The ultimate in PowerPoint Handouts aren’t made in PowerPoint at all. Link a presentation to handouts in Microsoft Word, where you will then have all the Word formatting options available to you. You’re forgiven for not knowing this option existed, because it’s not immediately obvious and you need to go several steps down in menus […]
A funny story from satirical ‘The Chaser’ shows what could happen when corporate PowerPoint presentations are taken too far. LinkedIn executive presents moving PowerPoint eulogy at mother’s funeral “Before a packed congregation of relatives and friends, the senior executive paid tribute to his mother through a series of bullet points, graphic charts and bold-font mission […]
The famous game, Civilization, has been impressively recreated in Excel as Solly’s Cellivization. Civilization was an early computer game that started in 1991 for MS-DOS and has undergone many reincarnations for Windows, Mac and gaming devices now almost forgotten. Here it is in Microsoft Excel … Even with the power of modern computers and Excel, […]
If you don’t like the large Office Backstage pane, the older and more powerful Open and Save dialog boxes are still available via shortcuts. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort changing the Word, Excel and PowerPoint File panes to add more features and unsubtle hints to use OneDrive to save all documents. […]
Here’s a list of the known Office install/update error codes with possible fixes. All thanks to a diligent and long-suffering Office Watch reader. Ron S has compiled these lists from web sites and forums based on experiences of other people. Doesn’t Microsoft have all this? Yes, they probably do but not for public consumption. Microsoft […]
There’s no direct ‘watermark’ option for PowerPoint Handouts which is a shame because it would be very useful to add ‘Confidential’, ‘Draft’, ‘Private’ or other very obvious notices. You can fake it with a little PowerPoint trickery. Add a Watermark Picture In short, make an image with the watermark text. The image can have text, […]
The newer File | Open panes include a Search option to quickly find Recent Documents by name. That means it’s practical to expand the Recent Docs list to a higher or maximum value in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. In any of the three programs go to File | Options | Advanced | Display. Over time, […]
Just as there is a Handout Master to control how slide printouts look, there is also a Notes Master which has more control over how PowerPoint printed notes with slides will look. If you’ve used the Handouts Master, Notes Master will be warmly familiar to you. Notes Master is like a simplistic template with some […]
PowerPoint 365 is getting the option to ‘Save As’ to SVG format from either images/graphics, charts or whole slides. It’s now in PowerPoint 365 Windows for Insiders and will spread to the public versions in due course. SVG is a scalable graphics format which ensures the image looks the same no matter how large or […]
One of the most commonly used and confusing Excel functions is getting a major revamp. Vlookup() is getting a new, better and easier replacement Xlookup(). It’s a truly good and useful addition to Excel, some might call it a godsend. Xlookup is now available to Insider releases Excel for Windows/Mac/Apple/Android. It’s a big deal and […]
Better to stick with a stable, known Microsoft Office instead of monthly updates with new and changed features. That rational customer approach isn’t understood at Microsoft who push the regular Office 365 changes on the assumption that’s a universal good which suits all customers. Brian X Chen in The New York Times has a thoughtful […]
The error messages on Office 365/2019 setup and update are notoriously unhelpful, so here’s a guide to fixing Office install or update problems that work out here in the real world. Error messages like the infamous ‘Something went wrong” should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The error message is often misleading and […]
If you get an error message when installing or updating Office 365 or Office 2019 there’s little help available beyond Microsoft telling you ‘Something went wrong’. What looks like specific error message are general statements that don’t identify the problem. These troubles aren’t any surprise to experienced Microsoft Office users. Install or update of Office […]
While printing PowerPoint handouts for your audience with just the slides can be useful, sometimes you may want to give them your notes as well as the slides, which is where Notes Print comes in. Contrary to its name, Notes Print includes slides as well as your notes underneath them. To print the slides with […]
Consider switching to SumIFS, it’s much the same as the older Excel function, SumIf() but easier to expand as your needs change. It can add up values according to more than criteria like a name and date range. We’ve talked about SUMIF and how its parameter order is a little strange. SumIF has filter/criteria […]
There are two a simple ways to make a list of unique or non-duplicate entries from a longer list. Unlike the many automatic ‘unique’ options in Excel, these options work only once but it’s available in many Excel release, old and new. Advanced Filter One is hiding at Data | Sort & Filter | Advanced […]
