Document Properties is one of those long-standing parts of Office that is worth another look. It can be quite useful and not always in the ways that Microsoft intends. At first, document properties looks like a fixed and rigid feature with limited use. However it can be used in much
While Microsoft Word lumbers along, there’s some interesting and genuinely creative word processors out there. We’re not talking about direct rivals to Microsoft Office 2013 like OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Kingsoft Office Free, Google Docs, iWork or earlier versions of Office. Instead we’ll look at software that takes a very different approach to
Eventually we all need to find a deleted document or a past version of an existing document. You never know when it’ll be needed or for which document. There’s many options available for keeping older versions of a document or file, most of them you have to setup in advance.
Choosing the sort type is really important and Word doesn’t always guess correctly. Office-Watch.com reader Peter M. reminds us that choose the sort type is really important: Text, Number or Date. “I just thought it worth pointing out that, for example 8, 70, 600 would sort in one order as
The Insert | Symbol feature in Office is overdue for an overhaul. Our venture into the new Unicode symbols and symbol fonts highlighted how much work Microsoft needs to do on this part of Office. Insert | Symbol has changed for a long time and many versions of Office. Here’s
A funny example of how you can’t trust the spelling and grammar checks in Word. We laughed at this sign, seen in a Tesco’s supermarket in the UK. Guess what – according to Word 2013 that entire document has no grammar mistakes at all! Even ‘incontinence’ doesn’t get a contextual
What is Delve and what does it mean for Microsoft Office? At the recent Microsoft conference there was mention of Microsoft Delve. But what the ?^%$ is ‘Delve’? It’s an enhanced search tool for your documents and online info. Not just standard Office documents but also videos, audio, links to
How can you get the new Unicode symbols in Office documents? There’s plenty of new symbols included in the Unicode 7.0 standard, here’s how to get them into your Office documents. Most fonts do NOT have all the Unicode characters, after all, there are over 133,000 of them. There are
Unicode adds more characters to an already large list. Unicode has added another 2,834 new characters in the Unicode 7.0 specification, mostly support for 23 new scripts. That takes the total to a whopping 113,021 characters! But we’ll have to wait for these new characters to appear automatically in Office,
Some great tips on table formatting. Joey Cherdarchuk has a nice posting on a very different table styling to the type that Microsoft prefers. Under the banner ‘Clear Off the Table’ he suggests getting rid of gridlines and colors to simplify the look of tables. In his example, Joey takes a
Office 2013 has some clever tricks when you touch the screen. Tony G writes: ” … there are some subtle features in Office 2013. I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 and I have observed that the right click menus and some other features are different when called up by the
Microsoft Word does badly against the National Spelling Bee joint champions. The Scripps US National Spelling Bee is over for another year with unprecedented joint winners Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe. Congratulations to both winners who were commendably gracious while sharing the trophy. Like last year, we were interested in
How to change Word so it’s more to the Game of Thrones author’s liking. George R. R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series among other wonderful books* has revealed that he uses an old DOS program (WordStar 4) on a standalone computer to write. That’s great for him
Microsoft’s gift to history Microsoft has released to the public domain the source code and documents for an early version of Word, Word 1.1a for Windows, as well as DOS 1.1 and 2.0. The Word for Windows has both C source code and some documentation. The documents are in original
Sometimes Office Service Packs add bugs as well as fixing them. The assumption by Microsoft and the hope of Office customers is that Service Packs for Microsoft Office will fix bugs on the software. Some of those bugs have been disclosed by Microsoft, others they’ve kept secret from customers. Problem
A quick look over the Word for iPad features, Here’s a look at the major features in Word for iPad, looking over the four main tabs. The buttons will be familiar in most cases though the underlying menus/galleries are different and limited compared to Word for Windows or Mac. Shameless
Why are some Word 2013 users not seeing ‘Welcome Back’ messages. As we’ve been mentioning, Word 2013 has a feature to put you back at the last place you were reading in a document … a little flag appears like this: That registry key will only store details for documents
How to block the ‘Welcome back’ message in Word 2013. Last week Office-Watch.com told you about how Word 2013 document details are saved without disclosure in the Windows Registry. Many readers asked how the feature can be turned off. A reasonable request in the circumstances but not according to Microsoft.
The more we dig, the more places we find trace of your Office document history. Recently we told you about some places where Word stores details of what documents you’ve opened, often much longer than you’d expect and with no direct way to remove these details. Yet another location is
A free way to show Microsoft Office help in other languages Office Screentips is a way to show tooltips for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other programs. This free addon from Microsoft doesn’t interfere with how the programs work or the wording of the tabs and ribbons. Only the tooltips
Can you use the free Getty images in your PowerPoint presentations? Getty Images, has announced that 35 million of their images are now available free. Does that mean you can use them in your PowerPoint presentations or Word documents? Sadly, no Getty Images is now allowing free embedding to some
Your document actions are still stored even after you’ve told Office 2013 to remove them. Go to the File | Open pane in Word 2013, right-click and choose ‘Remove from List’ will delete any indication that a particular document/s had been opened. Right? Wrong – Office 2013 retains information about
Your document activity shows up in the registry in more places than expected. Jason Hale has done a nice job checking out where Office 2013 leaves footprints showing what documents you’ve worked on. Office programs like Word, Excel and PowerPoint have MRU – Most Recently Used – lists that let
You’d be surprised how Office 2013 knows ‘Where you left off’. One of the nice little features in Office 2013 is the ‘Welcome Back .. Pick up where you left off’ tag that appears when you re-open a document. Click on that tag and you’ll move to the last place
