More free Copilot tricks for Microsoft Office users
You don’t need to pay for Microsoft’s AI service, Copilot, to get some of its benefits in Microsoft Office, especially Word, Outlook and Excel. Try converting text to a table or vice versa. The trick to grabbing text from an image. Along the way you’ll also discover some of the limits and problems with the […]
Change a picture to a custom color in Office
Don’t miss this often overlooked Office trick, changing the color of an image or graphic in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook. We did this in our article about inserting Prince’s ‘Love Symbol Number 2’ in Office documents. The image is available in various formats but always black, not purple. As usual, there’s more to color […]
Excel’s data from picture!
The nifty Excel ‘Data from Picture’ feature is in all Excel 365. It’ll convert a picture of text & numbers into a worksheet … almost. And there’s alternatives if you don’t have Microsoft 365. Data from Picture is already all versions of Excel 365 for Windows and Mac and Excel Mobile apps for iPhone, iPad […]
Insert the English flag into Word, Excel or PowerPoint
Add England’s national flag “St George’s Cross” into Office documents, Word, Excel or PowerPoint, then use some Office picture tools to enhance the image. Not to be confused with the British “Union Jack” flag, the English flag is a simple red cross on a white field. Many online searches for an ‘England’ or ‘English’ flag […]
All about “Please check your network connection and try again” errors
Many of us have seen the error message “Please check your network connection and try again” when the Internet is definitely available. What does this Office or OneDrive error message really mean and what can you do to fix it? This error message appears in Microsoft Office help and other places like OneDrive. “Sorry, something […]
Starting off with Regular Expressions in Excel
Now that Excel is getting proper Regular Expressions (Regex) here’s some resources to get you started. The upcoming Excel functions RegexTest(), RegexExtract() and RegexReplace() use a common type of regex (PCRE2) rather than some special Microsoft version. That’s important because each regex version has its own options and peculiarities. Using a common type of Regular […]
Using OpenDocument in Microsoft Office
OpenDocument is another set of file formats for word-processing, spreadsheets and presentations. It’s an international standard that’s supported by Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Office. OpenDocument vs Microsoft Office docs While most people use the modern Microsoft Office document formats (.docx .xlsx .pptx etc) there’s a competitive set of Office file formats to consider. The OpenDocument […]
Microsoft 365 gets better Open Document compatibility
Microsoft 365 is updating their OpenDocument format support to v1.4 which will improve compatibility with other software like LibreOffice. OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the International Standard for saving documents (ISO 26300 if you’re keeping score). It’s similar to the Microsoft Office formats in their basics of being XML based with ZIP compression. After initially joining […]
Python in Excel gets closer to public release
Python power in Excel 365 is getting closer to full public release. It’s now available for Microsoft 365 Current Channel (Preview), the last step before going out to all users. Python in Excel is possibly the most important improvement to Excel for a long time. All the power of Python libraries and code samples can […]
See the world’s top companies in Excel
In Excel 365 you can list the world’s top companies and their market capitalizations including the shortlived leader, NVIDIA. NVIDIA have a lock on the supply of AI related hardware and so their stock price has dramatically risen. ‘Dramatic’ is an understatement because NVIDIA briefly jumped over Microsoft and Apple to become the world’s largest […]
Join Tables with Excel Power Query
Excel’s PowerQuery has many clever tricks, one of them is merging and matching data from multiple tables into a single table. Combine, clean, and transform data from multiple sources into the single format you need; a table, PivotTable or PivotChart It’s a simple relational database with relations set to match up the rows in each […]
How to select more than one Office document to open
How to choose more than one Microsoft Office file or document to open at the same time. One of the frustrations about the ‘pane’ interface in Office for Windows is the failure to include all the features that customers were accustomed to from the standard File dialog boxes. Microsoft added new and useful features like […]
How to make a Gantt Chart in Excel
Gantt chart for project management or event scheduling are possible in Excel. Here’s the step-by-step help plus a complete sample worksheet for our subscribers. Gantt chart can be widely used in project management for visualizing project schedules. They break down a project or event into tasks or activities as horizontal bars on a timeline. Each […]
Avoid the traps when adding Excel info into a Word document
A table or chart in Excel can be put into a Word document in two different ways but there are traps that Microsoft doesn’t mention in their help. We’ll explain what’s happening and how to fix it. This looks like a standard Word table and it can be formatted like a table … but it’s […]
It’s official – Calibri beats Aptos in font poll
A recent poll commissioned by Microsoft confirms the widely held suspicion that people prefer the Calibri font over the new Aptos fonts pushed into Microsoft Office. This comes from a Twitter/X poll run by the Microsoft run @Microsoft365 account. The previous Office default font, Calibri, handily won the poll with 36.3% of the votes. We’ve […]
A quiet month of security fixes for Microsoft Office
Patch Tuesday for May 2024 is a quiet month for Microsoft Office with only four security fixes but one of them is rated ‘Critical’. Also a list of the latest build/version released for each version of Office. Only Excel has a ‘Remote Code Execution’ bug which affects all supported Excel for Windows releases. Sharepoint has […]
