2025 promises to be ‘interesting’ for Microsoft 365 and Office users, not always in a good way. Here’s some of the predictable events. What I can guarantee in 2025 is more Copilot and Outlook (new) hype – some justified and some stretching credibility. Happy New Year! Office 2016 and Office
Skype has stopped their Skype Credits service which is bad news for Microsoft 365 consumers who took advantage of their monthly 60 minutes of free calls to worldwide phones. Without notice, Microsoft stopped both Skype Credits and Skype Numbers (incoming phone numbers to your Skype account). What’s now appearing at
With your annual Microsoft 365 Personal/Family subscription, you get a fantastic perk: an hour of free Skype calls each month to many overseas destinations, and yes, that sometimes includes mobile phones! 📞🌍 Skype isn’t just for computer-to-computer calls, it can also make free or cheap calls to regular landline or mobile phone
Get Economic data or graphs from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) to load into your Excel workbooks or PowerPoint slides. From unemployment rates to the price of potato chips. FRED has 825,000 data sets for the USA and around the world. Tip: search FRED for your country (Canada, United Kingdom,
My favorite Outlook calendar view is very useful but most people don’t know it’s there. See today and the next week in one screen. I rarely care what’s happened in the past, I want to see what’s happening in the near future. That’s why my ‘Go To’ calendar view is
Enter the Ctrl + – (minus) shortcut in Excel. This powerful shortcut instantly deletes entire rows or columns without any confirmation. But there’s hidden trickery going on and some misleading info online. Ctrl + – is commonly said to “delete the selected row or column” but, as usual, the reality
Yes, Microsoft Word lets you select vertical (up or down) text blocks. Most text selection in Word involves selecting horizontally – selecting a line or a paragraph of text. Sometimes, though, you need to select a vertical slab of text. To do that, hold down the Alt key while you
There’s a hidden trap in Microsoft Excel’s DateDif function that rarely gets a mention and is too easy to overlook. DateDif() is a long-standing Excel function that returns the duration between two dates. It’s not a ‘full’ Excel function because it was added for compatibility with Lotus 123 and has
A PowerPoint action button is a shape you can add to your slides, allowing you to hyperlink to another slide or webpage, play a sound, or trigger other actions. It’s an easy way to add interactivity and navigation to your presentation with very little effort. It’s also a way
Excel is now 40 years old and it’s capable of some amazing things. Let’s not forget some of the mistakes made by users and serious bugs by Microsoft along the way. First a reminder of some Excel bugs and how Microsoft never seems to learn from their mistakes. Excel bug
Microsoft 365 for Mac can now use the Apple Handoff option to pass a document between a Mac computer, iPhone or iPad. We’ll also explain how to get a similar feature on any combination of devices Apple or Android. Apple Handoff lets you pass control of an open document between
Microsoft Designer makes it easy to create a unique and personal little graphic for Halloween, full size with animation, sticker or clipart Office Watch shows you how to use Designer for Halloween and some of the little tricks needed to make Designer work better. It took only a few minutes
There are simple and legal ways to save money on consumer Microsoft 365 plans, either Personal or Family. Don’t give Microsoft more money than you have to. Microsoft 365 is NOT a normal subscription Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plans are different in three, potentially, money saving ways: A Microsoft
A nice extra coming to Excel 365 highlights the selected cell, row and column with a single click or use an Excel trick to get the same and even better look now. Until now, that’s only been possible with some conditional formatting and a touch of VBA. Excel 365 will
Sometimes Word will switch to another language despite all the settings saying otherwise. With the help of an Office Watch reader, we’ve dug into the details to find what might cause the bug in Word and suggest some possible solutions. Word and Office should obey the default language setup in
Add something special to the start of your Word document with a banner image with text. We’ll explain how to do that with free tools like Copilot or Designer. We were inspired by a Microsoft promotion which wrongly said that a Microsoft 365 subscription with Copilot Pro is required, when
The latest version of the macOS for Apple Mac computers, Sequoia v15, is out now. Here’s a few features and settings that might interest Microsoft Office users plus a few tips from real use of macOS Sequoia. macOS Sequioa is available now and works quite well for us. More cautious
All you need is a ‘strawberry’ to see both ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot gets simple things wrong. Or ask which is larger of two numbers. Modern AI systems aren’t as great as the hype and why you definitely need to check anything Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Meta etc tells
A new collection of Copilot features have been released under the banner “Wave 2” with inclusions for Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Word and Teams. Don’t get too excited because there’s ‘fine print’ that limits who can catch this wave. Before we explain a little of what’s in the new set of
An often-repeated myth says that Word’s spelling or proofing language default is locked into the Windows language setting. Officially that’s not true and never has been since the first Word for Windows in 1989. In practice there’s a bug in Word which is why this persistent myth keeps being repeated.
Excel 365 has two new translation functions to identify language from text or translate text from one language to another. Let’s see how the work, some problems and unknowns. New in Excel 365 are: DetectLanguge() to identify the language of the text supplied, hopefully correctly (see below) Translate() converts text
Many people are moving away from Evernote due to the high prices. Here’s the simple way to migrate all Evernote notebooks to Microsoft OneNote. Why move from Evernote? Evernote’s pricing has risen to unrealistic levels. The cheapest paid plan “Personal” is now US$129.99 which is more expensive than Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 for Windows might crash while someone is just typing (you read that right). All the Office apps, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or OneNote can be affected according to Microsoft, which knows about the problem and offers some workarounds. The problem is caused by an out-of-date language pack which
Clipchamp, Microsoft’s video editor is now boasting background removal which is great for tricks like adding a watermark or ‘bug to a video. But there’s some limitations or ‘gotchas’ to watch out for. Add an image to a Clipchamp timeline, right-click then choose ‘Remove Background’. Wait a few moments and
