How to convert a PDF into a Word document, even when Word 2013 can’t do it. Since Word 2013 can’t properly convert ‘image only’ PDF’s or you don’t have Word 2013 at all, how can you convert PDF’s? There are many options available including free and paid online services, OCR
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
Can you use the free Getty images in your PowerPoint presentations? Getty Images, has announced that 35 million of their images are now available free. Does that mean you can use them in your PowerPoint presentations or Word documents? Sadly, no Getty Images is now allowing free embedding to some
Farewell, Mike Parker who brought Helvetica to the mainstream but alas not to Microsoft Windows or Office for Windows. Mike Parker isn’t a household name but the chances are the every household has an example of Helvetica, the font he helped make popular. When he worked for Mergenthaler Linotype Co.,
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
How to update Microsoft Office with the new name, OneDrive, and remove the old SkyDrive name. Recent versions of Office have the name SkyDrive (with the extra capital letter) in the supplied dictionary. However the new OneDrive name hasn’t made it to the Office dictionary yet. Here’s what you’ll see
How to find your pictures to insert into an Office document. Even a simple thing like adding a picture to an Office document or email has subtleties and annoyances. When you choose Insert | Picture in recent versions of Office, it opens, by default, in the Picture Library. That seems
Making Windows Explorer’s Recent Places feature a whole lot better. Recent Places shows the folders you can recently visited in Windows Explorer. By default it’s in the Favorites section. Unfortunately the standard Recent Places view isn’t a lot of help: The Type and Size columns are irrelevant because they will
Get Outlook to show changes in Dropbox folders Dropbox has one excellent feature, the ‘Events’ view that lists files added, deleted or modified. You can use that feature to get custom Outlook alerts when certain things happen to your Dropbox account, like when a file is added to a shared
How to get a message when certain RSS feeds are updated As you probably know, it’s possible to get an alert or an action when certain email messages arrive into Outlook using the Rules feature. Office-Watch.com shows how to do the same thing for an RSS feed. It will let
Save money, you don’t always need to pay for the ‘Pro’ version of Windows. In Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, Microsoft has ‘Business’, ‘Professional’ or ‘Ultimate’ versions which, among other features, can login to a Windows domain. This has the effect of forcing organizations to buy a more
What it really means for Office 2003 users plus a better countdown to the ‘end’ of Office 2003 and Windows XP Microsoft has a countdown to the end of support for Office 2003 and Windows XP in months, days and hours. We could not resist making our own … Microsoft
Select the wrong part of a MS Word table and the word count is wrong Benjamin B. writes with an interesting bug in Word 2013 that’s apparently been in Word for a few versions without acknowledgement from Microsoft, let alone a fix. It involves tables and the word count feature.
Can you call a Translation service to return results in Excel? After checking out the clever European word translator, we started wondering about loading translations into Excel. It should be simple to have some code to call a web server and return a translation of a word. Office 2010 and
2014 looks like the year of long movie titles with colons – here’s how to save yourself some typing. More and more movies are sequels and that means longer and longer movie titles. Most have colons because the studios don’t trust us to figure out that a movie is a
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
What wins in a conflict between custom and exclusion dictionaries? In Office-Watch.com we’ve talked about the custom dictionary (which lets you add words to the Office dictionary) and the exclusion dictionary (which removes words that would otherwise be considered OK. But what happens if a word is in both the
Among the December 2013 patches is a fix for the latest TIFF image bug. The most recent ‘zero day’ exploit for TIFF images has now been patched by Microsoft. The security lapse is the latest in a long line of problems with the Windows system for handling images. There seems
Examine US public health data in Excel. One of the great things about the recent Internet is the availability of previously hidden data. Large blocks of information have been collected, checked and published online. Combine that with a tool like Excel and you can do your own analysis! Here’s just
An example of web scraping from BestBuy.com into Excel. We’ve already talked about getting prices from the Amazon.com web site into Excel with automatic updates. Now let’s look at how to do it for BestBuy.com prices.Excel has had a method of web scraping for many versions you can find it
How to check Amazon product prices automatically in Excel. With Black Friday coming in the USA, it’s time to carefully check prices and look out for bargains. Ideally get those prices automatically and put them into Excel for comparison. To do that for Amazon means ‘scraping’ or trying to grab
Keep your calendar clear by hiding private appointments like reminders to take medicine. Sometimes we have appointments or events that we want to keep private or at least hide from the regular calendar views. You can have appointments in Outlook which will pop-up reminders when necessary but not show up
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
Christmas Cheer with Microsoft Office updated for Office 2010 and Office 2013 The Premium edition of Christmas Cheer with Microsoft Office has been updated for all customers – new and existing. We’ve updated the ebook to cover Office 2010 and Office 2013. All the Christmas themed sample documents – cards,
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