Tired of Comic Sans but still want a casual, friendly font? Microsoft Office has better built-in alternatives or there’s many other fonts that keeps the charm without the cringe. Here’s a quick guide to upgrading your documents. The Wall Street Journal has a history of Comic Sans, the font that
Display scores or ratings visually in Excel using solid and hollow emojis or symbols, you can use a combination of simple formulas and conditional formatting. This approach is useful for representing ratings, progress, or performance in an intuitive and engaging way. With a little Excel trickery, you can show multi-colored
Microsoft 365 Copilot is improving their document summary feature in Word across Windows, Mac, and the web for some customers. Still no mention of the feature that Word Copilot users really want! Copilot Summary appears at the top of Word documents, whether you like it or not. It can be
Check out this clever Python tool that converts Word documents, Excel sheets, PowerPoint decks and PDFs into a plain text format. Markitdown is a Python library released by Microsoft via Github, converts many documents into nearly plain text (called MarkDown). It’ll convert all these formats into text. Some conversions need
There’s a special new color called ‘Olo’ developed by scientists in Berkely, California. The nearest match to Olo is possible in Microsoft Office, including Word and PowerPoint. Olo can only be seen with help from a special laser that fires the color into the eye. It’s claimed to extend human
PowerPoint is getting a useful addition to its Copilot AI options, make a new slide with Copilot. The Home tab of PowerPoint 365 will have ‘New Slide with Copilot’. A Copilot enabled Microsoft 365 plan is necessary, obviously. Or there’s “Add a slide” on the Copilot icon top-left of a
Get the most from Microsoft’s Emoji collection with a wonderful app, the Fluent Emoji Gallery with many options and puts Microsoft’s own emoji efforts to shame. Microsoft’s Fluent Emoji collection are a great collection of 3D looking icons but they are a bear to find and use. Michał Łeptuch’s Fluent
The Startup Boost feature coming to Word 365 is really a sly trick by Microsoft. It’s a trick that anyone can do with any Office app and any version of Office. Startup Boost starts the app but hides it away. Word lurks in the background until the user clicks on
Startup Boost is a new way to make Microsoft Word 365 start faster. Here’s how it works and how to disable it. Startup Boost is a little tech trickery. Word 365 isn’t really getting faster, instead it’s being started in the background (aka preload) where it’ll lurk until needed. In
Office Watch reader Steve G is having a problem in Word. The F9 key isn’t updating fields in a Word document. He suspects a buggy patch of Windows or Office. Here’s how to find the source of the Function key or any keypress problem and fix it. Hint – it’s
Last Thursday wasn’t great for Microsoft 365 Family customers who were kicked out of their legitimate Office apps because of a bug in Microsoft licensing servers. We’ll explain when happened over nine hours and what you can do if it happens again. It’s become an all too familiar story. A
Microsoft has moved cloud services to a special domain .cloud.microsoft which is a good thing that gives us all a little more confidence in their online services. Microsoft’s services are a dreadful jumble of domains, mostly .com but also some .net. And there’s no consistency with Sharepoint and ClipChamp having
If your Microsoft Office 2016 apps suddenly started crashing last week, you’re not alone. Fortunately, Microsoft has rolled out an emergency fix to help users get back on track after one of their security update caused Outlook and other Office 2016 apps to stop working. The troubles started began after
Microsoft is restoring to lies and obfuscation to hide their decision to take unused Skype Credit money rather than give refunds or credits. Microsoft is trying to trick customers by saying that their Teams product replaces Skype – which is simply not true. Skype has two major features, only one
Microsoft 365 has introduced ‘Kermit,’ a new typeface specifically crafted to make reading more accessible and enjoyable for young audiences. Kermit the font aims to address the challenges faced by early readers, including those with dyslexia but has uses for everyone. Developed in collaboration with the type design studio Underware
Copilot could become a ‘toxic brand‘ because of pushy way Microsoft is adding it to Microsoft Office. We have some ‘modest proposals’ for how Microsoft can improve their AI offering and keep paying customers onside. Or, put another way, some grumbles about the way Microsoft is force-feeding Copilot to its
Maybe you’ve seen the little blue men appearing in the margins of your Word documents? They are Accessibility Recommendations and, yes, there is a way to get rid of them. There are two ways to hide these little creatures, both take a little digging. Right-click on any Accessibility icon then
Copilot is now appearing on the Microsoft Word title bar as part of the combined search and help, now called “Copilot Search”. The Copilot ‘ads’ for blank documents keep changing too. In the latest Word 365 Insiders builds the Search box (which combines Find, Help and broader Searches) is now
Stricter requirements are coming on mass mailings to Microsoft hosted mailboxes including Outlook.com. The new rules also affect anyone with a Microsoft managed Inbox. Any organization (domain name) sending “over 5,000 emails daily” will have to comply with new rules from 5 May 2025. At the same time, Microsoft is
Emails you want to see might end up in Junk Email as Microsoft imposing new standards to ensure emails are legitimate. Microsoft isn’t allowing any way to bypass their new rules for emails you want. The new standards apply to senders but there are important and less well promoted effects
Paste text into Microsoft Word without unwanted fonts, colors, or styles can save time and frustration. There’s a (relatively) new keyboard shortcut to do that directly. This guide breaks down all the changed keyboard options made to make room for a Paste Text Only shortcut in Word on Windows and
There’s a little undocumented surprise on the right-click menu. Tucked away at the top is ‘Search the menus’ help. Sadly the underlying help system is still woefully inadequate. Right-click in a document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook) and the top item isn’t ‘Cut’ but a “Search the menus” box. This
Microsoft has introduced a new feature allowing users to upload images directly from their mobile devices to Microsoft 365 Copilot. A nice trick but there are other ways to do the same thing, including two from Microsoft itself! The idea is to streamline tasks such as transcribing handwritten notes, summarizing
Excel is getting Value Tokens but what are they good for? Do they add any ‘value’ or are they just a ‘token’ extra? The ‘Value Token’ appears in the formula bar when you select a data linked cell e.g. Stocks, Currencies, Geography or custom data types. According to Microsoft “This
