If you look in folders that contain Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) you might see the occasional .tmp file. What are they? Could they be useful? How to look inside. Can they be safely deleted? The quick answers are: probably Word or Office document remnants, could be handy to recover
The much unloved Office Clippy will never leave us, thanks to a Javascript library that makes the annoying little critter possible on any web page. We wondered how the WordArt online site got the animated Clippy effect on the web page. Turned out that it wasn’t hard. There’s a free
You might think that the hyphen is a simple small horizontal line … but no. There are NINE different hyphen or short horizontal line choices in Microsoft Word. Let’s start with the standard hyphen, actually called a ‘Hyphen-Minus‘ with ASCII code 45. See Hyphens and Hyphenation, all the options in
Add a keyboard shortcut for any Microsoft Word style including Headings and Normal style. A shortcut is faster than clicking on the ribbon anytime you want to apply a style. For commonly used styles it’s easier and faster to use a keyboard shortcut. Microsoft even supplies a few with Word,
Make an image using the original Microsoft Office WordArt designs, courtesy of some clever web work by Mike McMillan. Or use the better WordArt that’s still available in modern Microsoft Word. Does anyone miss the original WordArt from the 1990’s? Now you can get it back https://makewordart.com/ recreates, with scary
Your deadline is in four hours, you’ve got pages to write and BAM! a letter key breaks on your keyboard …. What do you do? There are at least six different workarounds available in Word, Windows and Mac. A broken key happened to Colin Chambers, a University of Buffalo student
Which version of alphabetical order does Microsoft Word use? I thought that alphabetical order was, well, alphabetical order. That’s what I was taught at school and apparently I was taught wrong. There are at least three ways, two used by dictionaries, another by Microsoft and that’s for English alone! Reading Sue
We already talked about the Microsoft Word ‘Shrink One Page‘ feature and its limitations. Here’s suggestions for how to move a few orphaned lines from the top of a page in more subtle and effective ways. Obviously, every document is different so the tricks you use depend on the situation.
Empty or unwanted pages just after a Word table are especially annoying. Trying to select anything after the table can be difficult unless you know the tricks. Here’s the common problem in Word. A table goes to the end of a document or section but another empty page is added.
Adding comments to Microsoft Word documents isn’t just for groups, use them yourself for your own reminders and side-comments while you’re working on a doc. Word has a feature to let you add ‘side’ comments to documents – comments that don’t show up in the final document, don’t effect the
You can translate a Pantone PMS code or name into something Microsoft Office; Word, Excel or PowerPoint understands? Sometimes you’re given a specific color using the Pantone color scheme. Most commonly this happens for a corporate logo. The Ford car company specifies ‘PMS 294C’ for their blue logo. McDonald’s uses
An IF statement might sound like a complicated thing that programmers do, but it’s actually fairly easy to do in Excel. An IF statement basically puts something into a cell depending on certain conditions – if A is true, put X in this cell. You can even use what’s called a nested
Changing the case upper/lower for text through all of a Word document is easy because the default Find / Replace settings don’t need changing. We’ve already talked about the manual Change Case options in Word, now we’ll move onto bulk changes. Sometimes the spelling of a product or brand has
There are many free alternatives to the overused Comic Sans font. The Wall Street Journal has a history of Comic Sans, the font that people love to hate, complete with an interview with its creator, Vincent Connare. It turns out that Comic Sans was born from the unlamented Microsoft Bob
Here’s how to convert an older .doc .xls or .ppt into a safer and smaller .docx .xlsx .pptx even if you don’t have Microsoft Office. Any smart computer user is wary of documents received in the old .doc .xls .ppt formats because they are regularly used to transmit viruses. The
What is an RTF document, is it safe, how to use in Microsoft Word and why is it still being used? “I’m looking for a job and many employers are asking for my resume in RTF format. How do I do that and why can’t I just use a Word
Word’s in-built Heading styles come with some shortcut keys, but not enough for most people. Here’s how to add shortcuts to all Word heading styles not just the three that Microsoft does. For many versions, Word has default Heading styles ‘Heading 1’ ‘Heading 2’ etc. They are a quick way
How to change Word zoom to your preferred Zoom settings. Ray R writes … “I have been having some vision problems lately and have found that using Word’s zoom dialog to increase the displayed font size without changing it in the document or email (I use Word as my email
Thunderbirds are go! They live on in Microsoft Office, ready to serve as a retro look in your Word documents or PowerPoint slides. The passing of Gerry Anderson was sad news. Mr Anderson enthralled millions of kids (and more than a few adults) with his groundbreaking shows like Captain Scarlet
Windows and Office gives you Arial font when you ask for Helvetica, here’s why, how it’s done and how to control font substitutions in both Microsoft Word and Windows generally. We recently told you about the Helvetica font in Windows and Microsoft Office – or rather it’s noticeable absence. Microsoft
Drop Caps are very old fashioned, there’s space left for them in the oldest printed books in the world, the Gutenberg Bibles. You can do the same thing, a lot more easily, in Microsoft Word. In this Office-Watch.com article we’ll go beyond the simple ‘how to’ for Drop Cap. There’s
Microsoft Word can print the selected parts of a document, not just the whole document, Select the part of the document you want to print. Word won’t let you print separated selections (made using the Ctrl key). Go to File | Print (or Ctrl + P) and from the Settings
Which font to use if emulating a true laundry care or clothing text label in Word, PowerPoint or other Office program? We’ve already talked about how to put standard laundry care symbols in Word, Excel or PowerPoint but what about the text that usually goes with the icons? In our
How many rows and columns does Excel have now and in the last 25 years of Excel for Windows and Mac? All the talk about 64-bit versions of Office has raised the issue of maximum rows and columns in Excel. A few readers seem to believe that 64-bit Excel will
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