All about Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Microsoft 365, Office 2021 and earlier versions.
Recycling – good. Paper shredding – good. Together – not so good.
Paper shredding isn’t always welcome as recycled paper. Turns out there are hidden complexities even to just protecting your privacy and reducing waste. Wirecutter at The New York Times surprised us by explaining how putting shredded paper in a recycling bin can create all sorts of trouble. Shredded paper can cause problems at recycling facilities, […]
Microsoft 365 instant account switching
Quickly switch accounts while using Microsoft Office 365, Office 2019 and Office 2021 for Windows and even have different logins in separate programs. Many people wear different ‘hats’ while using Office. There’s a Work ‘hat’ or ‘hats’ with more than one job. Plus your personal or home role. Sometimes even more hats/roles like a volunteer […]
Faster Office File management on the fly
The File Open and Save dialog boxes in Office have many not-obvious features which let you do a lot of file management and housekeeping on the spot. You try to save a document and realize you need a new sub-folder. Or open a document and want to move it to a different folder. Or just […]
Smaller images make smaller documents in Word and Office
Pictures in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook can make the file sizes at lot larger than you expect. Here’s how to make images smaller (in file size) for Office documents without changing the look of the document, slide etc. The images in a document are what take up a lot of space in most documents. […]
Microsoft (again) announces 365 Basic plan extras
Microsoft has announced ‘extras’ for Microsoft 365 Basic but we can’t see anything new that wasn’t promised over a year ago and delivered six months ago. It’s a just a simple PR stunt that worked. The ‘Microsoft 365 Basic’ plan has just 100GB of OneDrive storage plus a 50GB Outlook.com mailbox for US$19.99 a year […]
Paper Sizing tricks in Microsoft Word
The world can be divided in many ways — how about by paper sizes? Letter/Legal/US sizes vs A4/Metric. Microsoft Word makes it easy to cope with both even with different paper sizes in one document. There’s a very handy way to rescale between Letter <> A4 for printing. Amazing Maps on X/Twitter shows the two […]
Coin 🪙 emoji in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
How to insert the Coin 🪙 symbol or emoji into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. How Coin 🪙 looks in different fonts Only Segoe UI Emoji font has the coin symbol in standard Windows. Coin 🪙 codes These are the important code numbers or values […]
Why are Teams and Office divorcing?
Teams app is being forced out of the Microsoft Office bundle. It’s a compulsory divorce with a side-benefit for anyone who doesn’t use Teams or doesn’t use it often. Microsoft has now decided (under duress) to stop selling their Teams app as part of Microsoft Office / Microsoft 365 bundles throughout the world. That’s an […]
Pivotby – Excel’s new faster PivotTables
Pivotby() is a new and easy way to make PivotTables in Excel. It’s one of two new ‘aggregation functions’ but we prefer to call them fast summary powers. We’ll dig into the detail of what PivotBy() can do. Excel has been able to group or combine data for many years but now all you need […]
More Excel on the web improvements
More common Excel desktop features are being added to the browser based version too. Drag and Drop pasting, Autofill, right-click for more Paste options and also export to text file (CSV) format. All these features will be familiar to Excel desktop (Windows/Mac) users and work in much the same way. Drag and Drop Columns and […]
Easter images and icons in Microsoft Office
Drop in some Easter flavor to your documents, slides or emails from right inside Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel. Either religious (Ascension, Crucifix etc) or secular (eggs, chocolate, bunnies) images and graphics are available. Modern Office, especially Microsoft 365 have stock images and icons from a large collection compiled by Microsoft. Stock Images, Icons and […]
Credit Card 💳 symbol in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
There’s more than one Credit Card 💳 image available in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. How Credit Card 💳 looks in different fonts. Only two standard Windows fonts have the credit card symbol; Segoe UI Emoji and Segoe UI Symbol. The Apple device version is […]
Yes, there will be a new version of Microsoft Office
Here’s what Microsoft has confirmed for the new version of Office. Strictly speaking two new Microsoft Office, a consumer version Office 2024 and Office LTSC 2024. The next single payment “perpetual licence” version of Office will be Office 2024 (for consumers) or the very similar Office LTSC 2024 (for volume licences). LTSC = Long-Term Servicing […]
Start Grouping in Excel for better looking sheets
Grouping in Excel lets you collapse or expand sections of a sheet so you can see the ‘big picture’ but still drill-down to how totals were made. Another use for grouping is hiding rows or columns from view. You can organize and manage data more effectively by grouping together rows or columns. This feature is […]
Three more Word features reach the web version
Three more familiar Microsoft Word features have reached the ‘on the web’ or browser based version of Word. Editing header/footer, columns and line numbering. Headers/Footers Word for the web has been able to view headers/footers for some time but now they can be added or edited as well. Go to Insert | Header & Footer. […]
Turn Excel into an AI / LLM wonder
GPT-2 can be squeezed into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, providing a functional demonstration of the Transformer architecture used in large language models (LLMs). GPT-2 is an older version of the AI system – Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT use GPT-4. Ishan Anand made the 1.25GB Excel file as a low-code introduction to LLMs (Large Language Models), […]