Microsoft Word’s dictionary is updated more regularly, especially for Office 365 customers. A good example of that is the addition of Brexit related words. We typed into Word various words that the people of the UK are too familiar with, just to see what’s in the Microsoft dictionary. The same results in Word 365 for […]
The upcoming Rewrite feature in Word will offer alternative phrases or wording for your sentences. Rewrite is another cloud based feature so anything selected for Rewrite is sent to Microsoft. The feature is supposed to be in Office 365 for Windows Insiders build 1908 (11901.20018), English only but hasn’t appeared even in build 1909. No […]
A Word document and a floppy disk caught a serial killer back in 2010. There are current lessons for anyone wanting to keep their personal or business data confidential. Known as the ‘BTK killer’, he murdered 10 people in Kansas between 1974 and 1991. The murderer was finally caught in 2004. He liked sending notes […]
Making a list of unique or not duplicated names from a longer Excel list with duplicates is possible in three ways that update automatically. One is headspinningly hard and one has some minor quibbles. The best option is a lot easier but not yet available to everyone. We’re talking here about making a list of […]
Handout Master lets you customize your presentation handouts more than the basics; changing the position and formatting of headers/footers, adding a background color or gradient. Maybe you can help uncover some unexplained mysteries of Handout Master, see below? Our Quick PowerPoint Handouts article showed you how to go to File | Print to print out […]
There are many ways to make a paper/PDF version of a PowerPoint slide deck, this is the quick ‘only a few clicks’ option. There are other choices that we’ll cover in upcoming articles. PowerPoint has some ‘Handouts’ features but they aren’t all in the same place and some aren’t even called ‘Handouts’! Why handouts? It’s […]
The venerable SUM() function in Excel is simple, really too simple. It just adds up a range of cells with no way to filter or limit what’s included. SumIF selects what to add-up from a longer list. SumIf sometimes confuses people because they, understandably, expect the range to be SUMmed to come first followed by […]
Microsoft and some contractors listen to Skype calls but that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. And Microsoft’s response was quite typical – they refuse to stop. Microsoft can and does let it’s ‘associates’ listen and read from Office documents and voice data. Word, PowerPoint and Outlook users are also likely spied upon. The choice […]
A supposedly ‘new’ feature in PowerPoint 365 for Windows is already in regular PowerPoint? The latest Insiders version of Office 365 for Windows has no truly new features. The only ‘new’ feature is something that’s already in Office 365. As we looked down the list of changes in version 1909 build 16.0.12013.20000 it was all […]
The long-standing Ursnif trojan is back in a new form to infect computers and steal personal information, all via a Microsoft Word document. To begin, we’ll repeat a warning we’ve been making for years … No .doc files DO NOT open .doc files from any source (not .xls or .ppt either). Most infected and dangerous […]
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: […]
An interesting forum thread suggests a problem between the ISP, Bell Fibre, and Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business. Several users report a severe slowdown in connections between their computers and OneDrive for Business. Speeds are capped around 600 kbps instead of the 500-800 MB/s. NOT standard OneDrive for Office 365 Home/Personal, just the business OneDrive part […]
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 […]
A lot of press reports about Office 2019 give the impression that the single-payment, non-subscription version of Microsoft Office is about to disappear off retail shelves. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and calm down … Office 2019 isn’t dead or even on life-support though Microsoft would love to stop selling it. It all […]
When the Stock and Geography data types disappear from the Data ribbon in Excel here’s how to fix and restore Linked Data Types. The Data ribbon is missing the entire ‘Data Types’ section. We’ve had several reports from Office-Watch.com readers who start Excel 365 and find that their Stock and Geography linked data worksheets won’t […]
At last! After months of delay, Microsoft has released product icons for Access, Project and Visio. Yawn, ho hum. We know Microsoft customers have been desperate to see these graphics (not). Back in March we first saw the Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint graphics. As before, when it comes to changed Office icons; if we […]
The desperately needed feature is coming to Microsoft Office … the ability to search for Icons. Microsoft added Icons to Office 365 and even more a few months ago … 300 more icons in Office, but which ones and where? The problem has always been finding the right icons from the long list. There are […]
Office now has sensitivity options to label Word, Excel, PowerPoint docs plus emails. Not ‘touch-feely’ sensitivity like ‘loving’ or ‘compassionate’ but instead corporate, privacy labels. It’s a new feature for Office 365 corporate hosted E3 or E5 accounts and the admins have enabled Sensitivity options. Sensitivity appears on the Home tab in Word, Excel, PowerPoint […]
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 […]
