All about Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Microsoft 365, Office 2021 and earlier versions.
How to count unique items in an Excel PivotTable
Excel PivotTable can show a count of unique items if you know where to look. Handy to see the number of customers, products or students from a long data list. What is the count of unique customers who made purchases in each region? How many unique products were sold in each store? How many different […]
How to get the Office 2024 preview and why not to bother
Microsoft has released a preview version of Office 2024 LTSC. Here’s how to get it, what’s in the preview and why not to bother with the preview software. Office 2024 is the next fixed price or perpetual license version of Microsoft Office that will be released later this year. The newly released preview is for […]
Straighten handwriting in OneNote
OneNote for Windows can straighten handwritten, digital ink, text so it’s nicely even across the screen. We tested Straighten to see how it really works … and it’s not bad. Microsoft doesn’t provide a working example of straighten just a mockup with grey lines and nothing like the real OneNote interface. So we made our […]
Ink to Text tool in Microsoft 365 for Windows
Word, PowerPoint and OneNote 365 for Windows have digital ‘ink to text‘ feature to not only handwrite into documents but also edit text and add bullet or numbered lists. Ink to Text requirements Before we explain the new feature, we’ll detail the specific requirements of the new ‘Ink to Text’ Word feature. Microsoft buries these […]
Microsoft Office font spacing mystery and how to fix
A strange case of letter spacing with a Microsoft font showing differences between Word and PowerPoint. Here’s the anomaly with three possible fixes for it and similar situations. Office Watcher Paul B noticed this peculiar spacing between a fullstop/period and digit 1 with the Tenorite font. In PowerPoint, the two characters are very close together […]
Steganography used to hide Word and Excel attack
Computers are being infected with at least eight different viruses in an attack that uses steganography to hide nasty code in images linked from Word and Excel documents. But there’s good news for most Office users. Steganography is a way to hide text or code in an image or object. It’s a trick that’s been […]
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 […]
