The BBC has an interesting piece on the effect of AutoCorrect and word suggestions for quicker typing. I dunno about ‘boring’ but AutoCorrect in Office does have a downside – it makes you and your typing fingers stupid. If you type stupdi into Word it will fix it to stupid as soon as you […]
In our recent article about simple Excel PivotTables we made a passing reference to the Data | Filter command for lists. Here’s how it works. Take any Excel worksheet that has lists with headings on the top row. Go to the Data tab and click the Filter button. This adds extra pull-down menus to each […]
Which version of alphabetical order does Microsoft Word use? I thought that alphabetical order was, well, alphabetical order. That’s what I was taught at school and apparently I was taught wrong. There are at least three ways, two used by dictionaries, another by Microsoft and that’s for English alone! Reading Sue Butler’s delightful book ‘The Aitch […]
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. […]
The Insert | Symbol feature in Office is overdue for an overhaul. Our venture into the new Unicode symbols and symbol fonts highlighted how much work Microsoft needs to do on this part of Office. Insert | Symbol has changed for a long time and many versions of Office. Here’s Insert | Symbol in Word […]
A Windows feature that’s very useful for Microsoft Office users. Character Map has been in Windows for as long as we’d like to remember and it’s done right. Over the years, the ‘softies who’ve worked on it have given some thought to the needs of people trying to find and preview characters. You’ll find Character […]
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 […]
How can you get the new Unicode symbols in Office documents? There’s plenty of new symbols included in the Unicode 7.0 standard, here’s how to get them into your Office documents. Most fonts do NOT have all the Unicode characters, after all, there are over 133,000 of them. There are far too many characters so […]
Microsoft makes a ‘one stop’ page for the latest Office update details. Figuring out what are the latest updates for Microsoft Office isn’t easy which is why we’re delighted to see Update center for Office, Office servers, and related products from Microsoft. It’s been a long time coming but as Sam Seaborn once said ” Let’s […]
How Word can warn you about the ‘Oxford’ or serial comma’? The Oxford comma is one of those grammatical things that most people don’t worry about but can get others soooo excited. It’s a question of whether to add a comma at the end of a list for example: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook OR […]
Access Archon Column #229 – Fixing Normalization Errors Access versions: 2002-2013 Level: Intermediate Introduction Sometimes when you take over an Access database created by an amateur (or at least, someone with a minimal understanding of normalization), you will find data such as employee names stored in a Text field in the Orders table. If the […]
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 […]
Why RE and FW are the best options for email subjects When you reply or forward a message your email program will add a prefix to the subject line. The question is – do you choose the standard ‘English’ prefixes RE: and FW: or your local equivalents? There’s plenty of alternatives to RE and FW […]
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 […]
Can you use the free Getty images in your PowerPoint presentations? Getty Images, has announced that 35 million of their images are now available free. Does that mean you can use them in your PowerPoint presentations or Word documents? Sadly, no Getty Images is now allowing free embedding to some images in their vast collection. […]
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, […]
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 […]
Farewell, Mike Parker who brought Helvetica to the mainstream but alas not to Microsoft Windows or Office for Windows. Mike Parker isn’t a household name but the chances are the every household has an example of Helvetica, the font he helped make popular. When he worked for Mergenthaler Linotype Co., Mr Parker added many fonts, […]
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 […]
How to update Microsoft Office with the new name, OneDrive, and remove the old SkyDrive name. Recent versions of Office have the name SkyDrive (with the extra capital letter) in the supplied dictionary. However the new OneDrive name hasn’t made it to the Office dictionary yet. Here’s what you’ll see in a default Word 2013 […]
How to find your pictures to insert into an Office document. Even a simple thing like adding a picture to an Office document or email has subtleties and annoyances. When you choose Insert | Picture in recent versions of Office, it opens, by default, in the Picture Library. That seems sensible, at least to Microsoft. […]
How to get a message when certain RSS feeds are updated As you probably know, it’s possible to get an alert or an action when certain email messages arrive into Outlook using the Rules feature. Office-Watch.com shows how to do the same thing for an RSS feed. It will let you filter down a larger […]
Get Outlook to show changes in Dropbox folders Dropbox has one excellent feature, the ‘Events’ view that lists files added, deleted or modified. You can use that feature to get custom Outlook alerts when certain things happen to your Dropbox account, like when a file is added to a shared folder. That list can be […]
2014 looks like the year of long movie titles with colons – here’s how to save yourself some typing. More and more movies are sequels and that means longer and longer movie titles. Most have colons because the studios don’t trust us to figure out that a movie is a sequel. Coming in 2014 we […]
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 number lines and paragraphs in Word. When you’re discussing a speech or other document ‘in progress’ you might want to number the lines or paragraphs for easy reference “Please change paragraphs 6, 7, 21 and 27”. Sure, these days there’s a lot of linking and online collaboration but there’s also a place for […]
Readers suggest some more uses for the Word/Office exclusion dictionary. As Office-Watch.com explained recently, the Office Exclusion dictionary can be used to take words out of the main dictionary. In other words, to ensure a word gets the red squiggly line. We had some suggestions for using the exclusion dictionary and our readers, bless you, […]
What wins in a conflict between custom and exclusion dictionaries? In Office-Watch.com we’ve talked about the custom dictionary (which lets you add words to the Office dictionary) and the exclusion dictionary (which removes words that would otherwise be considered OK. But what happens if a word is in both the custom and exclusion dictionary? That […]
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 […]
Examine US public health data in Excel. One of the great things about the recent Internet is the availability of previously hidden data. Large blocks of information have been collected, checked and published online. Combine that with a tool like Excel and you can do your own analysis! Here’s just one example of what’s available […]
An example of web scraping from BestBuy.com into Excel. We’ve already talked about getting prices from the Amazon.com web site into Excel with automatic updates. Now let’s look at how to do it for BestBuy.com prices.Excel has had a method of web scraping for many versions you can find it at Data | Get External […]
How to check Amazon product prices automatically in Excel. With Black Friday coming in the USA, it’s time to carefully check prices and look out for bargains. Ideally get those prices automatically and put them into Excel for comparison. To do that for Amazon means ‘scraping’ or trying to grab prices from a web page. […]
Where are Outlook email signatures stored and how to copy them to another computer There’s no import/export option for Outlook email signatures so how can you move them to another computer? Office-Watch.com has an introduction to Outlook Signatures . You might think there would be a simple way to move signatures around, but no, you […]
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 […]
The Vatican’s latest mistake can be blamed on Microsoft … if you try hard enough. A good laugh can be had with this news from the Vatican: “A commemorative coins issued by the Vatican has been withdrawn because it spells the word ‘Jesus’ incorrectly”. You’d think that knowing how to spell the name of the […]
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 […]
A guard against stuck Kiosk presentations in PowerPoint. One problem with PowerPoint’s Kiosk mode is a slide that won’t advance as you expect. Your lovely presentation gets stuck on a single slide. Some versions of PowerPoint have inbuilt protection against that. After 5 minutes of no activity in a kiosk presentation, Powerpoint intervenes to restart […]
Evernote for Android now comes with the ability to edit Office documents. Our favorite notemaking system, Evernote, now has the ability to edit Office documents within their Android version. Yes – we very much prefer Evernote over Office Onenote. Evernote runs very well, syncs seamlessly and completely across all popular platforms and devices. Evernote has […]
A fast way to add many photos to a presentation. Since at least PowerPoint 2003, there’s been a Photo Album option in PowerPoint. It’s a fast way to add many photos to a presentation. The Photo Album creates a series of slides from images you choose. Once the slides are created, you can adjust those […]
