We’re delighted to announce a new ebook from Office Watch — all about Office 365 for Windows: Straight Talk. In-depth with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook 365 plus buying and configuration. For anyone with Office for Windows on an Office 365 subscription. It’s a truly independent guide to Office 365 for Windows. We take the […]
It’s now possible to quickly switch accounts while using Office 365 for Windows and even have different logins in separate programs. Many people wear different ‘hats’ while using Office. There’s a Work ‘hat’ or ‘hats’ with more than one job. Plus your personal or home role. Sometimes even more hats/roles like a volunteer task running […]
Don’t bother using cut / paste to manually sorting or adjusting a list. There’s a faster shortcut for moving a line or paragraph around a Word document which isn’t in the usual lists of Word keyboard shortcuts. Word has a simple shortcut to that move the current line or paragraph up or down without selecting […]
Here’s some other problems with the Word Sort feature and tricks to work around them. Generally speaking, long or complex sorting is better done in Excel. Excel has much better data management features to split and sort. The final result can be copied into Word. Sort a list of names by surname or more in […]
Word’s Sort feature is OK, up to a point but has its limitations.We humans insist on variations of the simple ‘first and last’ name that confuse a computer. For short lists, it’s probably enough to do a Word surname sort then manually adjust the list for any anomalies. Longer lists need the power of Excel […]
Word sorting is more powerful than it appears, with a few extra clicks you can sort last names or anything else in a list. Sort is one of those Word features that’s been around for a long time. These days it’s tucked away on Home tab in the Paragraph group. Select a list or paragraphs […]
Yet again, Microsoft Word is beaten by mere humans when we pit the software against words used in the 2019 Spelling Bee finals. We made a list of some words from the 2019 Spelling Bee finals including the last eight words which confirmed the winners. See for yourself how Microsoft Word did against the human […]
WhatsApp will starting showing ads in 2020 which is another reason to give up on the messaging app and move to a more private and secure but very similar app, Signal. WhatsApp has over 1.5Billion users which makes it a too tempting target for the owners Facebook and advertisers. Facebook will be able to target […]
The benchmarking software PCMark 10 has added a new test that directly checks the performance of Microsoft Office programs on various hardware and software configurations. There are three separate Office Applications tests: Word covers typical word processing tasks for office workers. The test measures PC performance when opening, editing, and saving a document. Excel test […]
There’s an important feature in Word and other Office programs that we all have, and many people use, except the US Congress … document collaboration and comparison. It’s even more amazing because most, if not all congressional offices have Microsoft Office. An article about the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress which is trying […]
Word’s Citation and Bibliography support is enough for some people, but not for everyone so there are tools available to go beyond what Microsoft provides. See Add a Bibliography to Word documents Custom Bibliography formats or styles in Word Citations for everyone in Word Source Manager for citations in Word JabRef JabRef is the commonly used, […]
Word has many supplied Bibliography formats or styles to choose from. It’s possible to add your own custom formats to suit your needs. First, a quick look at how Word figures out how to format or arrange a citation. See: Add a Bibliography to Word documents Citations for everyone in Word Note: this is another […]
Word can automatically add a bibliography or list of sources or works cited in a document. Here’s how to do it with formatting to make your teacher or professor happy. To make a Bibliography, you first have to add citations and sources to your document. Once you’ve added all the sources and citations to the […]
Office 365 documents can be autosaved to OneDrive or SharePoint Online but there’s a major exception which Microsoft needs to fix. AutoSave is prominent in Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Office 365, on the left of the top bar. It will regularly save your document for you but only if it’s saved to OneDrive or […]
WOFF are a new-ish type of font that you might have seen mentions or downloads. Here’s how to use them in Microsoft Office; Word, Excel or PowerPoint. WOFF is Web Open Font Format designed to be compact and easy to download. WOFF is for web sites and mobile apps, not desktop programs like Office. Despite […]
An essential part of Word’s citations and bibliography feature is the Source Manager dialog – here’s how to, er, manage the Source Manager. Open the Source Manager from References | Citations and Bibliography | Manage Sources. There is a Current List (at right) which is saved in the current document. On the left if the […]
Since Office 2007, the workload of students and academics has been made a lot easier with the arrival of Citation features in Word. They are useful for everyone, not just in academia. Citations are individual references to source material you’ve quoted in your document. A Bibliography is a list of citations and sources used in […]
A few of the May 2016 patches Microsoft Office caught our eye with embarrassing bug fixes, previously not disclosed to customers. They all apply to older Office releases: Office 2016 and before. It’s a long-standing Microsoft trick to hide embarrassing bugs from customers until they have a fix. In the meantime, customers waste time and […]
Separate text boxes in Microsoft Word can be linked so text in one box can automatically flow into another text box later on the same page or document. Yet again with Word, there’s some extra tricks available beyond simple linking of boxes. Linked boxes is a trick that’s a common feature in professional publishing and […]
Sometimes there’s more than one way to do something in Word like having four blocks of text on a page with images or text breakout. “How can I do a magazine-like layout with four blocks of text, one in each corner with a box of text in the middle? I’ve tried with tables and text […]
