If you want to change the background color on an email, Outlook’s option to do that has changed name and location. At least Windows users can change background color, Outlook for Mac users lost this option at few years ago! A color background can be nice in an email but
How to insert either of the Tilde ~ ∼ symbols into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Tilde ∼ symbol is easy on some keyboards but for other keyboards, there’s no specific key for Tilde. The two Tilde symbols There are
Microsoft loves tinkering with WordArt and in Word 2010 the entire feature was expanded to Text Effects and split into two features on different tabs. Here’s how to find all the old WordArt features plus a lot more. Back in Office 2007 there was one WordArt feature on the Insert
Microsoft’s Clippy, the source of many jokes and frustration is being trademarked, almost 25 years after it was released in Office 97. Why? Hopefully not the first step in a revival of the hated little paperclip? Clippy was the overly persistent helper in Office 97 that kept popping up at
The new look Office 365 (and Office 2021) is coming. For the moment you might have the option to try it or not. Here’s how. Look for the megaphone If a megaphone appears on an Office app title bar, you can try the new look Office for Windows. Click on
We’ve looked at design and typography in 2001: A Space Odyssey and how to use the ‘2001’ look in Microsoft Office. Two readers asked about some curious kerning in our version of the title font.Maybe you’re not interested in the fine detail of the text in a fifty year old
There are many ways to add common sound effects and background music to your PowerPoint videos. But what if you wanted audio from an online source like YouTube? You can copy from online to an audio file, save it to your computer then link into a slide deck. There are many tools to ‘rip’ a video with audio from
Type the Up Down Arrow ↕ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Up Down Arrow ↕ symbol is a vertical line with arrowheads on both ends, pointing up and down. How Up Down Arrow ↕ looks in different fonts. Here’s some examples of how Up Down Arrow ↕ looks in common Office fonts. Up
Pantone has announced their “Color of the Year” for 2022 and, as usual, we’ll explain how to use those exact colors in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. For 2022, the new color will also be appearing in Microsoft products with a nice PowerPoint template with extra color palettes. The color
The Financial Modelling World Cup or Excel esports Final was held a few days ago and you can watch the whole event. There were eight finalists from the USA, Canada, UK, India and Australia. If you can’t get enough of Excel champs at work, check out the earlier rounds. Last
In January 2022 there are important changes to the volume licence Business and Enterprise plans for Microsoft 365, Office and Windows. Monthly plans will cost 20% more, making annual plans more enticing. Microsoft says “introduces a monthly term option that will enable partners to provide customers with flexibility at a premium price,” However, the option to
Microsoft is increasing the prices on their main Business and Enterprise plans ranging from 9% to 25% effective 1 March 2022 now extended to 14 March 2022. Of course, Microsoft hasn’t stated the price rises in such stark terms. They give the increases as monthly prices (e.g $1 a month)
Insert the Black Chess Queen ♛ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Black Chess King ♛ symbol is useful for users that want to represent the chess piece as a symbol, rather than an image. Or just a generic crown icon. How Black Chess Queen ♛ looks in different fonts. Examples of
Microsoft is offering a discount price on Microsoft 365 to people with pirated or illegal Microsoft Office. As usual with Microsoft, there are ‘gotchas’ and unknowns with their special offer. People using illegal or pirated Microsoft Office might be seeing a message like this in their Office apps. The message
The Ink Editor button in Word 365 has gone, replaced with the ‘Action Pen’ on the Draw tab in Word 365. Some of the ink gestures have quietly changed since the original release of the Action Pen. The ‘Action Pen’ is now on right-side of the Draw tab | Drawing
Office Background are the patterns at top right of the title bar in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office apps. Here’s the ‘Underwater’ and ‘Doodle circles’ backgrounds, just two of the 14 you can choose from. Office Backgrounds are fairly pointless decoration. They were added to Office 2013 to almost universal apathy outside the Microsoft Hype Bubble™. There is one
Rename Word styles or give them alternative names/aliases. Sometimes you’ve got no choice but to make an alias because the original style name is fixed. Any style can have an alternative name which appears in the Style Gallery. That’s a useful trick because there’s limited space for the style name
The Word Style Gallery doesn’t have to be left the way Microsoft supplies it. Fix the Gallery to make it work better for you. Microsoft Office often has menus and options aren’t designed for the customer. Instead they are setup for Microsoft’s needs in ‘out of the box’ demonstrations or
Microsoft Word, since 2007, has developed a confusing mish-mash of lists, galleries and dialog boxes to view, select and manage styles. We’ve received a few questions about finding style options so this Office-Watch.com article will try to make sense of all fourteen places. It’s a guided tour to the various
The gradual rollout of the new look Office for Windows (Microsoft 365 and Office 2021) continues. More users, but not all, can now try the revamped Office interface. We’ve had a lot of feedback from Office Watchers about the new look. Some approve, others definitely don’t. Some users are eager
Office 365 for Windows is getting the Mica effect in a coming release for Windows 11 users. What is Mica? How will affect Microsoft Office users? We’ll explain Mica ‘material’ (Microsoft’s pretentious noun), show you what it does and how (little) it matters to Office users. Also how to get
The Office 365 / 2021 for Windows “new look” is mostly about the Quick Access Toolbar with some nasty surprises and confusion, especially for novices. Let’s dig into the detail of the QAT changes, “fix” it to suit you and how the changes aren’t finished yet and not fully thought
Type the Approximately Equal To ≅ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Approximately Equal To ≅ symbol with a curvy line above the usual = symbol is commonly used within Mathematics to refer to approximate equality between two values, congruence
Excel Charts can be even better looking by completely replacing those plain color blocks with pictures. We’ve already shown how to overlay an Excel Chart with an image now we’ll replace the block with a picture. Although commonly differentiated by differing colors like this, how about we look at different images instead? First, click on the plot area within the column, here we’ve
