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 […]
The last man on the moon is missing from Microsoft Office. Let the conspiracy theories begin! The last man to walk on the moon, Captain Eugene Cernan, is a notable omission from the Microsoft Office dictionary. Update: as of November 2015 we’re delighted to see that Gene Cernan is now in the Microsoft Office 2016 […]
How to sort a list using a hidden or unseen list in Word. Sometimes you want to sort a list in a way that isn’t apparent to the reader. To continue our Apollo theme, here’s a list of the twelve men who walked on the moon with the order they stepped onto the surface. To […]
You can hide a column in Word, all it takes is a little trickery. Sometimes you want to hide a table column in a Word document but according to Microsoft you can’t do it. Here’s how to do it anyway. It’s true that there’s no explicit ‘hide column’ option like in Excel but you can […]
In-depth and clever tricks with sorting in Word. Following our look at different alphabetical orders, here’s a look at the sorting options in Word. You can sort paragraphs, lists and tables in a Word document. Select the list or paragraphs then choose Home | Paragraph | Sort. For tables there’s similar sort options are at […]
Which version of alphabetical order does Microsoft Word use? I thought that alphabetical order was, well, alphabetical order. That’s what I was taught at school and apparently I was taught wrong. There are at least three ways, two used by dictionaries, another by Microsoft and that’s for English alone! Reading Sue Butler’s delightful book ‘The Aitch […]
Microsoft adds the Ruble symbol to Windows 8.1 and we show you how to add it to earlier versions of Windows. Part of the Windows 8.1 August 2014 update is the addition of the new Russian Ruble currency symbol. All Microsoft will say about this change is “This feature adds new Ruble currency support for […]
Why Excel PivotTables get messed up and how to stop it. Time and again we’ve heard from people who try PivotTables and only get nonsense tables. That’s understandable since Microsoft’s hype about PivotTable ignores the basics that we’ll cover in this article. You’ve probably seen a Microsoft demonstration of PivotTables where it looks sooooo easy. […]
How to add and remove data from a PivotTable. Thanks for the great feedback from our article on PivotTables. One concern some of you have is about adding or removing source data after the PivotTable has been created. That’s understandable because the original PivotTable releases where unclear and curiously sensitive about the data ranges used. […]
Microsoft needs to play ‘catch up’ with email encryption. Yahoo is going to join Google is supporting not just email encryption but the same type of email encryption. Sadly we’ll have to wait until sometime in 2015 for Yahoo to release their version of OpenPGP. That’s good news … but where is Microsoft? For all […]
How to quickly insert symbols in Word without taking your fingers off the keyboard. Inserting Symbols into Word documents is a pain, go up to the ribbon Insert | Symbols | Symbol at the very least … or you can use a trick from the 20th century to keep your fingers on the keyboard. Type […]
Some programs let you email documents directly – here’s now. Microsoft Office for iPad has an ‘Email as attachment’ as one of its limited options for sharing a document. Here’s some clever ways to make use of that and workaround the Office for iPad limitations. Some cloud services offer an ‘incoming email’ option so you […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Windows feature that’s very useful for Microsoft Office users. Character Map has been in Windows for as long as we’d like to remember and it’s done right. Over the years, the ‘softies who’ve worked on it have given some thought to the needs of people trying to find and preview characters. You’ll find Character […]
A simple, practical and non-scary example of how Excel PivotTables can work for you. Excel’s PivotTables are a great feature but one that seems way too hard for most of us … so here’s a simple and practical example of how PivotTables can help. A little fear of PivotTables is understandable. It’s one of those […]
The two procedures will let you easily clear up redundant Word documents, and alphabetize lists of declarations. Access versions: 2007-2013 Level: Intermediate Introduction The two procedures described in this article will let you easily clear up redundant Word documents, and alphabetize lists of declarations. When working on the 3rd edition of my Working with Word […]
Word: how to find the character code used for a particular letter or symbols. Last week we talked about the Unicode v7.0 symbols and how to use symbols in Word. With over 100,000 characters in the Unicode specification, it’s important to know the character code number for the symbol you want. That raises the question, […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Back in Access 2003, you could easily change the font name and size for a datasheet form by clicking the square in the upper-left corner of the datasheet (in datasheet view), and selecting the font and size from the selectors on the Formatting toolbar, or by selecting Font from the Format menu. But these features […]
