Quickly insert symbols, characters and emoji in Microsoft Word without taking your fingers off the keyboard. Inserting Symbols into Word documents is a pain, go up to the ribbon Insert | Symbols | Symbol which takes time … or you can use a trick from the 20th century to keep your fingers on the keyboard. […]
Microsoft celebrates 25 years of the software suite. Microsoft quietly celebrated the 25th anniversary of their Office suite on 1 August 2014 but were they being a little ‘previous’ in their celebrations? While Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows were around on 1 August 1989, were they sold as ‘Microsoft Office’ or only as separate […]
Why your PowerPoint slides should NOT make much sense … Over on Slate there’s a nice little slideshow about making PowerPoint presentations that don’t bore your audience into a coma. In short, the advice is to make your slides incomprehensible. Well, not quite. The idea is that the slide content should complement or support what […]
Windows and Office gives you Arial font when you ask for Helvetica. We recently told you about the Helvetica font in Windows and Microsoft Office – or rather it’s noticeable absence. Microsoft plays some strange font substitution tricks that got us digging further. As we’ve noted, if you open up a document with Helvetica formatting, […]
A list of Microsoft Office versions and their latest Service Packs. If you don’t have Office 2013, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Here’s a list of the latest service packs for each version of Microsoft Office going back more than a decade. For the recent versions of Office, at least Office 2007 and later, you […]
An industrial dispute involving CAPS has ended. One of the most interesting industrial disputes of 2013 has now ended with a new agreement between staff and management of the Melbourne Fire Brigade in Australia. Being an emergency service, the administrative staff didn’t feel that a full ‘stop work’ strike was appropriate so they resorted to […]
How to copy an image from the web into an Office document. Getting an image from your web browser to a Word document is quite easy, though easier with some browsers than others. In your browser, right-click over the image you want and look at the options available. At the very least there’ll be an […]
How accurate is Excel compared to universal needs. On page 45 of the Sept/Oct 2013 Mental Floss magazine is a small item ‘Why do we care so much about the digits if Pi’ which includes this trivia: “The computers that keep the International Space Station humming round off pi at a crude 16 digits. When […]
Getting started with Word’s footnotes and endnotes. Footnotes is one of those Word features that’s been around for a long time and so it often ignored in all the hoopla about new features. In this article we’ll have a close look at Footnotes and Endnotes. In Word there are Footnotes and Endnotes however they are […]
A quick look at your dictionary options in Word Even if you, like me, only speak one language there are still some powerful language and dictionary options in Word to keep in mind. All copies of Microsoft Office (recent versions anyway) come with English dictionaries. ‘Dictionaries’ plural because there’s many variants supplied. You’d expect English […]
What is an RTF document and why is it still being used? “I’m looking for a job and many employers are asking for my resume in RTF format. How do I do that and why can’t I just use a Word document?” Ian G. RTF (Rich Text Format) is an older document format that’s been around […]
Gerry Anderson isn’t with us, but the Thunderbirds live on even in MS Office. The recent passing of Gerry Anderson was sad news to hear. Mr Anderson enthralled millions of kids (and more than a few adults) with his groundbreaking shows like Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, UFO and, of course, Thunderbirds. As Office users, […]
How to use AutoCorrect for more than a word or character. Paul G writes: “Autocorrect is fantastic for the numerous standard letters, or specific instructions for various computer actions (downloads, etc). 1. I prepare the fully formatted text (sometimes 3-4 pages with complex formatting, inserted screen shots or tables etc) 2. Highlight the entire text […]
A quick way to type a tick character in Word. Another great Autocorrect suggestion from Morris B. ” … the one that I have found the most useful is to replace ‘./’ with a tick (wingdings 252 – or wingdings 254) “ Using the fullstop/period is a clever Autocorrect prefix since that character isn’t usually […]
Adding comments to documents isn’t just for groups, use them yourself. Word has a feature to let you add ‘below the line’ comments to documents – comments that don’t show up in the final document, don’t effect the formatting yet stay with the document file. Comments are included in Word’s collaboration features to help groups […]
Which versions Office can you use with Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Nerds and Geeks the world over, including us at Office Watch, will be poring over the Windows 8 Consumer Preview released today. But what about running Microsoft Office – can you use existing versions of Office on the Windows 8 preview? We’ll be trying […]
How to move existing Outlook items to an Office 365 or any other new email setup. Now that you have an Office 365 account working in Outlook you can copy your current Tasks, Contacts and Calendar from your current Outlook store into the Office 365 account. In short, open up the existing Outlook folder and […]
Copying or moving many items in Outlook isn’t easy – here’s how to avoid Outlook’s deficiencies. For as long as Outlook has existed, there have been problems when you copy or move many items around. Here are some suggestions from years of experience and frustration. When transferring many items, Outlook gets bogged down terribly. You’ll […]
How to use a single copy of Outlook on multiple machines. There’s an easy way to run a single copy of Outlook and use it on multiple machines – Remote Desktop. We’ve heard from many Outlook users who move their PST data files between a laptop and desktop computers. We’re happy to say there’s a […]
Why can’t you get the right key from a pre-installed copy of Office? Buying a pre-installed copy of Microsoft Office has some pitfalls and one of them is trouble recovering the Product Key. If you’ve lost your copy of the Office Product Key (essential for installing Office) then usually you can get the Key from […]
