A recent security patch for Microsoft Office was done an unusual way, suggesting that there’s something a bit strange happening in the development team. Last week we told you about a 17 year old bug in the Equation Editor part of Office. Microsoft fixed the security hole and a few others besides. The way they […]
The long-standing viewer software for Word, Excel or PowerPoint are going to that Bit Black Hole to which all software must eventually go. The Word Viewer, Excel Viewer and PowerPoint Viewer are being ‘retired’ in Microsoft parlance. That only means they won’t be available for download from Microsoft. Nor will the company release any more […]
There’s been a whopping big security hole in Microsoft Office for the last 17 years, via the old Equation Editor and a less than vigilant Microsoft. We have details of the problem, how to fix it and why there’s more to come …. In the November 2017 patches there are some that are innocently labelled […]
The much unloved Office Clippy will never leave us, thanks to a Javascript library that makes the annoying little critter possible on any web page. We wondered how the WordArt online site got the animated Clippy effect on the web page. Turned out that it wasn’t hard. There’s a free Javascript library available that recreates […]
Does anyone miss the original WordArt from the 1990’s? Now you can get it back courtesy of some clever web work by Mike McMillan. https://makewordart.com/ recreates, with scary detail, the look of early Office including the WordArt gallery. Pull down menus, a Start button in the corner and the dreaded Clippy to help you. You […]
Can you believe it, PowerPoint is 30 years old? Originally called ‘Presenter’, in 1987 it was renamed to ‘PowerPoint’ by Robert Gaskins. Later in 1987, Microsoft bought the software out of petty cash (i.e. $14 million). 22 May 1990 was the first release of Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows, the birthday that Redmond officially recognizes. In […]
Each year Office-Watch.com has a little fun seeing how Microsoft Word’s dictionary compares to the winners of the Scripps (US) National Spelling Bee. Word did better in 2017 than past years. Still, no chance of Word reaching the finals in 2013, 2014, 2015 , 2016 and now 2017 despite being much older than any of […]
Most color printers have a secret tracking or forensic code added to every page that lets governments and others know when and where the page was printed. It’s just one result of last week’s NSA leak and later arrest. One piece of evidence against Reality Winner was the secret code on the pages she allegedly […]
Windows will automatically index and let you search Office documents on your computer or network – how can you stop that happening? Maybe the document is personal or so private you don’t want anyone to find it with a Windows Search. Or discover that the document even exists! Password Protection The most direct way to […]
There are many ways to save an Outlook email or other items to a separate file. Which one you choose depends on your needs. One Outlook message or many? Compatible for many people or not? Easy to search or not? Some options work for a single message only. Others can be used to save many […]
The US Supreme Court (aka The Supreme’s) has sided with consumers in a case about refilling printing toner or ink cartridges. Alas, printer makers still have other ways to grab extra money from you. Lexmark sued Impression Products who have been refilling ink/toner cartridges. The case alleged that Lexmark’s patents on cartridge technology were being […]
Everyone is talking about ransomware now that the WannaCrypt has spread like crazy across the world. These nasty viruses target your documents and precious files including Microsoft Office files and Windows backups. This is a little embarrassing for us because Office-Watch.com has just released a new book that’s suddenly become very topical. Everyday BACKUPS – […]
Adding fonts into Microsoft Office is easy but the standard advice doesn’t always work. We’ll show you how to install a font and avoid the trap. Font installation has nothing to do with Word, Excel or PowerPoint. It’s all done in Windows. Firstly, download the new fonts. There are many fonts, free and paid around […]
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 […]
If you look in folders that contain Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) you might see the occasional .tmp file. What are they, could they be useful and can they be safely deleted? The quick answers are: probably Word or Office document remnants, could be handy to recover a lost document but otherwise they can be […]
There’s a new type of infected Office document that can bypass some protections and trick people into installing a keylogger on their computer. A keylogger is software that records each keypress and send it to a hacker. They can use that info to get your login details for many sites or software. What’s new is […]
Drop Caps are very old fashioned, there’s space left for them in the oldest printed books in the world, the Gutenberg Bibles. You can do the same thing, a lot more easily, in Microsoft Word. In this Office-Watch.com article we’ll go beyond the simple ‘how to’ for Drop Cap. There’s the basic settings supplied by […]
It’s that time of year again and Office-Watch.com has a little fun seeing how Microsoft Word’s dictionary compares to the winners of the Scripps (US) National Spelling Bee. Surprisingly, Word did better in 2016 than past years, despite the words being harder. Still, no chance of Word reaching the finals in 2013, 2014, 2015 and […]
For a long time, Word has a set of Autoformat shortcuts to make horizontal lines, here’s how they work, how to change them and how to stop them when out of control. Line shortcuts There are six horizontal line shortcuts. For each one type the same character three times at the start of a new […]
The US Scripps National Spelling Bee is over for another year with another tie between two amazing young people. Both winners are impressive to us mere mortals but also compared to Microsoft Office. As we have for the last few years, we’ve made a list of the championship words to see how Microsoft Office’s English […]
Getting Outlook windows into the positions you want, and keeping them there, is one of those mysteries that Microsoft offers to us mere customers. We’ll try to explain what’s going on but, alas, can’t guarantee any solid answers. Most Outlook users have more than one window open at any time. They use the right-click on […]
