non-security bug fix updates.for Office 2016 and Office 2013. They are only for .msi installs, not ‘Click to Run’ modern installations. For most systems, they’ll be applied automatically. This is the full list with extra notes on a few fixes which caught our eye. Office 2016 updates Excel 2016 KB4011629 “PowerPivot formulas […]
Just as there is a Handout Master to control how slide printouts look, there is also a Notes Master which has more control over how PowerPoint printed notes with slides will look. If you’ve used the Handouts Master, Notes Master will be warmly familiar to you. Notes Master is like a simplistic template with some […]
PowerPoint 365 is getting the option to ‘Save As’ to SVG format from either images/graphics, charts or whole slides. It’s now in PowerPoint 365 Windows for Insiders and will spread to the public versions in due course. SVG is a scalable graphics format which ensures the image looks the same no matter how large or […]
One of the most commonly used and confusing Excel functions is getting a major revamp. Vlookup() is getting a new, better and easier replacement Xlookup(). It’s a truly good and useful addition to Excel, some might call it a godsend. Xlookup is now available to Insider releases Excel for Windows/Mac/Apple/Android. It’s a big deal and […]
Better to stick with a stable, known Microsoft Office instead of monthly updates with new and changed features. That rational customer approach isn’t understood at Microsoft who push the regular Office 365 changes on the assumption that’s a universal good which suits all customers. Brian X Chen in The New York Times has a thoughtful […]
The error messages on Office 365/2019 setup and update are notoriously unhelpful, so here’s a guide to fixing Office install or update problems that work out here in the real world. Error messages like the infamous ‘Something went wrong” should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The error message is often misleading and […]
If you get an error message when installing or updating Office 365 or Office 2019 there’s little help available beyond Microsoft telling you ‘Something went wrong’. What looks like specific error message are general statements that don’t identify the problem. These troubles aren’t any surprise to experienced Microsoft Office users. Install or update of Office […]
While printing PowerPoint handouts for your audience with just the slides can be useful, sometimes you may want to give them your notes as well as the slides, which is where Notes Print comes in. Contrary to its name, Notes Print includes slides as well as your notes underneath them. To print the slides with […]
Consider switching to SumIFS, it’s much the same as the older Excel function, SumIf() but easier to expand as your needs change. It can add up values according to more than criteria like a name and date range. We’ve talked about SUMIF and how its parameter order is a little strange. SumIF has filter/criteria […]
There are two a simple ways to make a list of unique or non-duplicate entries from a longer list. Unlike the many automatic ‘unique’ options in Excel, these options work only once but it’s available in many Excel release, old and new. Advanced Filter One is hiding at Data | Sort & Filter | Advanced […]
Microsoft Word’s dictionary is updated more regularly, especially for Office 365 customers. A good example of that is the addition of Brexit related words. We typed into Word various words that the people of the UK are too familiar with, just to see what’s in the Microsoft dictionary. The same results in Word 365 for […]
The upcoming Rewrite feature in Word will offer alternative phrases or wording for your sentences. Rewrite is another cloud based feature so anything selected for Rewrite is sent to Microsoft. The feature is supposed to be in Office 365 for Windows Insiders build 1908 (11901.20018), English only but hasn’t appeared even in build 1909. No […]
A Word document and a floppy disk caught a serial killer back in 2010. There are current lessons for anyone wanting to keep their personal or business data confidential. Known as the ‘BTK killer’, he murdered 10 people in Kansas between 1974 and 1991. The murderer was finally caught in 2004. He liked sending notes […]
Making a list of unique or not duplicated names from a longer Excel list with duplicates is possible in three ways that update automatically. One is headspinningly hard and one has some minor quibbles. The best option is a lot easier but not yet available to everyone. We’re talking here about making a list of […]
Handout Master lets you customize your presentation handouts more than the basics; changing the position and formatting of headers/footers, adding a background color or gradient. Maybe you can help uncover some unexplained mysteries of Handout Master, see below? Our Quick PowerPoint Handouts article showed you how to go to File | Print to print out […]
There are many ways to make a paper/PDF version of a PowerPoint slide deck, this is the quick ‘only a few clicks’ option. There are other choices that we’ll cover in upcoming articles. PowerPoint has some ‘Handouts’ features but they aren’t all in the same place and some aren’t even called ‘Handouts’! Why handouts? It’s […]
The venerable SUM() function in Excel is simple, really too simple. It just adds up a range of cells with no way to filter or limit what’s included. SumIF selects what to add-up from a longer list. SumIf sometimes confuses people because they, understandably, expect the range to be SUMmed to come first followed by […]
Microsoft and some contractors listen to Skype calls but that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. And Microsoft’s response was quite typical – they refuse to stop. Microsoft can and does let it’s ‘associates’ listen and read from Office documents and voice data. Word, PowerPoint and Outlook users are also likely spied upon. The choice […]
A supposedly ‘new’ feature in PowerPoint 365 for Windows is already in regular PowerPoint? The latest Insiders version of Office 365 for Windows has no truly new features. The only ‘new’ feature is something that’s already in Office 365. As we looked down the list of changes in version 1909 build 16.0.12013.20000 it was all […]
The long-standing Ursnif trojan is back in a new form to infect computers and steal personal information, all via a Microsoft Word document. To begin, we’ll repeat a warning we’ve been making for years … No .doc files DO NOT open .doc files from any source (not .xls or .ppt either). Most infected and dangerous […]
There are two similar text formatting options in Excel. The well-known Merge & Center and the hidden away Center across selection. Both have their advantages, the choice is yours. Merge & Center Most Excel users know ‘Merge & Center’ because it’s atop the Merge list at Home | Alignment | Merge. It does two things: […]
An interesting forum thread suggests a problem between the ISP, Bell Fibre, and Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business. Several users report a severe slowdown in connections between their computers and OneDrive for Business. Speeds are capped around 600 kbps instead of the 500-800 MB/s. NOT standard OneDrive for Office 365 Home/Personal, just the business OneDrive part […]
A recent Windows update is causing VBA code to fail in Excel, Access and other VBA parts of Office. The culprit isn’t Office, but the version of Windows that it’s running on. After the 2019-08 Cumulative Update KB4511553 is applied, some VBA code will stop working. The patch bug is in Windows 10, 8.1 and […]
