Get Microsoft Office for no money, nil, ziltch, nada, bugger all. It’s legal, easy and this article explains the many options available. We’ve not talking about ‘Office wannabes’ but Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote from Microsoft itself. They won’t have all the features of Office 2016 for Windows desktop. There’s usually enough for most purposes […]
It’s expected that today (15 June 2017), Microsoft will release ‘Office in the Windows Store’ as a new way to buy Office. Understand the differences between it and ‘Office 2016 for Windows’ or the Windows 10 / Modern apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The new release is not just a different way to […]
For a long time, it’s been possible to ‘print’ from any program and put the result directly into OneNote desktop program. Now you can ‘print’ to the OneNote for Windows 10 app. Once the ‘printed’ pages are in OneNote, they’ll get a text version added in the background. You’ll need the separate Send to OneNote […]
Microsoft’s promotion of a new OneNote for Windows 10 feature is, to put it politely, misleading. The updated app doesn’t do what the hype promises. You can’t insert a meeting from ‘Outlook’ and not ‘Outlook 2016’ as Microsoft alleges. Hype vs Reality is something all Microsoft customers are familiar with, but this goes beyond some […]
Coming soon is a new version of Windows, the Windows 10S. What does it mean for Microsoft Office users? The 10S is a stripped down and limited version of Windows 10. Some advanced features aren’t available while others are set to Microsoft’s preferences automatically. To buy 10S is cheaper than the Home or Pro editions, […]
After the recent docs.com scare we’ve had a few readers asking the basic questions: What is docs.com? What’s the difference between docs.com and OneDrive? In short, use OneDrive for all your cloud storage needs. Consider Docs.com, if you have a document that you’d like to share with the public or a wide group of people. […]
One of the colors in the Crayola box is being dropped. Never fear, the color Dandelion can be part of your Office documents as can any other Crayola color. It’s not the same as the smell and feel of a Crayola crayon but it’s better than losing the color entirely. Dandelion is being removed from […]
The OneNote app for Windows 10 now has a graphing feature in addition to the existing ‘Ink to Math’. As usual, there’s a catch or two. For a little time, you’ve been able to draw an equation then have it converted into text. This works fairly well, though, as you’ll see below, Microsoft has too […]
Here’s the complete list of non-security updates for Office 2016 for Windows and Office 2013 plus our notes on some bug fixes that caught our eye. As usual, these updates will be pushed to most Office computers automatically. No action is necessary. Unexpected Issues Microsoft is always using different words to avoid saying ‘bug’. This […]
Love or loath it, the ribbon in Microsoft Office is here to stay. You’re not stuck with the ribbon Microsoft gives you, make it work better for you. In this article, we’ll show you an example of how the ribbon is designed to suit absolute Office novices first and also with Microsoft’s marketing agenda in […]
Office Lens, a way to convert pictures of documents or whiteboards into text is finally available for Apple iPads. Back in 2015 Office-Watch.com demonstrated some of the clever crop and rotation tricks in Office Lens, plus the ‘convert to text’ option shameless stolen from OneNote. Source: Microsoft Images can be saved to OneDrive, OneNote or […]
A style is a collection of formatting choices combined under a single name. Any word or even a single letter has a collection of formatting settings as well. Font: size, color, bold/italic/underline/strikethrough/subscript/superscript, highlighting and more. Position: Left, Center, Right, Justified. List: bullet, numbering. Line Spacing, Borders, Background color and a lot more details. Instead of […]
Microsoft is gradually adding to Office some interesting new Ink related features; Replay and Math. Rewind and Replay Until now drawings or ‘ink’ in Office documents has been static and fixed, much like real ink. OneNote Mobile for Windows 10 is the first Office app to make ink additions animated. Office remembers how you’ve drawn […]
Microsoft has released an Android version of their Office Lens app. What is Office Lens? Office Lens main feature is an image to text conversion. You can take a photo of a document, receipt etc and it’ll convert into plain text (OCR) for use in OneNote, Word etc. It comes with three modes: Photo – […]
Yet one more for the list of things you’d never thought you’d see from Microsoft. They now have a deal with major Android phone and tablet makers to include Office software in some of their products. That’s right, Microsoft is paying companies to put their software on non-Windows devices. At least we’re assuming Microsoft is […]
It might seem strange for a long-standing Microsoft Office web site to say, but we’re not OneNote’s biggest fan. We liked version 1 a lot, the development team was very enthusiastic and responsive. But OneNote suffers from offering too much and being originally designed for the desktop. Containers can get too disorganized and unruly on […]
There’s plenty of other OneNote tricks hiding away. Make tables by typing Press Tab to start a table. Each tab key makes a new cell, press Enter to start a new row. Calculator Type a formula then the equals sign and a space, the result is automatically inserted. This only works if there’s no spaces […]
You can select almost anything in Windows to paste into OneNote or paste a link to the original content. Clipper You can select web page content, copy then paste it into OneNote. If you do that, OneNote will automatically add a link to the original page. Or install the OneNote Clipper. This is a browser […]
Pages can contain all manner of things, it’s as simple as ‘click on the page and type’. A container is automatically created for you. Of course, you can copy things from elsewhere (web pages, documents etc) and paste into OneNote. The real power of OneNote is to include lots of different content types. Here’s a […]
