Excel can’t add up reliably and it never has. It’s an important limitation of computer software that everyone needs to be wary of. Phil N sent us an interesting Excel worksheet. He’s simply adding a column of numbers starting with a negative number then positive numbers – the total should
Office Watch readers suggest some more uses for the Word/Office Exclusion Dictionary. As Office-Watch.com explained recently, the Office Exclusion dictionary can be used to take words out of the main dictionary. In other words, to ensure a word gets the red squiggly line. We had some suggestions for using the
Chemistry add-in for Word or Chem4Word is a way to “to insert and modify chemical information, such as labels, formulas and 2-D depictions, from within Microsoft Office Word” and works with Word for Windows including Word 365, Word 2021, 2019 and earlier. The Chemistry add-in started as a Microsoft Research
Flash Fill is a simple way to split and join text automatically in Excel for Windows or Mac. Flash Fill was added in Excel 2013 for Windows. It’s both useful and looks good in the demonstrations. In Excel there’s often need to join, separate or reformat strings of text. Flash
How many rows and columns does Excel have now and in the last 25 years of Excel for Windows and Mac? All the talk about 64-bit versions of Office has raised the issue of maximum rows and columns in Excel. A few readers seem to believe that 64-bit Excel will
Here’s what you need to know about the two official international document formats, Microsoft’s OpenXML (.docx .xlsx etc) and Open Document Format (.odt .ods etc) both supported in Microsoft Office and most other office suite software. Each format has been recognized by international bodies so there are two ‘official’ document
The wildcard is an advanced finding feature that has some powerful options beyond the standard * and ? options for Word. What Word calls ‘wildcard’ is really Regular Expressions, or at least a version of RegEx. Beginning or end of a word The beginning of a word can be represented
The Office Watch “Shortcut of the Week” tips for Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint from 2005 in the one convenient place. Tip 1 – Outlook navigation The Outlook navigation shortcuts could be more intuitive but here they are: Switch to Mail CTRL+1 Switch to Calendar CTRL+2 Switch to Contacts CTRL+3 Switch
=Rand.old() is a Word trick which adds common sentences that use all, or most, of the letters in that language’s alphabet. Here’s what Word does in English, French, German, Danish, Polish and many other languages. It’s useful filler text for testing formatting or other Word features just like “Lorem Ipsum
Hiding footnotes in Word triggers an annoying bug that’s been there for at least ten years. There’s no sign of it being fixed. While looking into Footnotes and Endnotes in Word for Office-Watch.com we came upon a strange bug. Anyone trying to hide the footnotes in a document will strike
Headline your next document with cats! Looking for something really different to headline your next document or presentation – why not use ‘Neko Font’ the font made out of cats. Strictly this isn’t a font you can download, instead you type text into a web page, choose the size (Large,
Microsoft Word’s ‘Pickup where you left off’ or ‘Welcome back’ message is different from the Shift+F5 shortcut. All the recent talk about the ‘Pickup where you left off’ feature in Word had a few Office-Watch.com readers asking how it’s different from the long-standing GoBack shortcut in Word – Shift +
If you want to take the plunge to Solid State Drives, here are some comments from our experience. Mostly for portable computers SSD’s are usually installed on portable computers to take advantage of the lower power usage. That means your laptop can run longer on the same battery charge. ALWAYS
Are there any advantages to getting an Solid State Drive (SSD) when running Microsoft Office? We have some advice from actual use. Solid State Drives are faster and power saving drives that are now less expensive and more available, but are they worth the trouble for Office users? YES —
The latest updates to Office for iPad are good for Microsoft marketing but not existing customers. Microsoft has just released updates to their Office for iPad apps (Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iPad). What’s new and fixed for Office 365 customers? Nothing …. If you’re already an Office 365 renter/subscriber
The last man on the moon is missing from Microsoft Office. Let the conspiracy theories begin! The last man to walk on the moon, Captain Eugene Cernan, is a notable omission from the Microsoft Office dictionary. Update: as of November 2015 we’re delighted to see that Gene Cernan is now
Dropbox plays ‘catch up’ on OneDrive and Google but still lose the cloud storage lead. And there’s a competitor that might beat them all. Dropbox has announced price decreases / storage increases to match offerings from Microsoft and Google. The lowest level of paid Dropbox is ‘Pro’ for $9.99 a
The ‘Modern’ version of OneNote gets Ink highlighting, Printing and PDF insertion. There’s a new version of OneNote for Windows 8 out today with some ‘new’ features that help it catch up ‘real’ OneNote for PC or Mac At this stage let’s be clear, we’re talking about the OneNote app
Now you can scribble all over your Android notes. Microsoft has released an update to OneNote for Android with the focus on handwriting. You can write, draw or annotate your OneNote pages with a tablet pen. You can draw, doodle or even deface an OneNote page. As you can see,
What’s with Office Mobile apps and their secrecy? Quietly, ever so quietly, Microsoft released a new version of Office for iPhone. Version 1.2 was pushed out on 14 August 2014 to a complete silence from Microsoft. No blog post, no Knowledge Base article … nothing … not a sausage or
Make Tom Hanks and Office for iPad work together. All the talk in iPad land is about Hanx Writer; a typewriter app for Apple iPad. Hanx Writer is a pleasant novelty app. It looks and sounds like a typewriter. Having spent a lot of time delving into Office for iPad
When the August 2014 update was finally released it disappointed in more ways than one. Oh dear, for all the hype, rumor and promise of the Windows 8.1 update, it turned out to be a damp squib. The feature additions were not as interesting as Microsoft strategic leaking led us
Microsoft adds the Ruble symbol to Windows 8.1 and we show you how to add it to earlier versions of Windows. Part of the Windows 8.1 August 2014 update is the addition of the new Russian Ruble currency symbol. All Microsoft will say about this change is “This feature adds
Forget the Romans … what use is a smartphone? The Guardian has an interesting article “From cameras to keycards, everyday devices killed off by the smartphone”. It could read like a scene from Life of Brian titled: “What have smartphones ever done for us?” “Well, aside from mobile phones, landlines,
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