Microsoft 365 – the subscription / annual fee plan for Microsoft Office on Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android.
Includes Word 365, Excel 365, PowerPoint 365, Outlook 365 and many other ‘365’ programs, apps and services.
Microsoft Office users can go legal for less
Microsoft is offering a discount price on Microsoft 365 to people with pirated or illegal Microsoft Office. As usual with Microsoft, there are ‘gotchas’ and unknowns with their special offer. People using illegal or pirated Microsoft Office might be seeing a message like this in their Office apps. The message is: Get up to 50% […]
Action Pen is editing by drawing in Microsoft Word
The Ink Editor button in Word 365 has gone, replaced with the ‘Action Pen’ on the Draw tab in Word 365. Some of the ink gestures have quietly changed since the original release of the Action Pen. The ‘Action Pen’ is now on right-side of the Draw tab | Drawing Tools. The Word 365 for […]
Add fancy title bar pattern to your Office Background
Office Background are the patterns at top right of the title bar in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office apps. Here’s the ‘Underwater’ and ‘Doodle circles’ backgrounds, just two of the 14 you can choose from. Office Backgrounds are fairly pointless decoration. They were added to Office 2013 to almost universal apathy outside the Microsoft Hype Bubble™. There is one minor benefit of the pattern […]
Great Word style renaming and alias tricks
Rename Word styles or give them alternative names/aliases. Sometimes you’ve got no choice but to make an alias because the original style name is fixed. Any style can have an alternative name which appears in the Style Gallery. That’s a useful trick because there’s limited space for the style name on the Gallery and the […]
All 14 separate Style lists and settings in Word
Microsoft Word, since 2007, has developed a confusing mish-mash of lists, galleries and dialog boxes to view, select and manage styles. We’ve received a few questions about finding style options so this Office-Watch.com article will try to make sense of all fourteen places. It’s a guided tour to the various Style setup, configuration and management […]
Who and how to get the new look Office for Windows
The gradual rollout of the new look Office for Windows (Microsoft 365 and Office 2021) continues. More users, but not all, can now try the revamped Office interface. We’ve had a lot of feedback from Office Watchers about the new look. Some approve, others definitely don’t. Some users are eager to try the new look […]
Mica with Microsoft Office, how to get it & should you care?
Office 365 for Windows is getting the Mica effect in a coming release for Windows 11 users. What is Mica? How will affect Microsoft Office users? We’ll explain Mica ‘material’ (Microsoft’s pretentious noun), show you what it does and how (little) it matters to Office users. Also how to get it (short answer: wait). Microsoft […]
Nasty Excel XLL files are spreading like crazy
A lesser known Excel file, the .XLL, is being used to spread password stealing malware across the Internet by email and online contact forms. As reported by Bleeping Computer, emails and online forms are getting spammed with links to fake and malicious web sites which entice people to download the malware. The malware is contained […]
Quick Access Toolbar nasty surprises in the new look Office
The Office 365 / 2021 for Windows “new look” is mostly about the Quick Access Toolbar with some nasty surprises and confusion, especially for novices. Let’s dig into the detail of the QAT changes, “fix” it to suit you and how the changes aren’t finished yet and not fully thought through. By default, there’s NO […]
Approximately Equal To ≅ symbol in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
Type the Approximately Equal To ≅ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Approximately Equal To ≅ symbol with a curvy line above the usual = symbol is commonly used within Mathematics to refer to approximate equality between two values, congruence or isomorphism. Not to […]
About Teams Essentials, the new way to buy Teams
Now there’s a new and different way to get paid Teams called Teams Essentials. Teams Essentials is a standalone Teams offering, not bundled into any other Microsoft 365 plan. That’s what makes it different from other ways to get a paid version of Teams. It costs US$48 a year per user. Microsoft promotes it as […]
Word: get a list of styles in a document
Word lets us down when it comes to viewing a document’s styles and how they link together. The only way to see a detailed list of styles is to Print them! In the print pane, choose the drop-down list under Print All Pages and scroll down until you see the little known ‘Styles’ option. (Tip: […]
Thunderbirds are go, get the look in Word and Office
Thunderbirds are go! They live on in Microsoft Office, ready to serve as a retro look in your Word documents or PowerPoint slides. The passing of Gerry Anderson was sad news. Mr Anderson enthralled millions of kids (and more than a few adults) with his groundbreaking shows like Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, UFO and, […]
AutoComplete in Outlook – all you need to know
Outlook’s AutoComplete seems simple and useful. It’s certainly useful but it’s hardly simple and occasionally it’s been downright dangerous or embarrassing. AutoComplete makes it too easy to send an email to the wrong address. We’ll look at AutoComplete, how it works, the pitfalls and the few settings available. First we’ll cover the basics (that you […]
How to make a smaller email or document
Here’s some suggestions for making a Word, Excel or Powerpoint document smaller. Also useful for Outlook emails. We’ve had readers occasionally asking how they can ‘shrink’ a document until it’s under some arbitrary size limit. Why even worry about the file size of documents? Much of the time, the file size isn’t a concern. Modern […]
Outlook calendar tricks & traps adding from links and .ics
There are web links or .ics files that let you add an appointment direct to your Outlook calendar without retyping. Airlines and some theater and concert events offer them at the end of online booking. They are simple to use but there’s also tricks to make them even better. We’ll look at some of the […]
