Patch Tuesday for May 2024 is a quiet month for Microsoft Office with only four security fixes but one of them is rated ‘Critical’. Also a list of the latest build/version released for each version of Office. Only Excel has a ‘Remote Code Execution’ bug which affects all supported Excel
All about Microsoft’s latest Office macro protection feature to stop virus infected documents loading nasties onto a computer. Mark of the Web MOTW is a relatively new way to protect your machine. Over 2022, a new layer of macro protection was added to Microsoft 365 for Windows. It’s something new
There are many ways to make pictures smaller, in both senses of the word. Here are three more options including great news for Windows 11 & Windows 10 users plus an important warning. Converting images into a smaller file size is sometimes essential. The large digital camera images (can be
Office-Watch.com has Star Wars Day covered with a series of articles which add the spirit of the Rebel Alliance or the Empire to your Microsoft Office documents, workbooks and slides. Star Wars Day is 4th May each year … “May the fourth be with you” geddit? Star Wars fonts Star
The existing Recommended PivotTables feature is now smarter in Excel 365 for Windows with more options and flexibility. For some time Excel has been able to suggest PivotTables based on the current Table. Recommended PivotTables is in Excel 365, Excel 2021, 2019, 2016 and earlier. Now in Excel 365 for
How to insert the Eye 👁 emoji into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Eye 👁 symbol is used for decoration “Look Here” or “See this”. Even as a fancy bullet point in Word or PowerPoint. How Eye 👁 looks in
Teams button creep into Office and Outlook ribbons because Microsoft tries to promote itself. Here’s how to get rid of it or any other Office buttons you don’t want. Teams icons prominently appear on Office ribbons, like this one on the Outlook Calendar ribbon. or this with Meet Now video
Excel PivotTable can show a count of unique items if you know where to look. Handy to see the number of customers, products or students from a long data list. What is the count of unique customers who made purchases in each region? How many unique products were sold in
Computers are being infected with at least eight different viruses in an attack that uses steganography to hide nasty code in images linked from Word and Excel documents. But there’s good news for most Office users. Steganography is a way to hide text or code in an image or object.
Quickly switch accounts while using Microsoft Office 365, Office 2019 and Office 2021 for Windows and even have different logins in separate programs. Many people wear different ‘hats’ while using Office. There’s a Work ‘hat’ or ‘hats’ with more than one job. Plus your personal or home role. Sometimes even
Pictures in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook can make the file sizes at lot larger than you expect. Here’s how to make images smaller (in file size) for Office documents without changing the look of the document, slide etc. The images in a document are what take up a lot
How to insert the Coin 🪙 symbol or emoji into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. How Coin 🪙 looks in different fonts Only Segoe UI Emoji font has the coin symbol in standard Windows. Coin 🪙 codes These are the
Pivotby() is a new and easy way to make PivotTables in Excel. It’s one of two new ‘aggregation functions’ but we prefer to call them fast summary powers. We’ll dig into the detail of what PivotBy() can do. Excel has been able to group or combine data for many years
More common Excel desktop features are being added to the browser based version too. Drag and Drop pasting, Autofill, right-click for more Paste options and also export to text file (CSV) format. All these features will be familiar to Excel desktop (Windows/Mac) users and work in much the same way.
There’s a useful but niche Excel warning about date with two digits for the century. That’s a useful precaution but sometimes the warning is wrong! Those of us around at the turn of the century will remember the Y2K problems and possible mistakes with a date that has only two
Copilot AI makes writing Excel formulas a lot easier but you still need to check the results to make sure Copilot has understood want you want and gives the right answer. There’s a lot of hype and promises about how AI can help make work easier. That’s not as true
Grouping in Excel lets you collapse or expand sections of a sheet so you can see the ‘big picture’ but still drill-down to how totals were made. Another use for grouping is hiding rows or columns from view. You can organize and manage data more effectively by grouping together rows
GPT-2 can be squeezed into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, providing a functional demonstration of the Transformer architecture used in large language models (LLMs). GPT-2 is an older version of the AI system – Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT use GPT-4. Ishan Anand made the 1.25GB Excel file as a low-code introduction
A respected author has a warning about the future of AI using the mixed history of spreadsheet mistakes as an example. Tim Harford is an excellent columnist and author known as “the Undercover Economist”. Check out his “More or Less” podcast for the BBC. In a recent article he argues
Excel has some nice choices for clearing out cells quickly. You can remove the contents, the formatting only or both contents and formatting plus choices for deleting just notes, comments and cleaning up links. As you can see the drop-down menu Home | Editing | Clear offers options such as:
Get rid of the over large ‘AutoSave’ slider on the Word, Excel or PowerPoint status bar. The Autosave button (strictly a label plus slider) takes up a lot of room on the top row of modern Office apps. That space is quite crowded and you need it to fit as
Excel has some useful options for printing less than an entire workbook. Printing a selection, active sheets or just a table. As Office-Watch.com has discovered before, there’s a lot more available in Office than a quick look suggests. See Print options are at File | Print then choose the menu
Hex color codes in Microsoft 365 for Windows and Mac aren’t just good for HTML coders, it’s a fantastic shortcut for anyone managing colors in Word, PowerPoint or other Office documents. Hex color codes are an option in Microsoft 365, Office 2021 and Office 2019. It seems like a simple
Make an unpleasant point with the world’s ugliest color. A ‘drab dark green’ can be used in any Word document, Excel sheet or PowerPoint slide. And we’ll explain the recommended complement color and font. It’s not our opinion, but the market researched result of an effort to find the most