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.
Force Microsoft Office 365 to half-yearly feature updates
There is a way to force the Microsoft 365 Office apps to half-yearly feature updates instead of the usual monthly changes. Microsoft Office 365 for consumers and small businesses (Personal, Family and other plans) automatically updates each month with new and changed features. Some are minor but others are big and important. That’s OK for […]
Make simple bar charts with Conditional Formatting
Excel can make bar charts in-cell without bothering with the full Chart system. Despite what you might have seen, there’s plenty of options in Excel Data Bars. The usual example of Excel Data Bars has the colored bar in the same cell as the value. In this article we’ll show how it’s possible to have […]
Check your Microsoft account recovery options … now before it’s too late
It’s not enough to setup two-factor security for your Microsoft account. Make sure your recovery settings are checked and up to date. Do it now before it’s too late. Today we’re helping someone trying to login to their Microsoft account after losing their password. Many, many hours of frustration and worry that could have been […]
Investigating the Word language bug
Here’s how Office Watch reader, Erik and we drilled down into Windows and Word to narrow down the source of the Word language bug. Erik’s tests are with Office 365 on Windows 11 Pro 23H2 but the same behavior has been reported by others in many versions of Word and Windows. Office Watch had a […]
Inside the Language choice bug in Word
Sometimes Word will switch to another language despite all the settings saying otherwise. With the help of an Office Watch reader, we’ve dug into the details to find what might cause the bug in Word and suggest some possible solutions. Word and Office should obey the default language setup in Office but, as some people […]
How to correctly spell Brontë in Microsoft Word with the diaresis
An 85-year-old blunder has just been fixed at Westminster Abbey to change the spelling to Brontë with the important diaresis. Here’s how to type an ë in Word and other matters arising. Here’s how the memorial to the Brontë sisters looked in Poets Corner until a few days ago. For 85 years this memorial, seen […]
Audio tricks and traps in PowerPoint
There are plenty of audio and music options available in PowerPoint if you want to give your audience a break from your voice. We’ll go beyond the simple ‘adding music’ help to give some practical advice for audio in presentations: You will find the audio basics at Insert | Media | Audio Choose a music/audio file […]
Add genuine BBC Sound Effects to PowerPoint
The BBC has a great collection of over 16,000 sound effects that you can add to your PowerPoint presentations. Use them as a trigger sound for a click on a presentation, as a novel background noise or even an alert sound on your computer or smartphone. Sound Effects Galore Exploring the 16,000 sound effects available […]
Limited-time offer: Free Python in Excel classes
While it lasts, check out some free classes about Python in Excel for better data analysis, DataFrames, charts & visualizations and machine learning. We’re a big fan of Python in Excel and these lessons should help those of us who haven’t yet caught the Python bug. Advance Your Python in Excel Skills, will be available […]
Python in Excel is now available to ‘all’
Excel 365 now has Python features included for all business and enterprise customers with a Microsoft 365 software licence Python is a powerful programming language with many great libraries of tools for analysis and charting. It’s a massive extension to Excel that we’ve already raved about. Python Editor for Excel is out and essential Excel […]
Make a great Word document banner – free
Add something special to the start of your Word document with a banner image with text. We’ll explain how to do that with free tools like Copilot or Designer. We were inspired by a Microsoft promotion which wrongly said that a Microsoft 365 subscription with Copilot Pro is required, when really neither of those things […]
Why AI is not as great as the hype
All you need is a ‘strawberry’ to see both ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot gets simple things wrong. Or ask which is larger of two numbers. Modern AI systems aren’t as great as the hype and why you definitely need to check anything Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Meta etc tells you. Ask an AI system […]
Strange spam that Microsoft isn’t stopping
No spam/junk email filter is perfect but it’s hard to understand how some recent messages have been missed by Microsoft’s inhouse security systems. Here’s two peculiar examples to watch out for. A prank email or a failed scam? An email is sent out to many people that seems to have hidden CC list with this […]
Copilot Wave 2 – watch out for the fine-print
A new collection of Copilot features have been released under the banner “Wave 2” with inclusions for Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Word and Teams. Don’t get too excited because there’s ‘fine print’ that limits who can catch this wave. Before we explain a little of what’s in the new set of Copilot features, let’s look at […]
All about the basics of Styles in Word
Here’s the basics of Styles in Word for paragraph, character or both (Linked) plus Tables and Lists. I know talking about styles in Word makes eyes glaze over but they are a really useful part of Word (plus Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook). Today I watched an ‘experienced’ Word user reformatting a document. He laboriously worked […]
Excel – why do the columns have numbers not letters?
What to do if Excel’s columns have numbers across the top instead of letters. There’s a simple setting to switch between two different ways of labelling cells. You open an Excel workbook and the column headings look all wrong – instead of letters (A, B C …) there are numbers. There are numbers for both […]
