All about Microsoft Office for Apple Mac. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook on macOS, Microsoft 365 for Mac, Office 2021 for Mac and earlier versions.
Why Office for Mac will never match Office for Windows.
Office for Mac users yearn for the day when their software matches ‘feature parity’ with Office for Windows. “Two platforms, One Office” is the dream. But is it possible or even likely? We’re inspired by this tweet from José Rodríguez-Suárez. If Microsoft responds, we can predict what they’ll say, because its the same line they’ve […]
Black Right Pointing Backhand Index 🖝 symbol in Office
insert the Black Right Pointing Backhand Index 🖝 into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Black Right Pointing Backhand Index 🖝 symbol can be used as a creative bullet symbol in lists or to point a direction on a sign. It’s the lesser known complement to […]
Playing one song after another in PowerPoint
To play a selection of different audio tracks, one after another is surprisingly clumsy even in Microsoft 365 PowerPoint. For example, you might like to have multiple tracks from a single album or several movements from a symphony. We expected that a simple Animation would work with the second music track set to play ‘after previous’ […]
Add music for the whole PowerPoint presentation
A common request is for music to play throughout a PowerPoint presentation. Handy for automatic and kiosk slideshows. That’s easy in PowerPoint these days. Insert the audio then look on the Playback tab. There’s a choice ‘Play in Background’ that does the job in one click. ‘Play in Background’ is just a way of turning on three existing settings: Play across […]
Almost Equal ≈ symbol in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
Almost Equal sign ≈ can be typed into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. The Almost Equal symbol ≈ is commonly used within Mathematics to indicate two values are roughly equal, but not exactly equal. Or use it whenever you need horizontal wavy lines! How Almost […]
Moving a row or column in Excel
How to move rows or columns up, down or across an Excel worksheet. There’s a quick way but it’s not obvious. Excel has a variety of different ways in doing this, but it’s important to know the fastest and easiest way, to save you a lot of time and hassle. In Word, moving paragraphs or […]
Google Font recommended pairing for Word and Office
Here’s how to choose good looking font pairs for your Word headings and body text or PowerPoint titles and text. We’ve shown you how to use Google Fonts in your Office documents. The Google Fonts site itself is little help but others have curated suggested pairings. Most of the suggested Google Font pairs are for […]
Using WOFF fonts in Microsoft Office
WOFF are a new-ish type of font that you might have seen mentions or downloads. Here’s how to use them in Microsoft Office; Word, Excel or PowerPoint. WOFF is Web Open Font Format designed to be compact and easy to download. WOFF is for web sites and mobile apps, not desktop programs like Office. Despite […]
NSFW or ‘naughty’ words aren’t in Microsoft Word – why?
There’s a strange, almost prudish, feature in the Microsoft Word spell checker aka Microsoft Editor that’s used in many of the company’s products. We’ll explain Microsoft seeming avoidance of ‘Naughty Bits’ and why it’s happening. Warning! This article is unusually explicit (NSFW) for Office Watch. If sexually explicit but standard words (not slang) might offend, […]
Up Down Arrow with Base ↨ symbol in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
Type Up Down Arrow with Base or underline ↨ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. How Up Down Arrow with Base ↨ looks in different fonts. Here’s some examples of how Up Down Arrow with Base / Underline ↨ looks in common Office fonts. Up […]
Replying to emails with colored backgrounds
Outlook replies can be a problem of invisible or hard to read text when the incoming email has a color background. We’ll explain the problem and how to fix your reply email. Messages with colored backgrounds might look OK to the sender but are a pain when you try to reply or forward. Most of […]
Outlook Email: why Format Background is called Page Color
If you want to change the background color on an email, Outlook’s option to do that has changed name and location. At least Windows users can change background color, Outlook for Mac users lost this option at few years ago! A color background can be nice in an email but care is necessary when replying […]
Typing both Tilde ~ ∼ symbols in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
How to insert either of the Tilde ~ ∼ symbols into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Tilde ∼ symbol is easy on some keyboards but for other keyboards, there’s no specific key for Tilde. The two Tilde symbols There are TWO tilde symbols in the […]
2001: A Space Odyssey and font kerning
We’ve looked at design and typography in 2001: A Space Odyssey and how to use the ‘2001’ look in Microsoft Office. Two readers asked about some curious kerning in our version of the title font.Maybe you’re not interested in the fine detail of the text in a fifty year old film? Fair enough. We’re going […]
Word tables for formatting magic
Use Word tables to do formatting tricks, make complex formats easily and solve Word formatting problems. There’s more to Word tables than just showing grids of information like this: Tables have all sorts of little tricks in them and let you do clever things in Word. Here’s a look at some of those tricks … […]
Grabbing audio only from online sources like YouTube
There are many ways to add common sound effects and background music to your PowerPoint videos. But what if you wanted audio from an online source like YouTube? You can copy from online to an audio file, save it to your computer then link into a slide deck. There are many tools to ‘rip’ a video with audio from YouTube that’s against the YouTube terms […]
