Tired of Comic Sans but still want a casual, friendly font? Microsoft Office has better built-in alternatives or there’s many other fonts that keeps the charm without the cringe. Here’s a quick guide to upgrading your documents. The Wall Street Journal has a history of Comic Sans, the font that
Microsoft 365 Copilot is improving their document summary feature in Word across Windows, Mac, and the web for some customers. Still no mention of the feature that Word Copilot users really want! Copilot Summary appears at the top of Word documents, whether you like it or not. It can be
Check out this clever Python tool that converts Word documents, Excel sheets, PowerPoint decks and PDFs into a plain text format. Markitdown is a Python library released by Microsoft via Github, converts many documents into nearly plain text (called MarkDown). It’ll convert all these formats into text. Some conversions need
There’s a special new color called ‘Olo’ developed by scientists in Berkely, California. The nearest match to Olo is possible in Microsoft Office, including Word and PowerPoint. Olo can only be seen with help from a special laser that fires the color into the eye. It’s claimed to extend human
The Startup Boost feature coming to Word 365 is really a sly trick by Microsoft. It’s a trick that anyone can do with any Office app and any version of Office. Startup Boost starts the app but hides it away. Word lurks in the background until the user clicks on
Startup Boost is a new way to make Microsoft Word 365 start faster. Here’s how it works and how to disable it. Startup Boost is a little tech trickery. Word 365 isn’t really getting faster, instead it’s being started in the background (aka preload) where it’ll lurk until needed. In
Office Watch reader Steve G is having a problem in Word. The F9 key isn’t updating fields in a Word document. He suspects a buggy patch of Windows or Office. Here’s how to find the source of the Function key or any keypress problem and fix it. Hint – it’s
Microsoft 365 has introduced ‘Kermit,’ a new typeface specifically crafted to make reading more accessible and enjoyable for young audiences. Kermit the font aims to address the challenges faced by early readers, including those with dyslexia but has uses for everyone. Developed in collaboration with the type design studio Underware
Copilot could become a ‘toxic brand‘ because of pushy way Microsoft is adding it to Microsoft Office. We have some ‘modest proposals’ for how Microsoft can improve their AI offering and keep paying customers onside. Or, put another way, some grumbles about the way Microsoft is force-feeding Copilot to its
Maybe you’ve seen the little blue men appearing in the margins of your Word documents? They are Accessibility Recommendations and, yes, there is a way to get rid of them. There are two ways to hide these little creatures, both take a little digging. Right-click on any Accessibility icon then
Copilot is now appearing on the Microsoft Word title bar as part of the combined search and help, now called “Copilot Search”. The Copilot ‘ads’ for blank documents keep changing too. In the latest Word 365 Insiders builds the Search box (which combines Find, Help and broader Searches) is now
Paste text into Microsoft Word without unwanted fonts, colors, or styles can save time and frustration. There’s a (relatively) new keyboard shortcut to do that directly. This guide breaks down all the changed keyboard options made to make room for a Paste Text Only shortcut in Word on Windows and
There’s a little undocumented surprise on the right-click menu. Tucked away at the top is ‘Search the menus’ help. Sadly the underlying help system is still woefully inadequate. Right-click in a document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook) and the top item isn’t ‘Cut’ but a “Search the menus” box. This
Microsoft has introduced a new feature allowing users to upload images directly from their mobile devices to Microsoft 365 Copilot. A nice trick but there are other ways to do the same thing, including two from Microsoft itself! The idea is to streamline tasks such as transcribing handwritten notes, summarizing
The Oxford English Dictionary has a list of new English words for 2025. We’ve checked to see if the Microsoft Word dictionary understands all these new terms. Some of the ‘new’ words are very familiar (‘load’, ‘class’ or ‘terror’) but with new meanings. Others are quite new (‘gigil’, ‘ludraman’ or
Microsoft is adding yet another push for customers to save all their documents to OneDrive. This time inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. OneDrive is Microsoft’s preferred place to save files and they cite various benefits to cloud storage. The company ignores the downsides to OneDrive and the right of
Trying to convert a Microsoft Publisher (.pub) file to Word (.docx)? We test Microsoft’s official recommendation, exporting the Publisher file to PDF and then importing that PDF into Word. It technically works but produces poor results in real-world tests. The conversion often ends up nearly unusable for typical editing tasks.
The reason Microsoft Word prefers ‘corporate speak’, phrases and language but there is more than one way to change Word’s grammar and style suggestions to suit you. Quite often on social media there are complaints about Microsoft Word’s grammar and style suggestions like this one. “MS Word suddenly dislikes the
Check out this headline ‘ramen’ font that looks great and has a clever name – Times New Ramen. Seine Kongruangkit made a font from photos of noodles, nifty use of Photoshop and an undying love of Ramen noodles <g>. Times New Ramen – you have to love it, just for
Shapes, images, and other items can be grouped together and often should be in Word, PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office apps. When you group shapes or objects, you can move, resize, rotate, flip them all at once, as if they were a single object. If you’ve ever had trouble moving
Don’t be scared of Master Documents – just very, very careful. Master Documents is useful and sometimes essential but it’s not the most stable or reliable part of Microsoft Word. What is a Master Document? In Microsoft Word, a Master Document is a Word document which has links to other
Back in 2015 we were amazed and dismayed to discover a privacy gap in Microsoft Office. Seven years later Microsoft has done nothing to fix or warn customers about. The problem is with images inserted into Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). The image ‘meta-data’ including GPS coordinates are retained with
Microsoft is testing a free version of Office for Windows with limited features, an important requirement and ads to ‘pay’ for the software. It’s three Microsoft 365 for Windows apps but with restrictions on what it can do and where documents are saved. If you download from this page at
Microsoft 365 apps are changing the ‘Pinned’ document list to ‘Favorites’ but why is Microsoft bothering at all? For many versions of Office/Microsoft 365 you’ve been able to keep regularly used files in a ‘Pinned’ list for faster access. The Pin icon lets you add a file to that list
