Excel is now 40 years old and it’s capable of some amazing things. Let’s not forget some of the mistakes made by users and serious bugs by Microsoft along the way. First a reminder of some Excel bugs and how Microsoft never seems to learn from their mistakes. Excel bug
Quickly add a Halloween ghost, pumpkin, witches’ hat and more to your Outlook email, Word document or PowerPoint slides which have many in-built icons, graphics and pictures to enhance your “All Hallows’ evening” Icons, Stock Images, Stickers and Illustrations are all available in Microsoft 365 for Windows or Mac. Some
Microsoft Designer makes it easy to create a unique and personal little graphic for Halloween, full size with animation, sticker or clipart Office Watch shows you how to use Designer for Halloween and some of the little tricks needed to make Designer work better. It took only a few minutes
There are simple and legal ways to save money on consumer Microsoft 365 plans, either Personal or Family. Don’t give Microsoft more money than you have to. Microsoft 365 is NOT a normal subscription Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plans are different in three, potentially, money saving ways: A Microsoft
My ‘go to’ way to get random numbers in Excel is the new-ish RandArray because can do everything that Rand() or RandBetween() can and more. RandArray() fills cells with random numbers for as many rows and columns as you want. It’s in Excel 365, Excel 2024 and Excel 2021. The
Adding a picture to PowerPoint text background look great and is easier than you might think. Even better, are many hidden options to adjust the image and position it exactly as you want. Curious about how to create text effects like in the image below? Look no further—if you have
Here’s what you need to know now there’s only a year left for Office 2016 and Office 2019 before their official support ends. End of Support On 14 October 2025, Microsoft will stop making security and bug fixes for Office 2019 and Office 2016 for both Windows and Mac. Office
The Feed feature on Microsoft 365 for business is ending in just a few weeks. It’s being replaced by a less helpful AI feature that doesn’t always help. The Microsoft Feed feature will retire starting November 1, 2024. the Feed feature will be retired from the Microsoft 365 app, affecting
Make it easier to see your current cell in an Excel workbook by dynamically highlighting the selected row, column, cell or headings. Here’s obvious and more subtle highlighting options plus the downside of highlighting, real world tips and debugging tricks if you’re having trouble. There are many different variations on
The latest Windows 11 update will delete Wordpad from the computer. Here’s how to get it back and keep it on Windows. As promised back in February 2024, the Windows 11 24H2 update deletes the Wordpad app. That’s a shame because Wordpad could open Microsoft Word documents (.docx) files offline
There is a way to force the Microsoft 365 Office apps to half-yearly feature updates instead of the usual monthly changes. Microsoft Office 365 for consumers and small businesses (Personal, Family and other plans) automatically updates each month with new and changed features. Some are minor but others are big
Excel can make bar charts in-cell without bothering with the full Chart system. Despite what you might have seen, there’s plenty of options in Excel Data Bars. The usual example of Excel Data Bars has the colored bar in the same cell as the value. In this article we’ll show
It’s not enough to setup two-factor security for your Microsoft account. Make sure your recovery settings are checked and up to date. Do it now before it’s too late. Today we’re helping someone trying to login to their Microsoft account after losing their password. Many, many hours of frustration and
The new version of Microsoft Office 2024 is now on sale to the general public all around the world. This is the ‘perpetual licence’ or single purchase release with no subscription fee. Office 2024 is now available direct from Microsoft.com and some retailers at the same prices as Office 2021.
Here’s how Office Watch reader, Erik and we drilled down into Windows and Word to narrow down the source of the Word language bug. Erik’s tests are with Office 365 on Windows 11 Pro 23H2 but the same behavior has been reported by others in many versions of Word and
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
There’s a simple way to drill into the Windows or Mac clipboard to see what’s saved and how it’s saved. The clipboard is a lot more complicated than most people think. Happily, most of the time the complications don’t matter to us mere humans. Copying text from, say, Word might
Ever wondered what font is used in a famous logo? There’s a fascinating collection of familiar brands with their names replaced with the font name. Emanuele Abrate has made Logofonts, for example the Starbucks logo with the font name, FreightSans Black. Nike uses Futura. WhatsApp with HelveticaNeue. YouTube uses AlternativeGothic
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 |
A short video which brings up some interesting points in the early development history of Microsoft Office, some might surprise you. Microsoft Office started as separately sold products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) and only gradually did they become an integrated package with shared components, consistent interface and some interconnections.
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
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
