Which Microsoft Office feature badly needs a fix?
For all the changes Microsoft has made to Search (aka Tell Me), they continue to ignore one basic that would make Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook a lot easier to work with. Here’s some examples of how Microsoft Office search badly needs fixing. Search (formerly called “Tell Me”) usually appears in the title bar as […]
Three ways to insert a Recycle symbol ♻ in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
Three ways to insert the Recycle symbol ♻ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. There are many different and specialist Recycle symbols. We’ll focus on the standard, generic symbol, officially called “Black Universal Recycling Symbol” in three forms: Emoji or Unicode symbol, Office Icon and the […]
Teardrop-Spoked Asterisk ✻ in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
Insert the Teardrop-Spoked Asterisk ✻ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Heavy Teardrop-Spoked Asterisk ✻ symbol has a circle in the middle with six ‘teardrop’ spokes around it. It has no specific purpose but is a more decorative alternative to the standard asterix * or other bullet […]
Scanning from within Microsoft Word or Office
Can you scan a picture or document directly into Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook? Certainly, but these days we’re spoiled for choice and have fantastic features like using a smartphone as a simple scanner. Back in the day, you could click a button in Word 2003 to scan a document or image and drop it […]
The faster way to insert pictures into Office documents
An easy and fast way to add pictures into Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. We mentioned a faster way to get a scanned image into Word via the ‘scan to clipboard’ option available in some scanning software. There are similar options available for copying existing image files into Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents as well […]
Workaround for Outlook slowly saving attachments
There’s a bug in the latest release of Outlook 365 for Windows (Microsoft 365) which makes saving attachments slow to a crawl. Microsoft has a workaround to consider, if you’re desperate. The problem occurs when saving attachments to a network folder directly. There’s a long wait looking at this dialog box. Finally the ‘Save As […]
Why another Outlook for Windows is coming
Windows Mail and Calendar apps will be replaced with the ‘new’ Outlook. That means a second ‘Outlook for Windows’ and plenty of confusion for customers and support people. Microsoft made this mistake before and seem determined to do it again. This ‘new’ Outlook is a Progressive Web App (PWA) formerly known as ‘Project Monarch’. It’s […]
New default styles in Word, PowerPoint and Outlook
The change of fonts in Microsoft 365 also means a change of default styles (normal and headings) are also changing. Here’s what the new styles look like and the exact settings Microsoft has chosen for Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. At the moment, these fonts and styles are in Microsoft 365 Insiders builds for Windows and […]
Another Microsoft Exchange failure
There’s been yet another failure of Microsoft’s Exchange Online service (aka Microsoft 365 hosted email) affecting customers around the world by stopping or delaying outgoing messages. Microsoft hid the extent of the problem by spreading the details across two separate bug reports. The first most people knew of the problem was sending messages that gave […]
Grinning Face 😀 emoji in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
How to insert the Grinning Face 😀 emoji into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Grinning Face 😀 emoji is usually depicted as a yellow face, with open eyes and a wide smile. Conveys good cheer or humor, often to make it clear that the sentence […]
More Word Find / Search tricks
Some more Microsoft Word Find tricks. Select and Find, finding blank lines, search for special characters/emoji, find a certain font or formatting plus wildcard options. This article follows on from our introduction Find pane search secrets in Word Select and Find If you select some text in a document then use the Ctrl + F […]
Moai 🗿 or stone statue emoji, 3D model and more in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
Add the Easter Island stone statue (Moai/Moyai) 🗿 symbol, 3D model or photo into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Moai 🗿 symbol represents the famous stone statues of Easter Island. It can be used to show a deadpan, ‘straight face’ or ‘stone face’ (literally) expression. […]
Why there’s three font locations in Windows 11 and 10
With the sale of fonts via the Microsoft Store and cloud fonts there’s now a complication in the familiar way fonts are managed in Windows 11/Windows 10 and how Office for Windows handles new fonts. There are now three different locations that fonts can be saved. For as long as anyone can remember, all Windows […]
Outlook and Office might be blocked by anti-virus software
A Windows 11 update might stop Outlook or other Office apps from working because of a conflict with anti-virus software. The trouble started with KB5027231 a Windows 11 update released 13 June 2023 which, among other things, fixed a file copying bug. 15 days later Microsoft admitted there was a bug in the bug patch. Not […]
What you’ll need to use Copilot with Microsoft Office
Microsoft has released some information about what you’ll need to get their AI tools (called Copilot) when they are eventually released. Copilot is Microsoft’s name for their upcoming AI tools integrated into Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) plus other services like Teams. As with all Microsoft’s Copilot announcements, it’s a strange mix. The […]
Designer Erase is a picture edit opportunity for all Office users
Microsoft Designer now has an image editing tool that’s been missing from Microsoft Office. Erase in Designer lets you edit images in an important way that’s not possible in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook for Windows or Mac. Picture editing in Office has a lot of features but they mostly effect the whole image, there’s […]