OneNote has been around since 2003 and is available to many Office users as part of their Office suite or subscription. Why not try OneNote, it’s worth a look since it can be very useful. What is OneNote We’ll skip past the Microsoft hype and tell you that OneNote is a place for notes of […]
Microsoft has released v2 of the OneNote Clipper, a browser add-in to copy content from a web page to OneNote. It has some nice new features but still has a fundamental flaw or at least a strange behavior. New in version 2 There’s a different interface with more options. The ‘Location Picker’ let’s you select […]
I’m not sure how something can get better than free, but a marketing genius at Microsoft has done it. OneNote for Windows has been available free to all comers since 2014 but with some features blocked and only accessible in the paid versions. Now more of the features have been made available. Previously these features […]
Microsoft has announced the existence but not availability of a new part of Office, Microsoft Sway. https://sway.com/ Sway is a new way to make a web based presentations with text, images, video, social media integrated. It certainly looks interesting. We think of it as a 21st Century version of PowerPoint, aimed at a connected world […]
Office Lens, the Windows Phone app, can now take a photo and turn it into a Word or PowerPoint document. Until now, Lens was a way to take photos and drop them directly into OneNote pages. Microsoft promotes this as a way to capture a whiteboard or paper document into your OneNote notes. Now Office […]
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 for Windows 8 in Modern/Metro […]
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, there’s a selection of pens […]
Some programs let you email documents directly – here’s now. Microsoft Office for iPad has an ‘Email as attachment’ as one of its limited options for sharing a document. Here’s some clever ways to make use of that and workaround the Office for iPad limitations. Some cloud services offer an ‘incoming email’ option so you […]
Another easy way to get images into Word and other Office documents. Last week we mentioned a faster way to get a scanned image into Word via the ‘scan to clipboard’ option available in some scanning software. There are similar options available for copying existing image files into Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents as well […]
Can you scan a picture or document directly into Word? Back in the day, you could click a button in Word to scan a document or image and drop it into a document. Can you still do that? Alas no. Microsoft dropped its imaging services within Windows and so Word lost the scan button. The […]
Also updated today … OneNote for iPad Amidst all the hype over Office for iPad there were some other announcements. OneNote for iPad was updated to version 2.2 promising “Beautifully redesigned for iOS 7” and “Photos of whiteboards and documents are now autocropped and enhanced”. See Also Office for iPad, September updates Office for […]
Grab high-res pictures from movies to insert into Office documents or emails. We’ll show you how to capture or grab a proper, full size, high-resolution still image from a high quality video file then paste that picture into an Office document or Outlook email. Why do this? Sometimes a video turns out badly but has […]
Why and How to remove words from the main Microsoft Office dictionary. Sometimes the supplied Office dictionary has words you don’t want or you’d like a warning about. Here’s how to put the red squiggly line under words that would otherwise be OK according to Microsoft. Why? Why would you want to remove words from […]
OneNote for iPad/iPhone has been updated with some important and essential additions. With version 2.1 you have proper control to create notebooks on Skydrive. At last you can create, rename and delete sections. Until now OneNote users had to switch to their computer or Office Web Apps to rearrange notebooks or sections. There’s details and […]
Insert special characters into Office documents quickly. One of the eternal questions to Office Watch is about adding extra characters to a keyboard. The most common requests are for adding currency symbols like Pound £ Euro € or Yen/Renminbi ¥ but can also include the @ symbol which can, even these days, be missing from […]
How we might be editing Office docs in the future, try it today. One of the more interesting Windows 8 apps is ‘Onenote MX’ an experimental version to see how Office might look in a world of Windows 8 apps, formerly known as Metro. Part of OneNote MX is the touch control called the Radial […]
How to enter accented characters, grave, circumflex, umlaut etc when they aren’t on the keyboard. Typing accented letters can be a chore and a mystery, especially for those of us unaccustomed to languages with the ‘extra’ letters. The keyboards don’t show accented letters and it’s not obvious how to type them. It’s good to get […]
How to install OneNote 2010 only on an Office 2007 computer. Handy for Windows Mobile 7 users. Bryan J writes: “ I would like to use OneNote 2010 because of my new Windows Mobile 7 phone. So… 1. is OneNote 2010 going to play nicely in my XP & Office 2007 environment, and 2. is […]
OneNote is merely the modern version of a Renaissance concept. The commonplace book isn’t a common thing these days, but it was once, er, common. Programs like OneNote might see a revival of the idea though, perhaps, not the name. A commonplace book was an early form of ‘scrapbook’ where people would keep quotations or […]
OneNote 2010 has introduced Heading styles the same as in Word. OneNote 2010 has introduced Heading styles the same as in Word. This is a welcome new feature because it makes it much easier to structure notes as you type them. The OneNote developers understand the importance of keyboard shortcuts (so people can quickly type […]
An overview of the Print options in the new Backstage view. In Office 2010 the Print tab is moved to the File menu aka Backstage. Available Printer options, page settings and page preview have all been grouped together in one place and made more obvious. The Print pane is much the same across all Office […]
