All about Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Microsoft 365, Office 2021 and earlier versions.
More Microsoft ads inside Office apps
Microsoft has no shame about dropping ads into paid Microsoft Office apps when there’s a way for the company to make even a little more money. We’ve received reports of the Word 365 or PowerPoint 365 side-pane opening to show this ad because the customer has turned off automatic renewal (aka recurring billing). It’s bad […]
Pie or Pi emoji and more in Microsoft Office
Three Pie emoji 🥧 🍕🍰 in Microsoft Office (Windows or Mac) plus some Stock Images, one for ‘Pi’ and a lot more for ‘Pie’. Just part of our tongue-in-cheek Pi 𝜋 Day and Pie series of articles. Pi 𝜋 emoji There is no emoji for 𝜋 because it’s a text symbol (Unicode U+1D70B) To insert 𝜋 […]
Gregory Forrest “Woody” Leonhard (1951-2025)
We mourn the passing of Woody Leonhard, Office Watch co-founder, on 8 March 2025 at age 73. Back in 1996, Woody Leonhard and Peter Deegan teamed up to create “Woody’s Office Watch” (the precursor of Office Watch) as a way to spread accurate and detailed news about Microsoft Office. Woody created a unique tone for […]
Microsoft treats its customers like fools
Sometimes it hard to know if Microsoft is suffering from ‘cognitive dissonance’ or deliberately treat their customers like fools that will accept anything the company says, no matter how nonsensical it is. Captain Worf has some words of wisdom … More that a few Office Watch readers asked about this conflicting message from Microsoft. First […]
Why Word prefers corporate speak and how to change it
The reason Microsoft Word prefers ‘corporate speak’, phrases and language but there is more than one way to change Word’s grammar and style suggestions to suit you. Quite often on social media there are complaints about Microsoft Word’s grammar and style suggestions like this one. “MS Word suddenly dislikes the phrase “in order to.” Who […]
Would you like some Ramen with your font?
Check out this headline ‘ramen’ font that looks great and has a clever name – Times New Ramen. Seine Kongruangkit made a font from photos of noodles, nifty use of Photoshop and an undying love of Ramen noodles <g>. Times New Ramen – you have to love it, just for the name alone! The photorealistic […]
Group and Ungroup objects in Word, PowerPoint and Office
Shapes, images, and other items can be grouped together and often should be in Word, PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office apps. When you group shapes or objects, you can move, resize, rotate, flip them all at once, as if they were a single object. If you’ve ever had trouble moving something in Office but found […]
Cheap phone calls now Skype is ending
With Skype ending what are the choices for making cheap phone calls, especially saving money on international calls? The ability to link computers and devices to regular phone numbers is something that Skype excelled at. You could call phone numbers from a device or setup a phone number that people could call for you to […]
Outlook (new) gets “Mail Merge” sorta, kinda
The new Outlook for Windows has what Microsoft calls “Mail Merge” which could be useful but bear NO relation to the standard Word/Outlook “Mail Merge” to send many emails. In the new message Options for Outlook (new) is an enticing button “Start Mail Merge” but don’t get too excited. This button is not related to […]
How to use Word’s Master Documents safely
Don’t be scared of Master Documents – just very, very careful. Master Documents is useful and sometimes essential but it’s not the most stable or reliable part of Microsoft Word. What is a Master Document? In Microsoft Word, a Master Document is a Word document which has links to other documents – called sub-documents. Each […]
Skype is dumped by Microsoft
Microsoft is dumping most of their Skype service in May 2025, ending a very useful option for people around the world, especially who use a regular phone for communication. Here’s the ending timeline, an important extension for Microsoft 365 customers and alternatives (official and others). Skype has been around since 2003 and was bought by […]
Image privacy breach still in Microsoft Office
Back in 2015 we were amazed and dismayed to discover a privacy gap in Microsoft Office. Seven years later Microsoft has done nothing to fix or warn customers about. The problem is with images inserted into Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). The image ‘meta-data’ including GPS coordinates are retained with the inserted image. Anyone getting […]
Apple blocks their best security feature in the UK
Advanced Data Protection, the best security option for Apple iCloud is now blocked for UK customers. A real blow to individual privacy and citizens’ rights but there are options for our British friends to keep their files safe. Advanced Data Protection is Apple’s option to fully encrypt data saved on their iCloud storage. An option […]
“Free” Office for Windows is being trialed
Microsoft is testing a free version of Office for Windows with limited features, an important requirement and ads to ‘pay’ for the software. It’s three Microsoft 365 for Windows apps but with restrictions on what it can do and where documents are saved. If you download from this page at Microsoft.com and install using a […]
Master Documents with OneDrive
Is there a way to use Microsoft Word’s “Master Document” feature with OneDrive? No, but only because Microsoft won’t fix it. Master Documents in Word won’t work on OneDrive. You might think that after all of Microsoft’s efforts to get customers using their cloud storage, the company would make sure one of their core products […]
Outlook PST files and OneDrive
Why does moving Documents to OneDrive (a so-called “Backup”) stop Outlook from working with PST files and what can be done to fix it? It’s a bug in Outlook (classic) but easily fixed. This is a long-standing bug in Outlook (classic) which Microsoft shows no interest in acknowledging, let alone fixing. The fix is simple […]
