Office Watch reader, John Hoffmann has some more detail on variable fonts, supported in Windows 10 and Windows 11 Variable fonts are a single package that includes many variations (Light, Heavy etc), instead of having separate font files for each variant. That takes up less disk space (important on tablet
It’s time again to put the mighty brains and resources of Microsoft against the best and brightest of American youth. Yet again, the kids put Microsoft Word to shame. Each year, Office-Watch.com get the word lists from the finals of the US Scripps National Spelling Bee and runs them through
An overdue and very welcome addition to OneDrive for Office 365 customers is password protected sharing links. Until now, you could send a link to a OneDrive stored file or folder but there was no control over who used that link. If the link ‘escaped’ to other people, they could
New and improved ‘Pro’ fonts are a lesser known part of the April 2018 update to Windows 10. You can install, free, updated alternatives for Windows standard fonts like Arial, Georgia, Gill Sans and Verdana. Windows 10 now supports ‘Variable Type’ fonts where a single font file contains many variations
The North Carolina State Bar is proposing attorneys get an hour of computer training, including Microsoft Office, as part of their annual Continuing Legal Education (CLE). Only one US State, Florida, has a computer component of their current CLE. Amazing! In Florida, lawyers have to get three hours of technical
It seems every other business is using the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as an excuse to sell something, so Office Watch has joined the bandwagon … with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Our book Keep Calm with Microsoft Office has sample Word documents and PowerPoint slides
It’s nice to see journalists used advanced Microsoft Word skills to keep government officials and politicians on their toes. CBC News, Canada received an early copy of a Manitoba government report on mental health. The final report was officially released a few hours later. The smart reporters at CBC compared
Another month, another set of security bugs in Microsoft Office. It’s Microsoft’s version of Groundhog Day. The May 2018 dump of patches involves 102 updates covering: Office versions from Office 2010 to the latest Office 2016 Core Office features Word Excel Sharepoint and Project server. Most people don’t need to
Microsoft has announced upcoming new features in Office for Windows, Office 365. We’ll be looking at them in detail but here’s Microsoft’s summary. We’ll start with the important rollout information, these features aren’t in Office yet, they are coming to Insiders first and later to regular users. Here’s the Microsoft
In case you thought making a Word or Excel virus attack was hard, think again. The ‘Rubella Macro Builder’ will sell you a DIY kit with updates for just US$40 a month. The virus maker will take you through the steps to make a hacked Word or Excel document that
It’s a simple question – How can I delete a blank page in Microsoft Word? The answer isn’t so simple because there are many reasons for Word to add another page and various tricks to getting rid of them. The most common type of extra page is at the end
Jeff Bezos doesn’t like PowerPoint or any other slideshow system at Amazon meetings. That’s what leapt out at us from his 2017 Letter to Amazon shareholders (published in April 2018). “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos.” Those memos
In the UK there’s been a lot of laughs and some red faces about a money raising letter ‘signed’ by the Conservative Prime Minister to a ” Mr Youmustbe F*ckingjoking ” and sent to a pensioner. It’s easy to laugh but anyone who has done large mailings knows that it’s
Will R. an Office-Watch.com reminded us of a trap when dealing with .doc and .docx files. “I opened a command prompt and did a del *.doc. Imagine my surprise when it deleted both .doc and .docx files (I have backups). ” Firstly, a teacher’s gold star plus wise owl stamp to Will
Last Friday, Office 365 customers in Europe and especially the UK had to stop working as the Microsoft hosting servers stopped working. When trying to use email online, users only saw an ‘AADSTS90033’ error, and the message: “Service is temporarily unavailable. Please retry later.” As usual, Microsoft’s communications were mixed.
Should you even bother bulk converting old documents (.doc .xls .ppt) into the newer Office formats (.docx .xlsx .pptx etc.)? It’s tempting to look at your older documents (doc etc) and think about converting them into the newer Office formats. There’s some advantages to conversion but it’s more difficult than
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times … ignore or delete any .DOC .XLS .PPT files you get via email or shared. The main carrier of virus infection is Microsoft Office documents, a fact that Microsoft doesn’t like to talk about. What Microsoft doesn’t say is
What should you do when Microsoft asks to see one of your documents? Submit the files or not? There’s no easy answer when Microsoft asks to see a file from your computer for their anti-virus system, Windows Defender. Do you send the files or not? This can happen with Defender
A recent New York Times article about Microsoft Word has good information but the headline is quite wrong. The article is called “How to Format Documents While Barely Lifting a Finger” so we expected a piece about how to reformat a document using themes or styles. Instead it’s about dictation
It’s been a busy few weeks for Richard Appiah Akoto the Ghanaian teacher who taught Microsoft Word with only a blackboard. Mr Akoto was flown to Singapore for a Microsoft Education conference where he received a standing ovation. Quite something for his first trip outside Ghana. “I wanted to teach
You’ve all heard about “The Cloud” as if everyone knows what it is. It’s clear from recent reader messages that not everyone knows about The Cloud. Or they think they know. Or they don’t realize how much the cloud can and will do. Office-Watch.com explains the cloud and how it
Timeline was a new feature in Windows 10. It was a way to see which documents and files you’ve opened across all your devices. What you won’t hear is that Office already has a similar feature. The Office team has already synchronized the Open / Recent Documents lists across Word,
Here’s some better VBA code for converting a private document (contract etc) into one with anonymous words. A useful trick if you’re trying to fix a Word formatting problem but can’t share the document. Legal numbering problems is a common issue that this macro can help with. Office-Watch.com has already
A rare factual error in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver that, amazingly, is related to Microsoft Word. In an item about The White House Calligrapher, Oliver said the job was easy because there’s already a font with the job title in Microsoft Word. And he shows a Word for
