How to get greater accuracy out of Word’s in-built calculator. Recently, we unearthed Word’s hidden calculator. Word rounds its calculator results to two decimal places. This time, we’ll take a look at the two ways to improve the accuracy of Word calculator results. Use an old maths trick or change
You haven’t heard about it? Don’t worry, even Microsoft has no information about this feature, unless you dig way back into its archives where you’ll find that the calculator – which formerly held a prominent position on the Tools Menu – was driven underground in Word 6.0 to make way
You can sort paragraphs, lists and tables in a Word document with all manner of tricks available under the simple ribbon button. Following our look at different alphabetical orders, here’s a look at the sorting options in Word. Select the list or paragraphs then choose Home | Paragraph | Sort.
The File Open and Save dialog boxes in Office have many not-obvious features which let you do a lot of file management and housekeeping on the spot. You try to save a document and realize you need a new sub-folder. Or open a document and want to move it to
More than five ways to type characters with accent, grave, circumflex, tilde, umlaut, dieresis or cedilla in Microsoft Word and Outlook when they aren’t on the keyboard such as á ã à ä Ç ç ē é ê è ë â ê î ô û and many more. Typing accented
Can you scan a picture or document directly into Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook? Certainly, but these days we’re spoiled for choice and have fantastic features like using a smartphone as a simple scanner. Back in the day, you could click a button in Word 2003 to scan a document
There’s more to Paste in Microsoft Word than just the keyboard shortcut. Demystifying the many paste options in Word and workarounds for troublesome situations. Like a lot of things in Word, copy then paste seems simple at first, but there’s a lot more going on that you can use to
Changing the font, size or style for all Word documents is remarkably easy and there’s two ways to do it. Alter the font that’s automatically used when you make a ‘blank document’. In Word 2007 and later the default font face is Calibri, font size 11 and style Normal. This
There’s a way to quickly change the language setting for a multi-lingual Microsoft Word document, by adding a language selector to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) like this. Use this as a pull-down list to change the language setting in parts of a document. The problem is the fixed width
Excel statistical functions have many Average / Mean options including Average with IF for filtering or mean with extreme values excluded. by David Goodmanson In a world which has more and more data, statistics are really important. They help you distill lots of numbers down so that you can see
Like an image in an Microsoft Outlook email? Here’s how to save it to a separate picture file. Sometimes you get an email with a nice picture displayed in the message (as opposed to an attachment). You can ‘grab’ any image and save it to your computer. On most web
The Drop Cap function in Microsoft Word provides a simple way of capturing the ornate look of an old book or manuscript. There are many options that can be used to change the look, positioning and behavior of any drop cap to suit your formatting needs or taste. Drop Caps have been in Microsoft
It’s not easy working with Excel and really large numbers. In fact, Excel doesn’t do a great job with larger numbers. Up to 15-digit integers, Excel is fine, but once you go over that, it quietly rounds numbers. Basically, data above 15 digits stop being accurate. As a result, Microsoft hides that inaccuracy by displaying
Protecting an important Excel worksheet from careless editing, or allowing only specific cells to be modified is all part of a powerful and highly flexible feature in Microsoft Excel known collectively as “Protect”. It’s been there for a long time but is little understood, so we’ll do our humble best
How to sort a list using a hidden or unseen column in a Microsoft Word table. Sometimes you want to sort a list in a way that isn’t apparent to the reader. To continue our Apollo theme, here’s a list of the twelve men who walked on the moon with
Re-creating the “Don’t be a Spock” sign in Word wasn’t hard especially since the original sign seen at the laboratory was probably made in Microsoft Word. Here are some comments on the design. The standard Arial font was used throughout. The two images and captions are in a 2 x
You’ve received a document, but when you try to open it, the file stubbornly won’t appear! We explain how to fix it. Our editor-in-chief saw that problem in an Internet cafe‚ in Ketchikan, Alaska and was surprised when neither the manager of the store nor the cruise computer ‘expert’ knew the
How to use AutoCorrect for more than a word or single character. It can speed up typing of large blocks of text or expanding an acronym into the full name. Paul G writes: “Autocorrect is fantastic for the numerous standard letters, or specific instructions for various computer actions (downloads, etc).
Benford’s Law is an amazing tool that is simple to use in Excel. Benford’s Law is one of those mathematical laws that seems to defy common sense but works for most naturally occurring number sets. It says that in most groups of naturally occurring numbers, the leading digit 1 will
How to convert metric to imperial and other measure conversions in Excel. Converting measurements from one system to another can be done by Excel using the CONVERT function … here’s how it works and then we’ll tell you what CONVERT can’t do or should do better. As usual, we decided
The secret to a timeline chart in Excel is the data. Emily writes asking “How can I make an Excel chart with dates on the X axis with a proper time scale – even if the dates aren’t regular? “ We could not understand Emily’s question until we asked for
Getting started with Word’s footnotes and endnotes. Footnotes is one of those Word features that’s been around for a long time and so it often ignored in all the hoopla about new features. In this article we’ll have a close look at Footnotes and Endnotes. In Word there are Footnotes
Outlook can record appointments in the Calendar but it can also record ‘recurring’ appointments for things that happen on a regular schedule. We’ll show you how to make a repeating appointment and suggest some ways it can be used that might not be immediately obvious. Repeating Appointments 101 To make
Adding some text, an arrow or graphic to an image should be an easy task in Word … and it is … once you know the trick. You can insert an image into Word or a Word created email in Outlook but the defaults make it hard to add overlays.
