There are two similar text formatting options in Excel. The well-known Merge & Center and the hidden away Center across selection. Both have their advantages, the choice is yours. Merge & Center Most Excel users know ‘Merge & Center’ because it’s atop the Merge list at Home | Alignment | Merge. It does two things: […]
A recent Windows update is causing VBA code to fail in Excel, Access and other VBA parts of Office. The culprit isn’t Office, but the version of Windows that it’s running on. After the 2019-08 Cumulative Update KB4511553 is applied, some VBA code will stop working. The patch bug is in Windows 10, 8.1 and […]
There’s a new generation growing up who see the Office ribbon differently from their parents. Check out this icon on the older Office ribbon …. To you, me and most people it means ‘Save’ because that’s obviously a floppy disk. Specifically, a 3.5” disk with either 720kb or 1.4MB up to a whopping 2.8MB (that’s […]
Despite all the possibilities for importing or sharing appointments, most of the time we have to manually type in new appointments or events. Here’s some tips to do it faster and get it right. We’ve all been there, a web page or email (below right) with details that need copying into a blank Outlook appointment […]
Inserting an .ics iCalendar item into Outlook is typical Microsoft Office. Seemingly easy if you believe the simplistic ‘help’ from Redmond but a little more involved in practice. iCalendar .ics files are small text files which contain an appointment or event. It’s a common standard so they can be used by Outlook or any other […]
Excel provides some handy pre-selected styles that you can apply to your cells. Here’s a selection of styles that we use, improve from Microsoft’s bland defaults and will light up your worksheets. These are excellent for distinguishing headers from data, classifying data, or showing the function of each cell (calculations, output, notes, etc.) Cell Styles […]
The Format Cells dialog can be accessed from Home | Alignment | Orientation, or by right-clicking on selected cells and selecting Format Cells. See Excel’s text and number alignment choices Text formatting in Excel with wrapping, line breaks and merging This dialog gives you more detailed options to choose from than are available in the Orientation […]
Under Excel’s Home | Alignment ribbon you can change the indents, alignment or angle of the text in selected cells. As usual, a seemingly simple set of buttons have some hidden tricks. See Text formatting in Excel with wrapping, line breaks and merging Alignment Adjust alignment of the text, both across and up/down, use the […]
It’s amazing to see how people use Excel in ways probably not dreamt of by the programs makers. We usually think of Excel as a financial tool either for businesses or personal budgeting or managing lists. Anything to do with numbers or lists has a place in Excel, like a guy in Singapore with a […]
There’s no need to switch out of Word to do simple calculations because Word for Windows has its very own built-in calculator. Calculate in Word has some nice tricks but also problems and traps. Type a calculation, hit the button (see below) and the result appears in the status bar AND it’s loaded into the […]
Word allows you to insert other files with data and functionality from another document or program directly into your Word document. Microsoft calls these additions ‘Objects’ which makes it sound overly technical and difficult but it’s not. Don’t get fazed by all the nerd talk about ‘objects’, that’s programmer speak that’s leaked out into the […]
A newly promoted UK politician has his own special style guide for staff, here’s some Word features that can help ensure your documents are approved by the boss. The Right Honourable Jacob William Rees-Mogg (to give his new full title) proudly affects an old-fashioned demeanor and has been described as “on secondment from the 18th […]
There are plenty of options to fit text in Excel but not all of them are obvious. Here’s your choices for wrapping text, adding line breaks and merging cells. At first, when you type text in a cell it just keeps going across the next cell, if it’s empty. Sure, you can drag the edge […]
Can Office 2007 and other older versions of Office (Office 2010, Office 2013) be installed on Windows 10. What are the licensing, activation problems? How about moving documents? Eileen G asks a common question to Office Watch: “I got a new HP desktop computer, but can I install the old MS orig office, “Home and […]
Microsoft Word has several ways to quickly insert placeholder text into documents. Sometimes you want to add some random text to a document as filler, but don’t want to think of something to write yourself. While there are websites that will generate placeholder text for you, it is also possible to do this directly within […]
Our articles about saving past events with anniversary reminders begs the question; How far back can Outlook save an event. The answer in Outlook for Windows, Mac and online is 1 April 1601. Trying to enter a date before 1st April 1601 brings up an error: “You must specify a valid date and/or time”. That […]
Most people are familiar with Word’s Spelling & Grammar check functionality, Word’s Readability check is a great extension. Word can check the complexity of your writing, and gives you an idea of whether your writing will be understood by your target audience. We’ll show you how to see Word’s Readability Statistics, what they mean and […]
Here’s a practical example of how to share an appointment or event with reminders using the iCalendar .ics standard. Some Apollo 11 events ready to download and add to your calendar (in Outlook or other software). Outlook supports .ics files and so does most other calendar programs. They are small text files which have all […]
Here’s the enhanced Apollo 11 mission timeline as an Excel worksheet. Office Watch newsletter readers asked for it after last weeks articles using the NASA web page as a data source. Complete Apollo 11 timeline in Excel Things to do with the Apollo 11 timeline in Excel Apollo 11 suggested viewing and reading The full […]
There are many ways to share an entire calendar or individual events in Outlook software. Sharing can be ‘live’ and connected. Any changes or updates to the event or calendar are automatically sent to everyone sharing. Or it can be a ‘one-off’ item. A special attachment which is emailed or a little .ics file. Receivers […]
