How to quickly fix display problems in Microsoft Office. When Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook don’t show up on the screen correctly. It doesn’t happen often but occasionally Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook open but as all grey. Clicking around the screen displays just a ribbon or menu but not
Outlook can record appointments in the Calendar but it can also record ‘recurring’ appointments for things that happen on a regular schedule. We’ll show you how to make a repeating appointment and suggest some ways it can be used that might not be immediately obvious. Repeating Appointments 101 To make
Microsoft’s Surface Earbuds are out now and have some extras for Word, Outlook and PowerPoint users. When we look past the hype there’s more than a few special conditions to keep in mind. Surface Earbuds have been some time coming, we first mentioned them about nine months ago. Now they
Animated GIF support is coming (finally!) to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. We discovered the new feature in a new Insiders build, Microsoft hasn’t announced anything. Here’s an animated GIF playing in Word 365. Paste or Insert an animated GIF now has play/pause buttons included (bottom left corner). The animation
Some useful new features have now been rolled out to the public versions of Microsoft 365 (Office 365) for May 2020. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook all have improvements. Two we’ve already told you about, the other is new. Stock Images, Cutout People and Stickers Or what Microsoft calls “New
‘Tell me’ help box is now in Microsoft/Office 365 for Mac as a way to find features on the ribbon. However it continues to have the same limitations that are in the Windows version. Look for the lightbulb and ‘Tell me’ box beside the ribbon tabs. Type in a phrase
A UK politician got caught sending an email with optional stock phrases and guides still in the message. Is there a simple way to stop that happening? Most organizations have standard wording and stock phrases which is understandable but there’s a risk those helpers are left in an email or
The promise of shared Outlook signatures is a little closer. Microsoft has announced that signatures in Outlook for Windows will be saved to the cloud from June 2020. At the moment, customers have to manually copy email signatures between Outlook’s or use a folder sync method to share the signature
Chris Pratt released a video showing 51,000 emails being deleted from his computer. Are they really completely lost? We doubt it. On Instagram we see his shock as the Trash folder gradually counts down the messages being removed from his computer. That’s supposedly the 51,000 Inbox messages that he’d promised
When Outlook displays a ‘This will be permanently deleted’ it’s not really deleted. For anyone interested in the gory details or testing themselves, here’s how we checked that out. It’s standard database procedure for a deleted record simply to be flagged ‘deleted’ rather than fully erased or overwritten. Tagging as
Outlook for Windows and Mac can easily add appointments or events using times from another time zone. They’ll show up and remind you in your local time. That’s really handy for global meetings or live streams scheduled in other locations. Enter the Outlook appointment or event using the time and
The Drawing Tools in Word 365 is now larger with separate tools like Lasso and Eraser now in a single combined gallery. There are other changes and new limitations on the Drawing Tools gallery, some of them undocumented. Compare that to the old Draw tab where the Lasso, Eraser and
Office 365 hosted organizations will soon get protection from Reply All email storms. Reply All storms happen with large distributions lists (e.g. whole company or division). Too many people hit ‘Reply All’ sending thousands of messages to already cluttered mailboxes. Now, if there’s too much ‘Reply All’ activity in a
Elon Musk and partner have named their child X Æ A-12 (no kidding) how do you type Æ in Microsoft Word and Office generally. The child’s name doesn’t trigger any spelling or grammar errors in Word. No squiggly lines. What is Æ ? Æ or æ is a a-e ligature
Just like the Melissa virus, looking back to the Love Bug virus of May 2000 shows how much has changed and how much has remained the same. Much the same story as the Melissa virus that came out a few months before. Love Bug or I Love You was a
Format Painter in Office will work to copy formatting between shapes which is very useful for complex Gradients. But they don’t always format copy in the way you’d expect. We’re obliged to Office-Watch.com reader, Lorelei, for pointing out that Format Painter can copy gradient fills in most but not all
Word has six shortcuts to make horizontal lines, here’s how they work, change them, color the lines and how to stop lines when they get out of control. All six line shortcuts There are six horizontal line shortcuts. For each one type the same character three times at the start
Over Easter there was a three day serious breakdown in Outlook.com for Australian users among many. The problems were first acknowledged by Microsoft about 1pm Sydney time on Saturday 11 April and continued for around three days! Mostly Aussies were affected with pockets of trouble in Europe and USA. A
The April 2020 security fixes for Microsoft Office come with a warning that some VBA code will stop working. There are workarounds to let some references through. The KB4557055 security fix blocks VBA references that link to Internet or intranet sources or have been downloaded from the Internet. That will
Find and add the Indian flag into Office documents, Word, Excel or PowerPoint, then use some Office picture tools to enhance the image. The same help applies for any other national flag, just look for a different source. Get the Indian Flag Image There are many, many copies of the Indian flag available. We’ve opted for
Here’s a readable and searchable version of the Microsoft 365 summary table that came with Microsoft’s announcement of the rebranding from Office 365 to Microsoft 365. It shows the differences between ‘free’ Office (with a Microsoft account), Microsoft 365 Personal (formerly Office 365 Personal) and Microsoft 365 Family (formerly Office
Choose the best online call and conference service to keep in touch with the people in your life. We’ve looked at all the major online voice and video calling/conferencing options and ranked according to ease of use, access to all-comers and reliability across slow Internet connections. Leaving aside privacy considerations,
A simple and cheap way to keep kids amused and give them something to talk to grandparents and others during online calls. Grandma/pa starts with some trivia questions for the kids to research, sent by email. Later in the day there’s an online call when grandma/grandpa can catch up on
Here’s how to call someone using Zoom or answer a call, then some of things you can do in a call. Zoom makes a blurry distinction between a call (between two people) and a meeting (more than two). It’s even possible to start/accept a Zoom call while in a Zoom
