Microsoft is expanding their support for SVG graphics by allowing these ‘Icons’ to be copied from Office documents into other third-party apps. Users can take an Office Icon or SVG and easily copy it to another app to use or change beyond Office’s in-built features. There’s no special menu item
Writing into cells is now possible in Excel for Windows using the Action Pen in a new way. Sadly, as we’ll see, the implementation is a bit clumsy and lacks documentation. Action Pen was introduced earlier this year as a way to edit documents with digital ink gestures. Action Pen
Microsoft is trying a new way to push Office or Microsoft 365 to new customers by dropping links into the Windows Start Menu. We’ve seen this on the Start Menu of Windows 10 preview releases. It’s a group of icons for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Skype. Most of
There are 87 different security breaches fixed in this months rollout of Microsoft bug fixes, including an important one for Windows. Also a Critical fix for Outlook and patches for Word, Excel. We’ll start with a very critical Windows bug that’s important to patch right away. Vital Windows 10 bug
Are your Excel worksheets ready for negative interest rates? The world is seeing historically low interest rates. So low that they can drop to zero or even lower rates. Not only can Excel worksheets break with unexpected negative percentages but modelling can accidently move into negative territory. Interest rates might
Excel’s Sparklines have a good range of options for highlighting high and low values, text or calculated overlays, changing axis and handling blank or zero values. Sparklines are in Excel for Windows and Mac. Excel Mobile (iPhone, iPad, Android) shows existing Sparklines made elsewhere but they can’t be changed, only
Excel isn’t the best way to store a large database but it’s a great way to sort, filter, analyse, chart and PivotTable from it. Here’s the best way to import and update a large database into Excel. The standard way to store a list in Excel is to import CSV’s
The UK has been embarrassed (again) with the news that around 16,000 COVID-19 test results were missing from the official database and so contact tracing wasn’t done. The culprit? Excel. Or, to be fair, bad use of Excel is to blame. Not understanding it’s limits and how to workaround them.
A strange name but Sparklines is a useful new part of Excel which makes simple single-cell graphs in Excel for Windows or Mac. Mea Culpa – we thought that ‘Sparklines’ was a fancy name made up by Microsoft after a long liquid lunch … Office Watch readers, John F, Nick
Microsoft has done a clever thing, combining two important Excel features into a new and really useful addition – Custom Data Types. Excel 365 for Windows/Mac already has Stock and Geography data types to drop live information into workbooks. It’s now possible to make your own Custom Data Types (CDT)
Office 2010 ends support on 13 October 2020 and we’ve been receiving questions from readers asking about switching to newer Microsoft Office. We’ll answer questions about when to update, what to replace Office 2010 and important factors to consider. We’re hearing concerns about privacy in modern Office, reliability and the
Microsoft 365 suffered a major outage of their online and cloud services. Here’s what we know, where we stand now and how to reduce your risk of trouble with future problems. The online services from Microsoft could not be accessed from about 5pm Monday (US Eastern) that included Office logins,
Microsoft 365 Enterprise customers can now try Application Guard as a new way to protect against malicious documents infecting computers.What is Application Guard and what it means for Office 365 Application Guard is a combination of Windows 10 Defender and Office programs that opens a suspect document in a special
Common programming tools can be used to make malicious Office workbooks which bypass both online security checks and Microsoft’s own protections in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Access. We’ll explain what’s happening and what Microsoft could do better. VBA Purging or VBA Stomping are clever tricks to make an Office documents
There’s a change in the way Microsoft 365 works with a sign-in to a Microsoft account. This applies to Word 365, Excel 365, PowerPoint 365 and other Office apps. Up to recently, Microsoft 365 / Office 365 has worked normally either when signed into a Microsoft account or not. Having
Stop duplicate names, email addresses or product SKU’s from being added to an Excel list or Table. Adding more rows to an Excel Tables can be done while preventing accidental duplicates creeping into the list. Excel Tables or lists can grow to hundreds or thousands of rows, there’s a risk
Microsoft is releasing a ‘Quick Poll’ option in Outlook ignoring the very similar, voting buttons, option that’s already in Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac. Use Voting Buttons to ask a question and Outlook will automatically collect responses. Office Watch also explains how recipient see the voting options and
Type the Left Right arrow ↔ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. How Left Right arrow ↔ looks in different fonts. Here’s some examples of how Left Right arrow ↔ looks in common Office fonts. Left Right arrow ↔ codes
How to make an Excel chart that changes as you add more cells or rows is really simple these days. Forget all the old stuff about named ranges or changing the Chart data. Setup your Excel list correctly and any linked charts will update automaticall. In a recent article we
The secret to a timeline chart in Excel is the data. Emily writes asking “How can I make an Excel chart with dates on the X axis with a proper time scale – even if the dates aren’t regular? “ We could not understand Emily’s question until we asked for
Microsoft is making an important step towards cloud storage security with the public preview of Double Key Encryption. That means, for the first time, Microsoft customers can secure their data from access, even by Microsoft itself. All the ‘secure’ cloud storage from Microsoft can be accessed by Microsoft. For all
With all the subscription offerings available (Netflix, HBO, Disney, CBS, Apple, Google, Amazon, Office 365 etc), here’s a way to manage them all from Excel. Along the way we’ll show you some interesting Excel features. We were inspired by Brian X Chen in The New York Times, writing about how
We’re happy to release a new version of our Subscriptions Manager that’s compatible with Excel 2007-2016. Subscriptions Manager is a way to list and manage the many online plans we sign up for; HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Spotify and so many more. You can track who pays (in a family) and
The names of genes are being changed just to stop Excel confusing them with dates during the import process. We’ll explain two ways Excel already works to avoid the geneticist’s problem. Genes named like MARCH1 and SEPT1 which Excel converts into dates when imported the wrong way, usually directly via
