All about Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Microsoft 365, Office 2021 and earlier versions.
Excel has ‘real’ Regular Expression functions
Microsoft Excel 365 has built-in support for regular expressions (regex). The functions REGEXTEST, REGEXEXTRACT and REGEXREPLACE have powerful pattern matching, text extraction and replacement directly into spreadsheet formulas, eliminating the need for VBA, add-ins or convoluted workarounds. Even better, the functions use a widely understood form of Regex for text-manipulation capabilities, data cleaning, validation and […]
How to remove words from the Word dictionary
How and why to remove words from the main Microsoft Word dictionary. The Office Exclusion List ensures a red squiggly underline appears to warn you about an unwanted word. Sometimes the supplied Office dictionary has words you don’t want or you’d like a warning about. Here’s how to put the red squiggly line under words […]
New Outlook’s blocked images problem
The new Outlook for Windows has a safety setting that might stop you seeing images in emails and is another privacy breach by Microsoft to snoop at customers data. It’s buried deep in the software and turned on automatically. Deep in the Settings for Outlook (new) is a way to block images in messages when […]
All the Outlook solutions to ‘Spy Pixels’ in emails
The many different Microsoft Outlook versions have a way to block images linked to emails, that includes the so-called ‘spy pixels’ used by many companies. See ‘Spy Pixels’ email epidemic, the good and the bad You can choose to view pictures in an Outlook email by clicking a button at the top of each message. […]
2025 calculations in Excel
2025 is a special number, as various social media posts have pointed out. It can be calculated in some interesting ways like (20 + 25)2 = 2025. Naturally we had to convert these into Excel formulas. 2025 is 45 squared, in other words, a ”perfect square”. This last happened in the year1936 (442) and the […]
Microsoft 365 and Office in 2024
A lot happened for Microsoft Office customers in 2024, maybe you missed some of the highlights of the year? Many improvements to Excel with more to come, Word got a Paste upheaval, Publisher given the chop plus relentless pushing of new Outlook and Copilot. Outlook (new) The new, totally different, Outlook for Windows was prematurely […]
Important Microsoft 365 and Office events to watch in 2025
2025 promises to be ‘interesting’ for Microsoft 365 and Office users, not always in a good way. Here’s some of the predictable events. What I can guarantee in 2025 is more Copilot and Outlook (new) hype – some justified and some stretching credibility. Happy New Year! Office 2016 and Office 2019 end All Office 2016 […]
What Office License do you have? Retail, Volume or OEM
Here’s how to find out what type of Microsoft Office licence you have; Subscription, Retail, Volume or OEM and other hidden details of your Office license. For perpetual non-subscription versions of Office like Office 2024, Office 2021 or Office 2019, it’s important to know if your purchase is Retail/Volume or OEM. OEM licences are sold […]
Outlook (new) doesn’t mail merge with Word
Outlook (new) for Windows doesn’t support Mail Merge from Word. Just one of the many limitations of that software which is still a work in progress. We’ve heard from a few people that Microsoft has ‘dropped’ mail merge from Word but that’s not true. Word’s Mail Merge has been there for decades and isn’t going away. Outlook […]
Microsoft 365 money saving chance – if you act now
Microsoft 365 Family and Personal users have a chance to beat the price rise widely expected to come in 2025. You can lock in the current price for up to five years. Why the expected price increase for Microsoft 365? Microsoft has already raised the price of Microsoft 365 in some countries with the “Microsoft […]
Copilot key didn’t last long – not even a whole year
The dedicated Copilot key, announced at the start of 2024 is being partly phased out by the end of the same year! The Copilot key is on some new computers and is supposed to start the Copilot Windows app directly. At least that was the idea in January 2024 when the Copilot key was announced […]
Great Excel monthly calendar from just one cell
Modern Excel lets you make a whole monthly calendar from just one cell formula. We’ll explain how it’s done with a sample workbook for our supporters. At its simplest, Excel can make a single month like this from a formula in cell A6 which fills all the cells with the correct dates for that month. […]
Bad news for Microsoft 365 customers, Skype Credit has ended
Skype has stopped their Skype Credits service which is bad news for Microsoft 365 consumers who took advantage of their monthly 60 minutes of free calls to worldwide phones. Without notice, Microsoft stopped both Skype Credits and Skype Numbers (incoming phone numbers to your Skype account). What’s now appearing at https://secure.skype.com/en/credit/ is bad news. Savvy […]
Get free Skype minutes to save on overseas phone calls
With your annual Microsoft 365 Personal/Family subscription, you get a fantastic perk: an hour of free Skype calls each month to many overseas destinations, and yes, that sometimes includes mobile phones! 📞🌍 Skype isn’t just for computer-to-computer calls, it can also make free or cheap calls to regular landline or mobile phone numbers (known as POTS – […]
Everybody loves FRED, including Excel
Get Economic data or graphs from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) to load into your Excel workbooks or PowerPoint slides. From unemployment rates to the price of potato chips. FRED has 825,000 data sets for the USA and around the world. Tip: search FRED for your country (Canada, United Kingdom, Australia etc) to see what […]
Forced move to Outlook (new) in April 2026
Microsoft has put Microsoft 365 customers on notice that a forced move from Outlook (classic) to their new, very different, Outlook for Windows will start in April 2026 for a large block of customers. Outlook (new) for Windows is a very different app from the Outlook we’ve used for years. Microsoft has released it to […]
