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
We’ll start 2017 with 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
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!
The US Scripps National Spelling Bee is over for another year with another tie between two amazing young people. Both winners are impressive to us mere mortals but also compared to Microsoft Office. As we have for the last few years, we’ve made a list of the championship words to
How can you send an Office document safely and securely to another person? A simple question with no simple answer. Who you are guarding against? A random snooper at the recipient’s end who accidentally finds the document, or someone targeting your or your data, such as a commercial rival,
Almost a year ago we sarcastically complained about the lack of words from ‘Game of Thrones’ in the Office dictionary. We didn’t expect Microsoft to do anything out it and, if they did, thought they’d tell customers. Slate magazine has noticed that many Westeros names now don’t get a red
The days of carrying a separate presentation ‘clicker’ may be over as Microsoft brings it’s Office remote app to Android. Office Remote turns a smartphone into a controller for a PowerPoint presentation, Excel worksheets (including Slicers and PivotTables) plus Word documents. Image supplied by Microsoft. The smartphone connects to your
Microsoft has released an Android version of their Office Lens app. What is Office Lens? Office Lens main feature is an image to text conversion. You can take a photo of a document, receipt etc and it’ll convert into plain text (OCR) for use in OneNote, Word etc. It comes
Yet one more for the list of things you’d never thought you’d see from Microsoft. They now have a deal with major Android phone and tablet makers to include Office software in some of their products. That’s right, Microsoft is paying companies to put their software on non-Windows devices. At
After a preview period, Microsoft Delve has gone public for Office 365 Business users. More links into Delve have also been announced. Delve is a new form of search tool which bring in relevant data from a selection of sources. Some are private like a Sharepoint site, corporate address book
We love words, especially old words that have been largely forgotten. This Valentine’s Day there’s a short item in The Independent UK about 10 old words that modern romantics might like to revive. We tried them out in Office 2013 to see if the in-built dictionary could cope. No real surprise that
The BBC has an interesting piece on the effect of AutoCorrect and word suggestions for quicker typing. I dunno about ‘boring’ but AutoCorrect in Office does have a downside – it makes you and your typing fingers stupid. If you type stupdi into Word it will fix it to
One of the automatically installed patches for Office causes a new bug! Ouch. The new bugs aren’t common but even so, they are embarrassing. You can find the details under the Knowledge Base article headed ““Cannot insert object” error in an ActiveX custom Office solution after you install the MS14-082
When you type or paste a web link into Office, it normally converts it into a web link automatically. But occasionally that feature doesn’t work right. We found one example when researching the famous artist Roy Lichtenstein and one of his best known works. Click on the image to see
While delving into the details of Office document properties, we found some curious anomalies. They aren’t major but worth keeping in mind if you use document properties in Word documents. When you enter a document property it should just add the text and the same document property will show the
Microsoft Office has Ebola … meaning it’s in the supplied dictionaries for Word 2013, Word 2010 and Word 2007. As a proper noun, the disease name has a capital letter. Without it, Word marks it as a spelling error. The surname Pooley isn’t in the dictionary and, as we’ll see,
