All about Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Microsoft 365, Office 2021 and earlier versions.
Better ‘Not Allowed’ red circle/line symbol with text
Continuing our series on the ‘Not Allowed’ symbol, let’s make a versions with text instead of a graphic or icon. Check out our article on Make a ‘Stop’ circle / diagonal symbol in Word, Excel & PowerPoint about creating, resizing and coloring the basic shape. Text in circle Instead of the usual symbol, let’s add […]
Great text & image ‘Not Allowed’ red circle/line symbols
Continuing our series on the ‘Not Allowed’ symbol, let’s make a version with text and graphic or icon. Check out our article on Make a ‘Stop’ circle / diagonal symbol in Word, Excel & PowerPoint about creating, resizing and coloring the basic shape. Better ‘Not Allowed’ red circle/line symbol with text has the basics of […]
Office Lens leaves Microsoft Store but lives on!
As we mentioned back in October, Office Lens has been dropped from the Microsoft Store but it’s not the end of Lens, far from it. Microsoft announced that the cloud services backing Lens features would be disabled from 1 January 2021. Only Office Lens for Windows 10 and Windows Mobile are affected. Saved documents retained […]
Nice variations for Stop shape in Word, Excel & PowerPoint
There’s plenty of scope for variations on the basic Not Allowed symbol (red circle with diagonal) using the tools in Microsoft Office. See Make a ‘Stop’ circle / diagonal symbol in Word, Excel & PowerPoint for how to insert the basic ‘Not Allowed’ shape and change to suit your needs. Line Direction The line across […]
Office Watch most popular articles of 2020
Well, that’s been an ‘interesting’ year for all of us <sigh> . Here’s some of the articles that have been popular with our worldwide audience over 2020. Getting more from online video calls With the global lockdown, Office Watch switched roles for a while and added lots of advice for online video calls. We’ve been […]
India price of Microsoft 365 and other products going up
Microsoft India is raising the price of their commercial and online services from 1 February 2021. The news is out despite a pointless attempt at secrecy by the local subsidiary. As reported by DQChannels Commercial on-premises software goes up 11% Online services like Microsoft 365 hosting goes up 9% The price rises apply from 1 […]
Hurry! Save more than $20 on Microsoft 365 Family only until the end of 2020
NewEgg is offering a 15-month new or renewal of Microsoft 365 Family for just $75 saving about $45. There’s a special discount or promo code that we’ll tell you below. UPDATE The price has changed to $99 which is still a good deal on a 15-month Microsoft 365 Family. $99 is the official price for […]
Jazz up your presentations with a little mmhmm
If you like to jazz up your Zoom, Teams or other presentations, try out mmhmm . It looks like an interesting tool you might like to try out over the break. mmhmm lets you create an online presentation for live broadcast or recording with many effects combined. Here’s an example with slides/images in a box, […]
Pantone 2021 colors in your Word, Excel and PowerPoint
Pantone has announced not one but TWO ‘colors of the year’ for 2021 and, as usual, we’ll explain how to use those exact colors in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The colors of 2021 are … Illuminating and Ultimate Grey As usual what’s more amazing than the color is the description that goes with the choice. […]
Get your Holiday ‘sweaters’ for Teams, PowerPoint & more
Microsoft has released some ‘sweater’ backgrounds for Christmas, Hannukah or anytime of year. The PNG images are intended as backgrounds for Teams calls but can be used anywhere. A PowerPoint slide, Word background, Zoom call background or whatever. Adding Virtual Background or blurred video to TeamsAdd your own background image to a Teams call They […]
2020/2021 Academic calendar in Microsoft Word
The only specific 2020/2021 calendar template in Microsoft Word is an academic calendar from August 2020 to July 2021, here’s how to use it and make it better. In File | New search for ‘academic calendar’ there are a few options. We’re looking at ‘Academic year calendar’. A few notes before moving on. Ignore what […]
Office for Mac now supports M1 chips directly
Microsoft Office 365 and 2019 for Mac (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) now work directly on the new M1 chip. There are a few ‘gotchas’ but support for Apple Silicon is almost complete. Apple is moving away from Intel chips to their own ‘Apple Silicon’ hardware, starting with the M1 chip. As we’ve explained, Microsoft […]
Here’s how Gmail can now edit Office docs directly
Google’s Gmail can now directly edit Microsoft Office documents arriving in email attachments. It’s available to all Gmail users, free and paid accounts. It removes a lot of the hassles of exchanging Office documents with Gmail and Google Docs/Sheets/Slides users. No more document conversion hassles … at long last! Email Attachments edited directly Any incoming […]
Office 2010 patches! A nice December 2020 surprise from Microsoft
The usual security fixes for Microsoft Office this month include some unexpected patches for Office 2010 which is a pleasant surprise. Office 2010 is now officially out of support (since 13 October 2020) but still works fine. That’s supposed to mean there’s no more patches. Microsoft hasn’t explained their reason for these unexpected fixes but […]
Teams gets Insider options for early adopters
Microsoft Teams users are getting similar ‘Insider’ or ‘Beta’ options to trial new and changed features. It’s setup similar to the existing ‘Insider’ options for Windows and Office. The naming of Insider levels is similar, but not the same as for Office. Public Preview Channel – the last step before public release of changes to […]
How bad is the Microsoft 365 Productivity Score really?
The Microsoft 365 Productivity Score has been raising concerns about staff privacy and intrusion into their ‘Work from Home’ life. We’ll look at what Productivity Score actually does, how it’s changed after public pressure and why administrators might prefer to be intrusive. Productivity Score applies to Microsoft 365 hosted organizations. People or small businesses with […]