You might think that the hyphen is a simple small horizontal line … but no. There’s hidden depths even in horizontal lines within Microsoft Word. Let’s start with the standard hyphen, actually called a ‘Hyphen-Minus’ with ASCII code 45. That hyphen is the one to separate hyphenated words. We have more on hyphenation and special […]
It’s been a long-standing problem for laptop users – you have Outlook running nicely at home but when you travel it’s impossible to send messages. Here’s what’s happening and how to avoid it. The fix, that should work for most situations is to change the Outlook account settings to login for both receiving and sending […]
Of course, you can’t fully send emails from Outlook if the computer isn’t connected to the Internet … but it’s surprising how many people don’t know they can write and click Send any time – whether the computer is connected to the Internet or not. We often use the relatively interruption free time on planes […]
These days, Outlook Categories are saved within the PST data file. If you move the PST to a new computer, the categories will move too. Exchange Server saves categories with each user mailbox and they show up automatically when you login (even with Outlook Web Access). Backup and Restore Even so, there’s occasions when it’s […]
How can you use Pantone Color names in Word or other MS Office documents? Sometimes you’re given a specific color using the Pantone color scheme. Most commonly this happens for a corporate logo. The Ford car company specifies ‘PMS 294C’ for their blue logo. McDonald’s uses PMS 123C and PMS 485C (yellow and red). How […]
Quickly insert symbols, characters and emoji in Microsoft Word without taking your fingers off the keyboard. Inserting Symbols into Word documents is a pain, go up to the ribbon Insert | Symbols | Symbol which takes time … or you can use a trick from the 20th century to keep your fingers on the keyboard. […]
Microsoft celebrates 25 years of the software suite. Microsoft quietly celebrated the 25th anniversary of their Office suite on 1 August 2014 but were they being a little ‘previous’ in their celebrations? While Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows were around on 1 August 1989, were they sold as ‘Microsoft Office’ or only as separate […]
Microsoft Word does badly against the National Spelling Bee joint champions. The Scripps US National Spelling Bee is over for another year with unprecedented joint winners Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe. Congratulations to both winners who were commendably gracious while sharing the trophy. Like last year, we were interested in seeing how the spell-check dictionaries […]
Why your PowerPoint slides should NOT make much sense … Over on Slate there’s a nice little slideshow about making PowerPoint presentations that don’t bore your audience into a coma. In short, the advice is to make your slides incomprehensible. Well, not quite. The idea is that the slide content should complement or support what […]
Windows and Office gives you Arial font when you ask for Helvetica. We recently told you about the Helvetica font in Windows and Microsoft Office – or rather it’s noticeable absence. Microsoft plays some strange font substitution tricks that got us digging further. As we’ve noted, if you open up a document with Helvetica formatting, […]
A list of Microsoft Office versions and their latest Service Packs. If you don’t have Office 2013, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Here’s a list of the latest service packs for each version of Microsoft Office going back more than a decade. For the recent versions of Office, at least Office 2007 and later, you […]
An industrial dispute involving CAPS has ended. One of the most interesting industrial disputes of 2013 has now ended with a new agreement between staff and management of the Melbourne Fire Brigade in Australia. Being an emergency service, the administrative staff didn’t feel that a full ‘stop work’ strike was appropriate so they resorted to […]
How to copy an image from the web into an Office document. Getting an image from your web browser to a Word document is quite easy, though easier with some browsers than others. In your browser, right-click over the image you want and look at the options available. At the very least there’ll be an […]
How accurate is Excel compared to universal needs. On page 45 of the Sept/Oct 2013 Mental Floss magazine is a small item ‘Why do we care so much about the digits if Pi’ which includes this trivia: “The computers that keep the International Space Station humming round off pi at a crude 16 digits. When […]
Getting started with Word’s footnotes and endnotes. Footnotes is one of those Word features that’s been around for a long time and so it often ignored in all the hoopla about new features. In this article we’ll have a close look at Footnotes and Endnotes. In Word there are Footnotes and Endnotes however they are […]
A quick look at your dictionary options in Word Even if you, like me, only speak one language there are still some powerful language and dictionary options in Word to keep in mind. All copies of Microsoft Office (recent versions anyway) come with English dictionaries. ‘Dictionaries’ plural because there’s many variants supplied. You’d expect English […]
What is an RTF document and why is it still being used? “I’m looking for a job and many employers are asking for my resume in RTF format. How do I do that and why can’t I just use a Word document?” Ian G. RTF (Rich Text Format) is an older document format that’s been around […]
Because the kids can spell words that Word can’t! The 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee in the USA got us wondering how Microsoft Word would cope. So we fired up Word 2013 with the latest English (US) dictionary as supplied by Microsoft. We selected 30 words used in the final rounds of the spelling bee, […]
Gerry Anderson isn’t with us, but the Thunderbirds live on even in MS Office. The recent passing of Gerry Anderson was sad news to hear. Mr Anderson enthralled millions of kids (and more than a few adults) with his groundbreaking shows like Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, UFO and, of course, Thunderbirds. As Office users, […]
