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
An 85-year-old blunder has just been fixed at Westminster Abbey to change the spelling to Brontë with the important diaresis. Here’s how to type an ë in Word and other matters arising. Here’s how the memorial to the Brontë sisters looked in Poets Corner until a few days ago. For
There are plenty of audio and music options available in PowerPoint if you want to give your audience a break from your voice. We’ll go beyond the simple ‘adding music’ help to give some practical advice for audio in presentations: You will find the audio basics at Insert | Media |
The BBC has a great collection of over 16,000 sound effects that you can add to your PowerPoint presentations. Use them as a trigger sound for a click on a presentation, as a novel background noise or even an alert sound on your computer or smartphone. Sound Effects Galore Exploring
While it lasts, check out some free classes about Python in Excel for better data analysis, DataFrames, charts & visualizations and machine learning. We’re a big fan of Python in Excel and these lessons should help those of us who haven’t yet caught the Python bug. Advance Your Python in
Excel 365 now has Python features included for all business and enterprise customers with a Microsoft 365 software licence Python is a powerful programming language with many great libraries of tools for analysis and charting. It’s a massive extension to Excel that we’ve already raved about. Python Editor for Excel
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
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
No spam/junk email filter is perfect but it’s hard to understand how some recent messages have been missed by Microsoft’s inhouse security systems. Here’s two peculiar examples to watch out for. A prank email or a failed scam? An email is sent out to many people that seems to have
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
Here’s the basics of Styles in Word for paragraph, character or both (Linked) plus Tables and Lists. I know talking about styles in Word makes eyes glaze over but they are a really useful part of Word (plus Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook). Today I watched an ‘experienced’ Word user reformatting
What to do if Excel’s columns have numbers across the top instead of letters. There’s a simple setting to switch between two different ways of labelling cells. You open an Excel workbook and the column headings look all wrong – instead of letters (A, B C …) there are numbers.
In-cell charts in Excel provide a powerful method to visualize data trends and patterns. They allow you to quickly derive insights within a worksheet, making information interpretation more straightforward without fussing about with full charts. We’ll explain how to make in-cell charts and then go further and show how to
How to lock your Excel worksheet from editing – the whole thing or some cells. Allow some people to edit a few cells, leaving the rest of the cells and formulas untouchable by others using the worksheet. Here’s a very simple example: Anyone opening the worksheet can enter a US
An old and unsafe Microsoft technology, ActiveX is finally being dropped from Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Office. As usual, there are details and niceties behind the major announcement. For starters, ActiveX isn’t really being discontinued. Microsoft is disabling ActiveX as a default. If you need ActiveX, a menu, registry or
Microsoft’s promise of offline support in Outlook (new) is a lot LESS than it appears as the company continues to over-promise and under-deliver their Outlook replacement. We’ve said it before … Maybe someday new Outlook will really be ready for the public but it’s not there yet. See Outlook (new)
Discover how to adjust bullet point spacing in Microsoft Word with the two key settings to achieve precise bullet point alignment and formatting. Learning the techniques to perfect your bullet points can make a significant difference in readability and presentation. There are TWO places to change the position of the
Quickly insert symbols, characters and emoji in Microsoft Word and Outlook without taking your fingers off the keyboard using a feature that’s been in Word (for Windows) for many years. Inserting Symbols into Word documents is a pain, go up to the ribbon Insert | Symbols | Symbol which takes
Here are two ways to quickly make up list or tables of fake data to use in Excel worksheets. Use them to test a workbook or code. GenerateData.com There are a few websites that can make fake lists, we prefer https://GenerateData.com for its simple interface and many options. Just some
The Workplace Discount Program (formerly Home Use Program) offers 30% discounts on Microsoft 365 to employees of many organizations and government agencies. Here’s how the Workplace Discount Program (WDP) works, the tricks and traps. What is the Workplace Discount Program – WDP? Organizations (companies, governments etc.) that have Microsoft 365
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.
How to stop Outlook grouping Inbox messages, most commonly by date. “Today”, “Yesterday” etc. which might suit some people but is a right nuisance to others. This is an option in Outlook (classic) for Windows which can appear, seemingly for no good reason. It’s not in Outlook (new). Some people
Excel is getting a new function TrimRange() which should solve a long-standing calculation performance problem. As well as speeding up workbooks, TrimRange() comes with some new range options that add to the well-known colon. Ever since Microsoft added dynamic arrays to Excel there’s been a problem … how to reference
The Microsoft 365 Insiders blog is ending, sorta. kinda. Really, it’s just moving to another part of the Microsoft.com web site. For the last five years, the Microsoft 365 Insiders blog has been the place where the company boasts about new and changed features in the Insiders or beta versions
