For all the changes Microsoft has made to Search (aka Tell Me), they continue to ignore one basic that would make Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook a lot easier to work with. Here’s some examples of how Microsoft Office search badly needs fixing. Search (formerly called “Tell Me”) usually appears
The Sharing options in Office are changing, yet again with a new ‘sharing experience’ in all Microsoft Office 365 apps for desktop, web and mobile. We’ll explain the changes, including a few options that Microsoft hasn’t mentioned. All the usual Microsoft buzzwords have been recycled to describe these changes; “streamlined”,
Three ways to insert the Recycle symbol ♻ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. There are many different and specialist Recycle symbols. We’ll focus on the standard, generic symbol, officially called “Black Universal Recycling Symbol” in three forms: Emoji or Unicode
Insert the Teardrop-Spoked Asterisk ✻ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Heavy Teardrop-Spoked Asterisk ✻ symbol has a circle in the middle with six ‘teardrop’ spokes around it. It has no specific purpose but is a more decorative alternative to the standard
Excel’s IRR() function is a straightforward way to calculate the rate of return for investments which have regular return/payment dates with amounts which might vary. Such as a simple fixed-interest bond, where cash flows occur at regular intervals such as monthly or yearly. When expressed as a percentage return, it’s
There’s a nice little Excel function that will calculate the rate of return on any asset like a stock or fund including income/dividends with purchases and sales over time. The secret sauce is XIRR() a function which calculates an internal rate of return with uneven interest or dividend payments. In
Can you scan a picture or document directly into Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook? Certainly, but these days we’re spoiled for choice and have fantastic features like using a smartphone as a simple scanner. Back in the day, you could click a button in Word 2003 to scan a document
An easy and fast way to add pictures into Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. 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
The change of fonts in Microsoft 365 also means the default styles are also changing in Excel 365. Here’s what the new styles look like and the exact settings Microsoft has chosen in Excel 365 for Windows and Mac. The new Excel defaults for a worksheet mostly use Aptos Narrow
Microsoft Excel has a handy function called NPER that can help you work out how long it’ll take to pay off a loan. It’ll show how adding even a little bit per payment can help clear a loan faster and some practical advice on using NPER in the real world.
Let Excel help you cut your credit card debt by calculating the monthly payments needed to pay off the card. The PMT function in Excel calculates of loan payments needed to clear the debt in a certain time. Suppose there is a remaining balance of $5,400 on a credit card
Excel can calculate the future value of your investments, such as finding out a return you’ll get on a Certificate of Deposit (CD) or Term Deposit. There’s an inbuilt Excel function to make the task very simple. It’s just one way Excel can make your financial decisions a whole lot
Excel’s new AI functions, under the Copilot branding, have started to appear in some public releases. Here’s the full list with syntax of all six AI functions. The functions have started appearing in some Excel 365 for Windows, Insiders Beta (version 2308 build 16708.20004). Not all Insiders see the same
Add some extra flair to your plain Excel charts by inserting pictures or graphics within the chart. It’s remarkably easy and enhances charts a lot. You can simply enhance your graph by inserting a business logo in the chart area. Or you might want to add images to replace the text labels. You may want to insert an image of money to represent dollars spent,
Here are samples of the five new fonts available for Microsoft 365 and Office 2021 customers one of which has become the new default font, but under a different name – Aptos. Did we say five? … there are really 10 new sans-serif fonts. Each of the five newbies come
The Excel Stock data type lets you track the largest companies market capitalization in real-time. It’s strangely compelling to watch the market caps change by billions in the blink of an eye. Excel 365’s Stock data type has the essential information to calculate market capitalization with changing values in real-time.
Make your own Wordle grids in Microsoft Office, Word, PowerPoint or Excel. Choose the right font, colors (the exact green, yellow or grey) plus grid details including blank or unfilled boxes. Wordle was originally a standalone app, created by Josh Wardle . It’s now owned and run by The New
How to insert the Grinning Face 😀 emoji into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Grinning Face 😀 emoji is usually depicted as a yellow face, with open eyes and a wide smile. Conveys good cheer or humor, often to make
Some features have been dropped from Microsoft 365 Family, Personal and other plans. Wolfram data types in Excel and so-called ‘Partner Benefits‘. As usual the announcement was full of marketing euphemisms and didn’t tell the whole story because a third feature (Excel’s Money template) discontinued on the same date. Three Microsoft
Barbie (the doll, not the Aussie BBQ) is everywhere at the moment so we’ll explain how to select Barbie Pink in your Word documents, Excel sheets and PowerPoint slides. There’s no one Barbie Pink but a selection to choose from. We looked around various official sources for the toys and
Some more Microsoft Word Find tricks. Select and Find, finding blank lines, search for special characters/emoji, find a certain font or formatting plus wildcard options. This article follows on from our introduction Find pane search secrets in Word Select and Find If you select some text in a document then
There are many ways to visually explain a list of values with different types of Excel Charts and other trickery. We’ve already looked at the numerical or statistical ways to summarize a list of values. Now let’s visualize the data in various ways available easily in Excel. There are various
Everyone knows the SUM function in Excel but that’s just the start, there are eight SUM() functions (and more) for adding up numbers in different ways. SUM() SUM is one of the first functions taught to newcomers. It’s as old as Excel itself (older because SUM was in the first
With the sale of fonts via the Microsoft Store and cloud fonts there’s now a complication in the familiar way fonts are managed in Windows 11/Windows 10 and how Office for Windows handles new fonts. There are now three different locations that fonts can be saved. For as long as
