An astonishingly simple security breach in Microsoft Office has finally been patched two months after Microsoft confirmed the problem. The unanswered question, why did it take so long to discover it? Mimecast.com discovered the ActiveX memory leak back in November 2018 and told Microsoft. Two months later Microsoft fixed the problem in their January 2019 […]
Criminals try using Microsoft Office to get money from you using various phone scams impersonating Microsoft. Here’s how to protect yourself. Scammers are clever, sophisticated and look very sincere. Often there are stark warnings about dire consequences. In the end they want your money, infect your computer, steal your personal information or all three. The […]
Managing Styles and priority settings in Word for Mac is harder but possible if you’re willing to dig in document or template settings. Word for Mac has two style lists available, just like Word for Windows. The Quick Style Gallery across the ribbon Home tab (called Style Gallery in WinWord) and the Styles pane that […]
Changing the order of styles in Word’s Style Gallery is possible but buried way down inside the message boxes. A standard Word Style Gallery looks like this. Right-clicking on a style gives some options, including Remove from Style Gallery. Moving the styles into another order is more complicated. You’d think modern Word would let you […]
Microsoft Office 365/2019 installation is about to change in a big way for all users – home and business. The default is changing from 32-bit to 64-bit software in mid-January 2019. Microsoft is giving little warning of the change despite the compatibility risks to customers. An important change in the way Office is installed by […]
Excel can display dates in many different formats including Japanese Imperial Era. You don’t need the Japanese version of Excel. Office-Watch.com shows how to display an Era date and how Excel knows which Era to use. You don’t ‘convert’ a date from western format to Japanese Era. Like any date in Excel, just change the […]
Feature updates for Microsoft Office 2010 have been withdrawn but Redmond won’t tell customers why, beyond the usual vague platitudes. The KB4032217, KB4461627, KB4032225, and KB4461616 updates for Office 2010 released 2 January 2019 were withdrawn after a few days after complaints. Microsoft won’t admit what the problem is beyond saying customers “may experience difficulties in Microsoft Excel or […]
Font Embedding is an important part of document portability. It’s available in Microsoft Word for Windows and has (finally) been added Font Embedding to Word for Mac. When you share a document or even move to another computer, it does NOT include the necessary fonts. Word assumes that all the needed fonts will be installed […]
The British Army has new recruitment posters for Millennials or ‘Snow Flakes’. Make your own versions in Microsoft Office with either Word or PowerPoint. The campaign targets “snowflakes”, “millennials” and “selfie addicts” with a call-back to the famous Lord Kitchener “Your Country needs YOU” poster. Here’s our re-creation in Microsoft Word as it might appear […]
Office has picture adjustment tricks to convert a picture into something gray and transparent. Remove Background We found a black & white photo (rights free) online and used the Office Picture Tools | Format | Remove Background to make the surrounding transparent and show through the page background color. Color to Grayscale For a color […]
Reducing the line spacing or vertical gap between lines in Word paragraphs can be done in six different ways depending on the situation Adjusting line spacing to put lines very close isn’t usually necessary for regular text. It becomes useful when trying some design tricks for headings, for example the title in our Millennium poster. […]
Skype has an email bug that shows no sign of going away. Office 365 customers may wrongly get an expiration email saying “your existing subscription World 60 mins mobiles and landlines – 1 month with Office 365* has expired.”. Office 365 Personal, Home & University include an hour each month of Skype calls to landline and mobiles […]
If you like Reddit but want to hide it from your boss, co-workers, partner etc then we’ve got a web site for you. It makes Reddit look like Outlook Web Access (aka OWA). Go to https://attaxia.github.io/MSOutlookit/ or http://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/ There’s a web page with the latest Reddit posts in the familiar form of Microsoft Outlook. The […]
Office 365 for Mac users might well be confused about compatibility with their MacOS. Some Office 365 for Mac users might not be getting the latest and greatest features. Microsoft has a blog post might be accurate, but it doesn’t exactly shine with clarity. The situation appears confusing, so we’ll try to break it down […]
Deep in Microsoft Word is the choice “Automatically Update Document Styles”. What does that do and which documents are affected? There are several similarly worded options to do with ‘Style’ and ‘Automatic’ so let’s be clear … we’re talking about File | Options | Add-ins | Manage | Templates | Go | Templates and Add-ins […]
Every Word Style has an option to ‘Automatically Update’ which sounds great, but it usually leads to more confusion. Here’s what ‘Automatically Update’ really means and why you might turn it off. There’s a whole mess of style ‘Automatic’ options in Word that are spread all over the place. Here we’re talking about Modify Style […]
Happily, there’s a quick way to update a style within a Word document. It works only when you ask it and you can apply a series of changes before updating the style. Update Style to Match Selection We’ve made a series of changes to a paragraph; font size, color and indent. Then right-click on the […]
Gordon G asks “Just read Convert Normal style into Body Text style in Word why didn’t you use Select All from the Styles list then apply a different style?” In Word there’s sometimes more than one way to reach the same result. In Office for Mere Mortals we usually go for the method that easiest […]
Each paragraph style can be seen alongside the text in Microsoft Word but it’s very much an afterthought that could be much improved. The Style Area Pane appears only in Draft and Outline view on the left-side. Turn on Style Area Pane Dig into Word for the Style Area Pane. File | Options | Advanced […]
Microsoft is replacing the current ‘My Office’ gateway app with a new ‘Office’ app for Windows 10. The Office app is a gateway to your Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents plus Outlook, OneDrive and SharePoint. Source: Microsoft The official Microsoft blurb: ” Quickly switch between apps. See all your Office apps in one place and switch […]
