All about Microsoft Office for Apple Mac. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook on macOS, Microsoft 365 for Mac, Office 2021 for Mac and earlier versions.
Listen to free audiobooks from Microsoft and Project Gutenberg
Microsoft and Project Gutenberg have joined to create thousands of audiobooks for free, using modern ‘text to speech’ technology that’s amazingly good. And we have some tips on how to create audiobooks with more variety in voice, accent and pace. Since 1971, Project Gutenberg has compiled a wide range of copyright free ebooks in many […]
Microsoft’s font substitution for Aptos really sucks
Microsoft’s alternatives for the new Aptos fonts range are very poor. In some cases, the substitutions make no sense at all. We’ve looked at what happens if a document with Aptos fonts is opened Office 2016 and earlier versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Aptos fonts are the new default for Microsoft 365 and […]
Join the ‘Office Insider’ Movement: Uncover the Surprising Benefits and lesser-known Risks!
Microsoft has many little ‘ads’ or suggestions that Microsoft Office 365 users (Windows or Mac) join the Microsoft 365 Insiders program (formerly Office Insiders). Is it safe to become an ‘Office Insider’ and why is Microsoft pushing it so much? Office Insiders is the testing program for new Office features. It’s what used to be […]
Microsoft fixes a big hassle with Excel’s great Lambda()
Microsoft has fixed the big hassle that comes with the otherwise excellent Lambda() feature in Excel 365 with the new Advanced Formula Environment. Office Watch has sung praises over the power that Lambda brought to Excel. It’s the ability to write custom functions within Excel but without VBA macros. Proper IDE for Excel formulas But […]
Copying images from Designer to Office documents
Unfortunately, copying an image made in Designer isn’t as simple as it should be. Here’s how to grab images made with Designer to use in your own Office documents. Don’t wait, start using Microsoft Designer now It’s easy to paste an image into Designer. Just copy the image from your app (like Word or PowerPoint), […]
Two Excel workarounds for automatic refresh and recalculation
There are two ways to make Excel automatically refresh data connections and recalculate a worksheet. These tricks are important with the Stock and Currency data type in Excel 365 but also other situations. Normally Excel will update itself when you change a cell value. These days there are situations where cells change value but Excel does […]
Gun 🔫 emoji in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
Insert the Water Pistol or Gun emoji 🔫 into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. AND how to make the ‘gun’ point to the right. Water Pistol 🔫 symbol is the only ‘gun’ style symbol in the emoji collection. It’s officially called ‘Water Pistol’ but searching […]
Ten ways to Reverse, Mirror or Flip Text in Microsoft Word
There are at least ten ways to ‘reverse’ ‘mirror’ or ‘flip’ text or images in a Word document. Horizontal, vertical, reversed, combined or any angle you like. When people say those terms they can mean different things so we’ll look at many options and how to do them. Also along a curve, but that’s a […]
PowerPoint linking to slides – now hidden but still there
Modern PowerPoint has made an ‘improvement’ to slide linking in PowerPoint which hides an important feature that’s been in PPT for years … linking to slides or web pages. Sometimes Microsoft gets so enthusiastic about some innovation they forget the basics that customers use on a daily basis. Insert | Link in PowerPoint is one […]
Farewell, Dennis Austin father of PowerPoint
Vale Dennis Austin, one of the original creators of PowerPoint has died at the age of 76. Back in 1987 Mr Austin and Robert Gaskins developed ‘Presenter’ for the Mac with some then unique features. A “direct manipulation interface”, what we now call WYSIWYG and take for granted in modern apps. The idea of working […]
Inspect without color in PowerPoint
Inspect without color is one of the more interesting and useful Accessibility tools in PowerPoint 365. It shows a slide in ‘black and white’ or ‘greyscale’ which is useful for more than helping color blind people, Inspect without Color can help improve the readability and design of any slide. Inspect without color is designed to […]
Was Microsoft 365 email down or not?
Microsoft 365’s mail service had troubles on Monday 4th for almost 24 hours. Or did it? Microsoft’s reporting of the incident has been inconsistent and had more than the usual self-serving blather. The Microsoft 365 email outage started on Monday 4th September about noon UTC (early morning in the US) and was described by Microsoft […]
Surprise! Office 2021 & Office 2019 has the all Aptos fonts
An undocumented surprise for Office 2021 and Office 2019 customers. The new Aptos fonts are automatically installed in Office 2021/Office 2019 even though Microsoft insists they are for Microsoft 365 only. However, there’s a crucial difference and strange anomaly between how Aptos fonts work in Office 2021/2019 vs Microsoft 365. According to Microsoft the Aptos […]
Fun Eyes 👀 symbol in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
Type the fun Eyes 👀 symbol into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Eyes 👀 symbol / emoji is a bit of fun for documents and PowerPoint slides. How Eyes 👀 looks in different fonts. Eyes is available in symbols fonts like Segoe UI Emoji and Segoe […]
Word’s symbol substitution, the good and the bad
A few years ago, Microsoft quietly added a little Word trickery to make it easier to Insert Symbols and not get the dreaded blank box or box with question mark. Here’s what Word does and how to workaround the, sometimes unhelpful, fix. Back in the olden days of Word 2007 and before, it was possible […]
Ballot Box with Ballot 🗳 emoji in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
Insert the Ballot Box with Ballot 🗳 symbol into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Ballot Box with Ballot 🗳 symbol can be used for any situation around voting or choice. For example to decorate this PowerPoint slide. How Ballot Box with Ballot 🗳 looks in […]
