How to make Office document backups and file versions
Eventually we all need to find a deleted document or a past version of an existing document. You never know when it’ll be needed or for which document. There’s many options available for keeping older versions of a document or file, most of them you have to setup in advance. You can choose or more […]
Two ways for sorting by Number
Choosing the sort type is really important and Word doesn’t always guess correctly. Office-Watch.com reader Peter M. reminds us that choose the sort type is really important: Text, Number or Date. “I just thought it worth pointing out that, for example 8, 70, 600 would sort in one order as Text and the reverse order […]
Word – Insert Symbol wish list
The Insert | Symbol feature in Office is overdue for an overhaul. Our venture into the new Unicode symbols and symbol fonts highlighted how much work Microsoft needs to do on this part of Office. Insert | Symbol has changed for a long time and many versions of Office. Here’s Insert | Symbol in Word […]
How Word’s grammar check can let you down
A funny example of how you can’t trust the spelling and grammar checks in Word. We laughed at this sign, seen in a Tesco’s supermarket in the UK. Guess what – according to Word 2013 that entire document has no grammar mistakes at all! Even ‘incontinence’ doesn’t get a contextual spelling query. It’s the same […]
What is Microsoft Delve?
What is Delve and what does it mean for Microsoft Office? At the recent Microsoft conference there was mention of Microsoft Delve. But what the ?^%$ is ‘Delve’? It’s an enhanced search tool for your documents and online info. Not just standard Office documents but also videos, audio, links to web sites etc that are […]
Use the latest Unicode symbols in Office
How can you get the new Unicode symbols in Office documents? There’s plenty of new symbols included in the Unicode 7.0 standard, here’s how to get them into your Office documents. Most fonts do NOT have all the Unicode characters, after all, there are over 133,000 of them. There are far too many characters so […]
More characters for Unicode
Unicode adds more characters to an already large list. Unicode has added another 2,834 new characters in the Unicode 7.0 specification, mostly support for 23 new scripts. That takes the total to a whopping 113,021 characters! But we’ll have to wait for these new characters to appear automatically in Office, Windows and mobile devices. The […]
Clearer table formatting than Microsoft auto-format
Some great tips on table formatting. Joey Cherdarchuk has a nice posting on a very different table styling to the type that Microsoft prefers. Under the banner ‘Clear Off the Table’ he suggests getting rid of gridlines and colors to simplify the look of tables. In his example, Joey takes a standard Microsoft auto formatted table […]
Touch features in Office 2013
Office 2013 has some clever tricks when you touch the screen. Tony G writes: ” … there are some subtle features in Office 2013. I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 and I have observed that the right click menus and some other features are different when called up by the touch screen and using the […]
Microsoft Word vs. Spelling Bee champions 2014
Microsoft Word does badly against the National Spelling Bee joint champions. The Scripps US National Spelling Bee is over for another year with unprecedented joint winners Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe. Congratulations to both winners who were commendably gracious while sharing the trophy. Like last year, we were interested in seeing how the spell-check dictionaries […]
Making Word compatible with George R. R. Martin
How to change Word so it’s more to the Game of Thrones author’s liking. George R. R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series among other wonderful books* has revealed that he uses an old DOS program (WordStar 4) on a standalone computer to write. That’s great for him but the rest of us […]
Get your Word for Windows source code
Microsoft’s gift to history Microsoft has released to the public domain the source code and documents for an early version of Word, Word 1.1a for Windows, as well as DOS 1.1 and 2.0. The Word for Windows has both C source code and some documentation. The documents are in original format which means that Word […]
Office 2010 SP2 adds a bug
Sometimes Office Service Packs add bugs as well as fixing them. The assumption by Microsoft and the hope of Office customers is that Service Packs for Microsoft Office will fix bugs on the software. Some of those bugs have been disclosed by Microsoft, others they’ve kept secret from customers. Problem is, Service Packs are really […]
Word for iPad – a tour
A quick look over the Word for iPad features, Here’s a look at the major features in Word for iPad, looking over the four main tabs. The buttons will be familiar in most cases though the underlying menus/galleries are different and limited compared to Word for Windows or Mac. Shameless plug:Office for iPad: The Complete […]
‘Pickup where you left off’ isn’t working
Why are some Word 2013 users not seeing ‘Welcome Back’ messages. As we’ve been mentioning, Word 2013 has a feature to put you back at the last place you were reading in a document … a little flag appears like this: That registry key will only store details for documents that Word 2013 wants to […]
Stop ‘Pick up where you left off’ in Word 2013
How to block the ‘Welcome back’ message in Word 2013. Last week Office-Watch.com told you about how Word 2013 document details are saved without disclosure in the Windows Registry. Many readers asked how the feature can be turned off. A reasonable request in the circumstances but not according to Microsoft. Despite the privacy implications there’s […]