Microsoft India has announced a 15% price increase for Office 365 Home from 8 January 2019. Buy now to beat the price rise and extend your Office 365 subscription. The current price for Office 365 Home is INR4,619 – which has been the price since January 2017 when Microsoft raised the Indian price by 10%. […]
An Arizona man practiced as a dental anaesthesiologist using a Microsoft Word template as part of his application. It wasn’t hard for Office-Watch.com to find the template he used and you can too! ABC15 (Arizona’s News Leader) has the story of Dr. Pankaj Goyal who applied for a General Anaesthesia Permit. That’s the highest level […]
As a quick example of what’s possible, here’s a quick look at some photo editing options in Microsoft Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook emails. Since it’s Christmas, we’ll use one of the famous Apollo 8 Earthrise images. We’ve already talked about how Apollo 8’s Earthrise, as we know it, is a cropped, rotated and […]
The famous Earthrise photo from Apollo 8 is not what the astronauts saw and photographed. Here’s where to get the original, uncropped images from the source. Cropped, rotated & color adjusted: the common version of ‘Earthrise’. Earthrise is one of the most famous images of all time and rightly so. Among the many achievements of […]
If you’re looking for 2019 calendar options, open up Microsoft Excel. Excel has a wide range of calendar templates to choose from. Go to File | New and type ‘calendar’ into the search box. There’s a proverbial embarrassment of riches. Pick a year All the Excel templates apply to any year. Enter the year you […]
Word has four 2019 calendars in the File | New templates supplied by Microsoft. Search for ‘2019 calendar’ in the File | New pane. There are two 2019 calendar designs: Yearly calendar on a single page Monthly calendar (one page per month). Each has two variants, depending on which day you consider the start of […]
Today’s story from the UK Parliament raised the interesting fact that there’s a difference between Lipreaders and Lipspeakers. Being Office nerds we wondered if Microsoft Word’s dictionary knew about the two words. Let’s start with the basics … The difference between a lipreader and a lipspeaker A lipreader is deaf or hard of hearing who […]
Office 365 customers read about new and changed features in ‘Office 365’ but they don’t appear in the software they’ve bought. Where are these missing features? Microsoft loves announcing new stuff in ‘Office 365’ and, seemingly, can’t bring themselves to tell customers of any limitations. Even in a footnote. Just because something is announced for […]
It’s taken over a decade, but Office for Mac has taken a huge step towards true document compatibility. Font embedding was not possible until now and it’s been too long coming. This is HUGE Office for Mac news but it’s got almost no mention, with attention focused on the superficial ‘Dark Mode‘ instead. Font embedding […]
You can ‘go dark’ with Office 365 for Mac combined with the MacOS Mojave Dark Mode. MacOS Mojave release includes a system-wide Dark theme at Apple | System Preferences | General | Appearance. Compatible programs will switch to darker menus etc. Originally Office 365 for Mac did not change with Dark Mode but now it […]
Microsoft’s own Bing search engine was giving prominent place to a link which explains how to pirate Office 2019. It’s a curious display of algorithmic and corporate independence, All you had to do is search for ‘Office 2019 download’ on Bing to see information that Microsoft definitely does not approve of. First reported by Catalin […]
Musicians with Excel skills might like to try Excel MIDI an Excel file with a simple sequencer that plays MIDI music. Made by ruiseixas from Portugal, Excel MIDI is an Excel worksheet downloadable from SourceForge. It’s an .XLSM file so you’ll have to enable VBA content to let it work. We tried it on Excel […]
If you’re sending meeting requests or invitations there’s an important Outlook option to check. Normally, Outlook within a company, uses Microsoft’s own method for including meeting details. That’s OK ‘in-house’ where you can be sure everyone has Outlook. But you don’t know what people outside the organization use to manage email and calendar. Buried at […]
Switching paragraphs from Normal style to Body Text styles in Microsoft Word is a clever use of the Replace feature. We’ve talked about how savvy Word users have their main text paragraphs in the Body Text style instead of the standard Normal style. See also Modifying Body Text style in Microsoft Word That’s great for a […]
The default ‘Body Text’ style in Word needs some changes to suit your needs. Here’s some suggestions for things to alter or check to make sure they suit your, er, style. Can’t see a Body Text style? See Make Body Text style appear in Microsoft Word Body Text style can be different The default Body Text […]
By default, Body Text style in Microsoft Word is ‘hidden until used’. That seems like a Catch-22, its not visible until it’s used but you can’t use the style if it’s not on the style list! There are two ways to reveal or un-hide a hidden style. There’s the long-winded Microsoft approved method and the […]
There are good reasons to avoid the Normal style for the main text in a Word document and use the hidden ‘Body Text’ style instead. The standard Microsoft Word document structure has Headings (Heading 1, Heading 2) … with paragraphs of text in the Normal style. It sounds good but, as usual with Microsoft Office, […]
An embarrassingly simple security breach in Microsoft account logins (including Office 365) has been fixed but it took Microsoft way too long to do anything. It was possible for someone to take over the logins of Microsoft account users to get login details including passwords. There’s over 400 million Microsoft accounts including anyone with Office […]
The latest ebook from Office-Watch.com is a little different, it’s a heartfelt ‘Thank You’ to our Office Watch donors. Peter Deegan has been quite astonished and humbled by the generosity of readers to our first ever reader appeal. Both the money and kind remarks have been a considerable morale boost quite beyond the practical help […]
If you do enjoy the stuff we do here at Office Watch we’d really appreciate it if you’d chuck a few dollars at our first ever fundraising drive. We won’t bore you about how hard it is to stay afloat in the modern media (though it’s very true). The financial support of readers is the […]