If you need to create a filter string for filtering by a person’s name, or a city name, you may run into this error: This is because single quotes are used as the delimiter for Text strings, and there is a single quote in the city name. To get around this problem, make a calculated […]
Microsoft makes a ‘one stop’ page for the latest Office update details. Figuring out what are the latest updates for Microsoft Office isn’t easy which is why we’re delighted to see Update center for Office, Office servers, and related products from Microsoft. It’s been a long time coming but as Sam Seaborn once said ” Let’s […]
Plenty of free ebooks about Office 2013, Office 2010, Office 365 and more. Microsoft has released another 130 free ebooks for anyone to download. It includes titles about Windows 8, Office 2013, Office 2010 and Office 365. A list of the Office related titles with links is below. Free ebooks should be enough to boast […]
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 […]
How Word can warn you about the ‘Oxford’ or serial comma’? The Oxford comma is one of those grammatical things that most people don’t worry about but can get others soooo excited. It’s a question of whether to add a comma at the end of a list for example: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook OR […]
Access Archon Column #230 – Making Concatenated Strings from Linked Tables and Multi-valued Fields Access versions: 2007-2013 Level: Intermediate Introduction Back in 2001, I wrote an Access Archon article (#89, Flattening Linked Data) which showed how to create a string of concatenated data from values in a one-to-many linked table. That technique is still useful, […]
Access Archon Column #229 – Fixing Normalization Errors Access versions: 2002-2013 Level: Intermediate Introduction Sometimes when you take over an Access database created by an amateur (or at least, someone with a minimal understanding of normalization), you will find data such as employee names stored in a Text field in the Orders table. If the […]
An interesting font idea from Spain – handwriting of homeless people turned into fonts. HomelessFonts.org is a series of fonts based on the handwriting of homeless people. For example, here’s the Francisco font. There are five fonts at present with more promised. Priced per font at €19 Euros for individuals and €290 for companies The […]
You can get match results automatically in Outlook Once great thing about Outlook’s Internet Calendar feature is that it can be updated automatically. The 2014 World Cup (football/soccer) is a good example. As we’ve already explained, you can make a separate Outlook calendar with the match schedule for your time zone then overlay that with […]
How to get the World Cup schedule into Outlook automatically. The football/soccer World Cup is about to start with 64 matches being played over the next month. Here’s how to get a reliable schedule into your Outlook calendar quickly and easily. Outlook lets you import an Internet feed of calendar items. This is better than […]
How to quickly change web links in Office documents. It’s possible to bulk change web links in Word documents using the Replace, here’s the trick. For example, you might need to change the domain name due a corporate restructure or update links so they are secure (https) instead of regular (http) links. The trick is […]
Gpg4Win is one way to improve and expand Outlook’s poor encryption support. Google’s End-to-End got us thinking about how to improve Outlooks lame email encryption and make it ready for End-to-End. The End-To-End addin uses OpenPGP, an email encryption system not directly supported by Outlook but you can do it via Gpg4Win. Gpg4Win is a […]
Google’s End-to-End secure email tool is a great idea – will it force Microsoft to improve Outlook? Google has announced an upcoming tool ‘End to End‘ which promises a way to send and receive encrypted emails from within a Chrome browser using web-based email systems (apparently not just Gmail). That is a great move which […]
Does pasting an image into Office take up more space than inserting it? Gary Z read our tip about pasting images into Office and asks: “I remember reading years ago that graphics are copied to the clipboard in BMP. Huge files. Then if paste HUGE increase in Word file size. So INSERT jpg, tiff, png. […]
Another easy way to get images into Word and other Office documents. Last week 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 […]
A quicker way to do some regular tasks in Outlook. Quick Steps is that big block in the middle of the Outlook 2010 and 2013 Home tab Quick Steps let you customize and combine Outlook functions into a single click without resorting to VBA. The defaults are meant to be examples of what is possible. […]
Can you scan a picture or document directly into Word? Back in the day, you could click a button in Word to scan a document or image and drop it into a document. Can you still do that? Alas no. Microsoft dropped its imaging services within Windows and so Word lost the scan button. The […]