Microsoft has announced more AI or machine learning is coming to Word. It’s an extension of the Insights and Designer features already in Excel 365 and PowerPoint 365. The features haven’t been released yet even to fast track Insiders so we only have Microsoft’s word (no pun intended) on how they’ll work. Word Ideas will […]
There are some simple Microsoft Word tricks to squeeze a Table of Contents (or Table of Figures etc) into less pages. Here’s an example of a Table of Contents (ToC) that’s grown too big using Word’s default settings. It’s creeped over to a second page. We’ve seen ToC’s for big documents that take up many, […]
Unclear date formatting in documents, worksheets, presentations and other media is a pet peeve of ours. These days it’s bad practice to show dates in digits only such as 01-05-2019 12/3/18 etc. Yet we often see these formats used in booking confirmations and other documents. Either of those dates can be misunderstood by a global […]
If you have included tables in a document, Word can generate a list of them all for you. Like a Table of contents, this list or Table of tables can include page references or links to each table. A Table of tables can be useful for creating a proper appendix or reference within more formal […]
If you have included equations in a document, Word can generate a list of them all for you. Like a table of contents, this list or Table of Equations can include page references or links to each equation. A Table of Equations can be useful for creating a proper appendix or reference within more formal […]
If you have included images, graphs, tables or equations in a document, Word can generate a list of all of these, for you. Like a table of contents, this list can include page references or links to each figure or picture. A Table of Figures can be useful for creating a proper appendix of figures […]
Office 365 customers will be seeing a set of opening screens about how Microsoft gathers and uses customer data. Those screens are carefully worded to avoid some hard truths about modern cloud connections and cover Microsoft from legal liability. Cloud features can be great and very useful. Companies do their best to hide the problems, […]
Microsoft has something ‘new’ in Office 365 they call ‘Connected Experiences’. It’s really a new, fancy name for things we already have. Connected Experiences is the new catchphrase for the cloud services already in Office 365 software or apps. It’s the various features which require customer data sent to Microsoft’s servers. According to Microsoft: “Office […]
Like any other text in Word, the appearance of all your captions can be changed by modifying the style that is applied to them or selecting the text and formatting manually. See Adding Captions in Word Caption Style All captions use the ‘Caption’ style, so modifying that style will modify the format of all past and […]
Captions let you add autonumbered labels under most Word objects including pictures (figures), tables or equations. Captions can be combined into a list of all the figures/tables/equations in the document, along with their page numbers. As usual in Word, there are many options beyond the simple adding of captions and some ‘gotchas’ as well. See Changing […]
There’s a TV show just starting its last season, maybe you’ve heard of it <g>? Here’s how to get the Game of Thrones look in Word documents and PowerPoint slides. Plenty of people have borrowed the Game of Thrones or GoT look, including a certain US President. All these uses are contrary to various trademarks […]
The May 2019 update to Windows 10 includes a long-awaited and important addition, an updated Emoji Panel. What a pity that it totally sucks and is incredibly dumb. Emoji Panel is better than what we had before (nothing) but not by a lot. We’re talking about the Emoji Panel or ‘keyboard’ which appears in Windows […]
Word has settings to automatically change the case of words that you type, fix common capitalization typing problems add items of your own to have capitalized the way you want them as you type. Word also has options to manually Change Case in Microsoft Word. The settings are in the AutoCorrect dialog at File | […]
If, while typing, you notice that Word has automatically changed capitalization of something you did not want changed, you can correct this easily as you type. Hover your mouse over the part of the word that has been automatically changed. A blue line will appear under the changed part. We typed AUtomatic and Word immediately […]
Google has announced that their G Suite customers will be able to edit and collaborate with Microsoft Office documents. It will be available to all G Suite users by the end of May 2019. Source: Google. Until now, a clumsy Office compatibility app for Chrome allowed Microsoft Office documents to be edited in Google Docs, […]
Slack, the popular collaboration service, has added better integration with Office 365 hosting and OneDrive. Office 365 tools were inevitable because Microsoft now has Teams, its own rival to Slack. There are two new tools, Outlook email and calendar plus nice previews of Microsoft Office documents. Office document preview Now included in Slack is better […]
The lesser known version of SVG icons is the smaller, compressed, SVGZ format. Here’s how to use SVGZ in Office 365/2019 despite no direct support for the format. Most SVG icons arrived uncompressed in plain XML text using the .SVG extension. We’ve shown before how SVG’s can be edited in any text editor to make […]
How to insert the different Ellipsis … marks into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Ellipsis … symbol is used for a gap or break in some text, usually to drop out some irrelevant text or speech. The same applies in maths e.g. 1,1,2,3 …. 377 […]
Change Case options in Word, like many Word features goes beyond the obvious choices on the ribbon. Alter the upper/lower case of words, phrases or more. ‘change case’ can become ‘Change Case’ or ‘CHANGE CASE’ without retyping. There are four ways to change the case of existing text in Word: Keyboard shortcut Change Case button […]
Changing the case upper/lower for text through all of a Word document is easy because the default settings don’t need changing. We’ve already talked about the manual Change Case options in Word, now we’ll move onto bulk changes. Sometimes the spelling of a product or brand has peculiar case choices like iPad, eBay or reCAPTCHA. […]