One way to get a web table into Excel is simply to copy the page from your browser into an Excel workbook. This method works for all versions of Excel back more than a decade. It’s been superseded by Get and Transform with PowerQuery which does a much better job of conversion. See Complete Apollo 11 […]
The 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 is our excuse to show-off some features in Outlook for Windows/Mac. How to add past events, post events in other time zones, get reminders of upcoming anniversaries and set reminders for longer times than Outlook allows. Adding Past Events Outlook can save details of past events. That it’s in […]
Back in the 16th Century, italic fonts were invented and that trick can still be used today in Microsoft Word. Italics let you fit more text into the same space. An innovative Venetian publisher, Manutius, needed to make small and affordable books. Paper was expensive so anything that put more text on the page was […]
You’re not stuck with the Microsoft automatic settings when inserting a new shape. Change the defaults to whatever you like for faster shape formatting in Office; Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. When you Insert | Shape, something like this probably appears. Blue fill, 1pt black single line outline, no effects and Text Wrapping in front […]
You’re not stuck with the Microsoft automatic settings when inserting a new text box. Change the defaults to whatever you like for faster text box formatting in Office; Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. When you Insert | Shape | Text Box , something like this probably appears. Thin black outline, no fill and text wrapping […]
If you regularly translate text from or to the same language, you can set default languages. Once you have set the languages, Word will automatically translate the text as soon as you hit Translate, without you having to set the text each time. To set the default languages, go to Review | Translate | Set […]
Word lets you translate an entire document in one go, either right click anywhere in the document, right click and select Translate, or go to Review | Translate | Translate Document. As with translating a selection, the Translator will open in a sidebar, where you can select the languages to translate from and to. Generally, […]
Word has a feature to translate text from one language to another. Whilst the translation may not be perfect, it does give you a starting point to understanding what the text says. You can either translate a selected piece of text, or the whole document. Translate works slightly differently depending on which you choose. Choosing […]
If you’re the sort of person who’s easily distracted, or just want to focus on the content of your document without worrying about formatting, there are a number of ways you can clear the distractions from Microsoft Word, so you can focus on the text you’re writing. Minimize the Ribbon Remove the entire ribbon from […]
The Power Query exploit in Excel is a concern but one that most Excel users are already protected from. Look past some of the shock headlines (e.g “120 million users personal information at stake due to Microsoft Excel flaw”) . Mimecast did a good job tracing this security bug in Power Query which has existed […]
In Adding Vertical Lines in Word we looked at the many choices for lines down the page. Moving beyond that, let’s look at other vertical non-line choices to spice up a Word document. Sidebar Sidebars are the starting point for many different design element options. You’re not limited to what Microsoft supplies, just use them […]
If you know the trick, Word’s ‘Line Between’ option for multiple columns can be formatted to a different color or other types of line. The downside Word’s standard line between column setting is the lack of formatting. There’s no known way to change the look of the vertical line between columns. Like the old Model […]
There are at least five ways to add a vertical line in Word. Vertical lines can help accentuate a piece of text in Word, but knowing how to add them is not as intuitive as adding a horizontal line. Adding a border Or a Page Border Using the shape tool Adding a bar tab Adding […]
How can you buy an older version of Microsoft Office to fit in with your other computers? Fran, a loyal Office-Watch.com reader has that problem getting Office 2013. “ I have Office 2013 on two computers now. Is there a way to get another copy for the new Microsoft Surface I just bought for less than the price […]
A US government department has accidentally revealed a secret by overlooking the obvious in Office document security. Office helps you scrub documents of private or secret information before sending. It’s easy to overlook the obvious data leaks that ‘Inspect Document’ doesn’t cover. ‘Inspect Document’ checks for hidden information in the document that you might not […]
Office Watch reader Steve G is having a problem in Word. The F9 key is starting Cortana instead of updating fields in a Word document. He suspects a buggy patch of Windows or Office. F9 is the most common problem but redirecting to different commands. That’s probably because F9 is a most common Office function […]
Drop-down boxes are useful in Excel but, like many things in Office, there’s more than one way to do it and more to know that the simple examples often given. Making a pull-down list is easy and there’re many tips showing the basics. In this article we’ll go beyond that. We’ll show that simple tip […]
There’s a simple trick to ensure that an email is real, not a phishing trick to get your personal information. But Microsoft makes it easy for phishing attacks to pretend that are the real thing.. Hover over a link in an Outlook email to see the real url that you’ll visit if you click. Look […]
The inverted or Spanish question mark ¿ is available in Microsoft Word, regardless of language setting. There’s even an in-built shortcut. ¿ is most commonly used in Spanish for the start of an question sentence. This guide is mostly for people without a Spanish keyboard or who only occasionally need the inverted question mark. See […]
The inverted or Spanish exclamation mark ¡ is available in Microsoft Word, regardless of language setting. There’s even an in-built shortcut. ¡ is most commonly used in Spanish for the start of an exclaiming sentence. As far back as the 1660’s there have been attempts to introduce ¡ inverted exclamation to denote irony. Despite its […]
