If you’ve used OneNote recently, you’re probably aware of the feature allowing you to draw shapes and make lines straight. Then Word for Windows got “Draw and Hold”. Now Excel and PowerPoint can draw straight lines and draw neat shapes (circle, square and more). We’ll explain how it works and how
The Feed feature on Microsoft 365 for business is ending in just a few weeks. It’s being replaced by a less helpful AI feature that doesn’t always help. The Microsoft Feed feature will retire starting November 1, 2024. the Feed feature will be retired from the Microsoft 365 app, affecting
A nice extra coming to Excel 365 highlights the selected cell, row and column with a single click or use an Excel trick to get the same and even better look now. Until now, that’s only been possible with some conditional formatting and a touch of VBA. Excel 365 will
Make it easier to see your current cell in an Excel workbook by dynamically highlighting the selected row, column, cell or headings. Here’s obvious and more subtle highlighting options plus the downside of highlighting, real world tips and debugging tricks if you’re having trouble. There are many different variations on
Word for Windows has a new and dangerous bug which deletes a document as you try to save it. The bug has been fixed but here’s how to make sure you’re not running the bad Word. Any bug which deletes data is bad and while it takes a specific set
Researcher, a search and citation tool in Word 365 will disappear in a few months. You’ll find Researcher, for now, on the References tab in Word 365 for Windows or Mac. That button will be removed from the Word ribbon sometime in late December 2024 and should be totally gone
A rap about OneDrive? If your ears can stand it, Microsoft has a OneDrive song for you. This tune was played as a prelude to a live Q&A session, possibly to discourage people from attending? “OneDrive, it’s the king of the cloud… never loses a file” Click on the image
Digging into the new Mac operating system v15 Sequoia we found two useful and one nice trick to check out. There are two ‘Hover’ options to make text easier to read or type plus a clever ‘retro’ screen saver that brings fond memories for those of us who remember early
The latest Windows 11 update will delete Wordpad from the computer. Here’s how to get it back and keep it on Windows. As promised back in February 2024, the Windows 11 24H2 update deletes the Wordpad app. That’s a shame because Wordpad could open Microsoft Word documents (.docx) files offline
There is a way to force the Microsoft 365 Office apps to half-yearly feature updates instead of the usual monthly changes. Microsoft Office 365 for consumers and small businesses (Personal, Family and other plans) automatically updates each month with new and changed features. Some are minor but others are big
Excel can make bar charts in-cell without bothering with the full Chart system. Despite what you might have seen, there’s plenty of options in Excel Data Bars. The usual example of Excel Data Bars has the colored bar in the same cell as the value. In this article we’ll show
It’s not enough to setup two-factor security for your Microsoft account. Make sure your recovery settings are checked and up to date. Do it now before it’s too late. Today we’re helping someone trying to login to their Microsoft account after losing their password. Many, many hours of frustration and
The new version of Microsoft Office 2024 is now on sale to the general public all around the world. This is the ‘perpetual licence’ or single purchase release with no subscription fee. Office 2024 is now available direct from Microsoft.com and some retailers at the same prices as Office 2021.
Here’s how Office Watch reader, Erik and we drilled down into Windows and Word to narrow down the source of the Word language bug. Erik’s tests are with Office 365 on Windows 11 Pro 23H2 but the same behavior has been reported by others in many versions of Word and
Sometimes Word will switch to another language despite all the settings saying otherwise. With the help of an Office Watch reader, we’ve dug into the details to find what might cause the bug in Word and suggest some possible solutions. Word and Office should obey the default language setup in
There’s a simple way to drill into the Windows or Mac clipboard to see what’s saved and how it’s saved. The clipboard is a lot more complicated than most people think. Happily, most of the time the complications don’t matter to us mere humans. Copying text from, say, Word might
Ever wondered what font is used in a famous logo? There’s a fascinating collection of familiar brands with their names replaced with the font name. Emanuele Abrate has made Logofonts, for example the Starbucks logo with the font name, FreightSans Black. Nike uses Futura. WhatsApp with HelveticaNeue. YouTube uses AlternativeGothic
An 85-year-old blunder has just been fixed at Westminster Abbey to change the spelling to Brontë with the important diaresis. Here’s how to type an ë in Word and other matters arising. Here’s how the memorial to the Brontë sisters looked in Poets Corner until a few days ago. For
There are plenty of audio and music options available in PowerPoint if you want to give your audience a break from your voice. We’ll go beyond the simple ‘adding music’ help to give some practical advice for audio in presentations: You will find the audio basics at Insert | Media |
The BBC has a great collection of over 16,000 sound effects that you can add to your PowerPoint presentations. Use them as a trigger sound for a click on a presentation, as a novel background noise or even an alert sound on your computer or smartphone. Sound Effects Galore Exploring
A short video which brings up some interesting points in the early development history of Microsoft Office, some might surprise you. Microsoft Office started as separately sold products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) and only gradually did they become an integrated package with shared components, consistent interface and some interconnections.
While it lasts, check out some free classes about Python in Excel for better data analysis, DataFrames, charts & visualizations and machine learning. We’re a big fan of Python in Excel and these lessons should help those of us who haven’t yet caught the Python bug. Advance Your Python in
Excel 365 now has Python features included for all business and enterprise customers with a Microsoft 365 software licence Python is a powerful programming language with many great libraries of tools for analysis and charting. It’s a massive extension to Excel that we’ve already raved about. Python Editor for Excel
Add something special to the start of your Word document with a banner image with text. We’ll explain how to do that with free tools like Copilot or Designer. We were inspired by a Microsoft promotion which wrongly said that a Microsoft 365 subscription with Copilot Pro is required, when
