All about Microsoft Office for Apple Mac. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook on macOS, Microsoft 365 for Mac, Office 2021 for Mac and earlier versions.
What do fonts say to each other?
Ever wondered what fonts say to each other. How newcomer Aptos treats Calibri? How Dingbats dance and what Comic Sans wears? Elle Cordova answers these and other important typographical questions in two Instagram videos. Fonts Hanging Out part 1 https://www.instagram.com/p/C2cZBIAr24m/ Fonts Hanging Out part 2 https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2sxcszyLnN/ Enjoy … Excel – switch away from Aptos fontsMicrosoft […]
A good part of Designer has been Erased!
A good part of Designer has been deleted with no notice or explanation. Erase is missing with only a ‘dumb’ alternative. The feature is Erase it let you select and remove parts of an image and automatically fill the area with surrounding content. The entire ‘Erase’ option has disappeared for no reason that Microsoft cares […]
A Loop feature that should be in all Office apps
Microsoft Loop has a new feature that should be added to Word and PowerPoint, see what text has been written by Copilot AI instead of a human. Loop is adding a tag (‘floatie’) which shows who wrote some text and includes ‘Copilot’ as one of those authors. That’s a very useful piece of information especially […]
Last minute Heart icons for Valentine’s Day
Need a heart symbol or image for your Valentine’s Day message, email, slide or card? Microsoft Office Icons have many choices available including Icons. Many of the stock or supplied resources in Office have passionate ‘heart’ symbols. As you’ll see, there are some anatomically correct icons among the romantic ones, just ignore them <g>. Icons […]
Copilot’s Legal Trap or what you’re giving to Microsoft
Just by using Copilot you’re giving Microsoft free access to anything you do or get from their AI system. It’s a legal trap that everyone needs to keep in mind. We found this buried in the Copilot Terms and Conditions (T&C’s) starting on the Bing web site https://www.bing.com/new/termsofuse (strange place for it to hide). Microsoft’s […]
Essential ways to strengthen your Microsoft account
Most readers of Office Watch will have a Microsoft account but is it as secure as it should be? Two-step authentication is becoming essential for the key Microsoft account. If you have Microsoft 365, OneDrive, Outlook.com, Windows 11/10/8.1/8, Windows Phone or (likely) Skype then you’ll have a Microsoft account. It’s the single login for all […]
How Office improves without customers even noticing
While a lot of Word, Excel and PowerPoint might appear to be the same for decades, there’s a lot of work happening ‘under the hood’ to keep Office working. Gilad Oren at Microsoft has written an interesting piece on how the whole real-time collaboration feature in Microsoft Office has been changed to make it faster […]
Make Images with Google Bard
For yet another way to make AI images, perhaps with a different look, you can now try Google Bard. Bard is Google’s AI helper, now available in ‘most countries’ (Google’s wording) but only in English for the moment. It does all the things we’ve come to expect from a broad AI service, similar to Copilot. […]
No Data? Excel’s Autofill is not the answer
Two economics professors have been caught using Excel’s Autofill feature to fill in the blanks to complete a published academic paper. A study on green innovations and patents in 27 countries by two professors has come under scrutiny by a student as reported, by Retraction Watch. The paper was said to use “balanced panel data” which is […]
Five ways (and more) to type Accent characters in Word and Outlook
More than five ways to type characters with accent, grave, circumflex, tilde, umlaut, dieresis or cedilla in Microsoft Word and Outlook when they aren’t on the keyboard such as á ã à ä Ç ç ē é ê è ë â ê î ô û and many more. Typing accented letters can be a chore […]
Easily compare a series of values with ChiTest() Excel
Compare one set of numbers with another list of values using ChiTest() in Excel. It compares two sets of numbers and gives a single number to show how different the sets are. ChiTest() or ChiSq.Test() sounds like a complex formula that only expert statisticians can understand – not at all! While the math behind ChiTest() […]
Microsoft Word – switch away from Aptos fonts
There are at least two ways to switch away from the new Aptos fonts in Microsoft Word and back to the old Calibri fonts or something else. Microsoft has forced a change to Aptos as the new default font in Word but that change doesn’t suit everyone. In particular, Aptos doesn’t make much (or any) […]
Outlook – change away from Aptos font
Switch from the new Aptos default font in Outlook to another font that you prefer and is has better readability in Outlook desktop (Windows or Mac) and Outlook (new). Personally I’ve tried to like Aptos fonts but after a few months they still offend my eyes, especially in emails. It’s too ‘blocky’ and hard to […]
What’s the deal with Microsoft’s Copilot Copyright Commitment
Microsoft loves to boast about their “Copilot Copyright Commitment” but what does it really mean and how much protection do customers really get? There’s a concern that AI generated content might be subject to intellectual property (IP) law suits. Perhaps because an AI image or text is too similar to copyrighted content. The New York […]
Wordpad is ending, what are your alternatives?
Microsoft is ending Wordpad on Windows 11 … not right away but sometime soon. Here are your options for a replacement. WordPad has been in Windows since 1995 as a basic word-processor with Word document compatibility. It was never much loved but still has an important place. It’s the only way to view or edit […]
Is AutoSave really the ‘greatest feature of all time’?
According to Microsoft, AutoSave is the ‘greatest feature of all time’. That’s ‘over the top’ even for Microsoft and it only highlights the self-serving limitations of the current Autosave feature in Office. “Autosave is the greatest feature of all time and you can use it across your M365 apps. That’s all.” The ‘X’ (formerly Tweet) […]
