All about Microsoft Office for Apple Mac. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook on macOS
Microsoft 365 for Mac, Office 2021 for Mac and earlier versions.
You can show ordinal numbers in Excel; 1st, 2nd, 3rd. Sadly, it’s not as simple as you’d think. The ‘Ordinal Rank’ column, 1st, 2nd etc you’d expect to be provided by Microsoft, but it’s not. There’s no in-built function nor a number format. After all, Excel has many different number
The work of Eric Gill is controversial these days, for good reason. Microsoft Windows and Office have fonts based on Gill’s work so users might need to think twice about using Gill Sans and similar fonts. Gill Sans MT and Gill Sans Nova are supplied with Windows and Office but
Office for Mac users yearn for the day when their software matches ‘feature parity’ with Office for Windows. “Two platforms, One Office” is the dream. But is it possible or even likely? We’re inspired by this tweet from José Rodríguez-Suárez. If Microsoft responds, we can predict what they’ll say, because
insert the Black Right Pointing Backhand Index 🖝 into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Black Right Pointing Backhand Index 🖝 symbol can be used as a creative bullet symbol in lists or to point a direction on a sign. It’s
To play a selection of different audio tracks, one after another is surprisingly clumsy even in Microsoft 365 PowerPoint. For example, you might like to have multiple tracks from a single album or several movements from a symphony. We expected that a simple Animation would work with the second music track
A common request is for music to play throughout a PowerPoint presentation. Handy for automatic and kiosk slideshows. That’s easy in PowerPoint these days. Insert the audio then look on the Playback tab. There’s a choice ‘Play in Background’ that does the job in one click. ‘Play in Background’ is just a way of turning on
Almost Equal sign ≈ can be typed into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. The Almost Equal symbol ≈ is commonly used within Mathematics to indicate two values are roughly equal, but not exactly equal. Or use it whenever you need
How to move rows or columns up, down or across an Excel worksheet. There’s a quick way but it’s not obvious. Excel has a variety of different ways in doing this, but it’s important to know the fastest and easiest way, to save you a lot of time and hassle.
Here’s how to choose good looking font pairs for your Word headings and body text or PowerPoint titles and text. We’ve shown you how to use Google Fonts in your Office documents. The Google Fonts site itself is little help but others have curated suggested pairings. Most of the suggested
WOFF are a new-ish type of font that you might have seen mentions or downloads. Here’s how to use them in Microsoft Office; Word, Excel or PowerPoint. WOFF is Web Open Font Format designed to be compact and easy to download. WOFF is for web sites and mobile apps, not
There’s a strange, almost prudish, feature in the Microsoft Word spell checker aka Microsoft Editor that’s used in many of the company’s products. We’ll explain Microsoft seeming avoidance of ‘Naughty Bits’ and why it’s happening. Warning! This article is unusually explicit (NSFW) for Office Watch. If sexually explicit but standard
Type Up Down Arrow with Base or underline ↨ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. How Up Down Arrow with Base ↨ looks in different fonts. Here’s some examples of how Up Down Arrow with Base / Underline ↨ looks
Outlook replies can be a problem of invisible or hard to read text when the incoming email has a color background. We’ll explain the problem and how to fix your reply email. Messages with colored backgrounds might look OK to the sender but are a pain when you try to
If you want to change the background color on an email, Outlook’s option to do that has changed name and location. At least Windows users can change background color, Outlook for Mac users lost this option at few years ago! A color background can be nice in an email but
How to insert either of the Tilde ~ ∼ symbols into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Tilde ∼ symbol is easy on some keyboards but for other keyboards, there’s no specific key for Tilde. The two Tilde symbols There are
We’ve looked at design and typography in 2001: A Space Odyssey and how to use the ‘2001’ look in Microsoft Office. Two readers asked about some curious kerning in our version of the title font.Maybe you’re not interested in the fine detail of the text in a fifty year old
Use Word tables to do formatting tricks, make complex formats easily and solve Word formatting problems. There’s more to Word tables than just showing grids of information like this: Tables have all sorts of little tricks in them and let you do clever things in Word. Here’s a look at
There are many ways to add common sound effects and background music to your PowerPoint videos. But what if you wanted audio from an online source like YouTube? You can copy from online to an audio file, save it to your computer then link into a slide deck. There are many tools to ‘rip’ a video with audio from
Type the Up Down Arrow ↕ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Up Down Arrow ↕ symbol is a vertical line with arrowheads on both ends, pointing up and down. How Up Down Arrow ↕ looks in different fonts. Here’s some examples of how Up Down Arrow ↕ looks in common Office fonts. Up
Pantone has announced their “Color of the Year” for 2022 and, as usual, we’ll explain how to use those exact colors in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. For 2022, the new color will also be appearing in Microsoft products with a nice PowerPoint template with extra color palettes. The color
Insert the Black Chess Queen ♛ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Black Chess King ♛ symbol is useful for users that want to represent the chess piece as a symbol, rather than an image. Or just a generic crown icon. How Black Chess Queen ♛ looks in different fonts. Examples of
Rename Word styles or give them alternative names/aliases. Sometimes you’ve got no choice but to make an alias because the original style name is fixed. Any style can have an alternative name which appears in the Style Gallery. That’s a useful trick because there’s limited space for the style name
The Word Style Gallery doesn’t have to be left the way Microsoft supplies it. Fix the Gallery to make it work better for you. Microsoft Office often has menus and options aren’t designed for the customer. Instead they are setup for Microsoft’s needs in ‘out of the box’ demonstrations or
Type the Approximately Equal To ≅ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Approximately Equal To ≅ symbol with a curvy line above the usual = symbol is commonly used within Mathematics to refer to approximate equality between two values, congruence