You’ve chosen an image, now you have to get it into your Office document. You’d hope there was a single way to do that but, as usual, there’s plenty of options. Outlook has its own special needs, different from Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There’s also privacy and image size issues
Here’s the complete list of non-security updates for Office 2016 for Windows and Office 2013 plus our notes on some bug fixes that caught our eye. As usual, these updates will be pushed to most Office computers automatically. No action is necessary. Unexpected Issues Microsoft is always using different words
It was only a matter of time, the first attack targeting Word for Mac has been released. It’s a simple, almost primitive hack, but it’s out there so beware. There even a ‘silver lining’ of sorts. The document is named U.S. Allies and Rivals Digest Trump's Victory - Carnegie Endowment
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is the latest gallery to put many of their images into the public domain. Now you can, legally, use them to decorate your PowerPoint presentations or Word documents. The Met has released about 375,000 images under Creative Commons Zero CC0 licence. That
Microsoft announced Touch Bar support with much fanfare back in October 2016. Over 3 months later and paying customers are still waiting. There’s been lot of talk about this feature including web sites with ‘tips’ on using Office with the Touch Bar without noting that it’s not got into ‘insider’
To many people the Oxford Comma is an obscure grammar issue but, boy!, can it get people excited. We’ve had lots of messages, pro and con, from readers. This all started because Microsoft dropped one of the options available for the Oxford Comma check. In Office 2016 (Windows or Mac)
A few years ago we had a close look at the Oxford Comma (‘Comma required before last item’, serial comma, Harvard Comma etc) in Word 2013. We’ll now repeat those tests with the new “Microsoft’s own” grammar system to see if there’s any improvement. Office-Watch.com has already noted that the
Microsoft has restored an important missing part of Word 2016 for Windows; the Grammar and Style checking! It’s available for all Word 2016 for Windows users including the ‘perpetual licence’ users who normally don’t get ‘new’ features. This important improvement hasn’t had the usual Redmond hype, presumably because it’s more
The saga of the Comic Sans font never ends. Like the font itself, stories about the font won’t die. Now we have “Comic Sans: The Man Behind the World’s Most Contentious Font” the video. Contentious is a polite word. Hated, Loathed, Despised, Reviled, Detested might be more accurate. It’s not
Office Lens, a way to convert pictures of documents or whiteboards into text is finally available for Apple iPads. Back in 2015 Office-Watch.com demonstrated some of the clever crop and rotation tricks in Office Lens, plus the ‘convert to text’ option shameless stolen from OneNote. Source: Microsoft Images can be
There’s a new type of infected Office document that can bypass some protections and trick people into installing a keylogger on their computer. A keylogger is software that records each keypress and send it to a hacker. They can use that info to get your login details for many sites
“Why doesn’t Word for Mac have a reading view like Word for Windows?” Clare C. Nottingham, UK? Word 2016 for Mac does have a variation on reading view. It’s similar to Word for Windows, but it’s renamed. Look for Focus on the View tab. Word for Windows has Read mode.
Microsoft has released a new version of Office 2016 for Windows to the ‘Slow’ insiders. This means Office 365 customers have more goodies to look forward to in coming months. You’ll need Office 2016 Version 1612 (Build 7628.2048) or above. The new features, as described by Microsoft are: View and
There’s very few security patches this month but the major fix is for Word 2016 for Windows. Alas, as usual, Microsoft tries to overwhelm with a lot of standard phrases leaving key questions unanswered. This months security flaw is similar to many others over the years. A hacked document can
A style is a collection of formatting choices combined under a single name. Any word or even a single letter has a collection of formatting settings as well. Font: size, color, bold/italic/underline/strikethrough/subscript/superscript, highlighting and more. Position: Left, Center, Right, Justified. List: bullet, numbering. Line Spacing, Borders, Background color and a
a look at some commonly used characters used in Office but are missing from the standard keyboard. How to insert symbols on a ‘one-off’ basis or insert quickly for more commonly used characters. Degree mark for temperature. Has no special shortcut but you can make one (see below). Currency symbols.
Another festive season (marketing) tradition is the Pantone ‘Color of the Year’ which gets a lot of media coverage. It gives us an excuse to explain how to convert (as best you can) a Pantone color into something to use in Microsoft Office. Pantone colors don’t have a direct match
There are long-standing but hidden parts to AutoText that’s worth checking out – the field codes. Two Word field codes apply to AutoText: {AutoText } – inserts or updates the named AutoText field automatically. {AutoTextList } makes a menu of some or all AutoText entries to select from. These field
Office 2016 for Windows will soon support scalable vector graphics (SVGs). Preview/Insiders can try them now and it’ll be available to all Office 365 subscribers in 2017. That means you’ll be able to make your documents look even better with vector-based SVG files that won’t pixelate when increased in size.
Microsoft is gradually adding to Office some interesting new Ink related features; Replay and Math. Rewind and Replay Until now drawings or ‘ink’ in Office documents has been static and fixed, much like real ink. OneNote Mobile for Windows 10 is the first Office app to make ink additions animated.
It’s that time of year again and Office-Watch.com has a little fun seeing how Microsoft Word’s dictionary compares to the winners of the Scripps (US) National Spelling Bee. Surprisingly, Word did better in 2016 than past years, despite the words being harder. Still, no chance of Word reaching the finals
Emoji are those funny little icons that appear in text/SMS messages and some emails. Emoji have become quite the thing. More are being added to mobile phones, especially Apple devices. Originally intended to show emotions in text messages, they’ve expanded to other uses and overlap with many common symbols from
Editing an image in Office is not a way to hide the original details or redact a photo. Images in a document can be fully redacted by replacing the image with black box (or other full color block). But what if only want to hide/redact part of the image? That’s
This tweet shows there’s plenty of ways to use Microsoft Word. I mean, who wants all that hassle of opening up the paper tray when software can deliver a single page right to your hands? And nicely warmed up too!