There’s a strange, almost prudish, feature in the Microsoft Word spell checker aka Microsoft Editor that’s used in many of the company’s products. We’ll explain Microsoft seeming avoidance of ‘Naughty Bits’ and why it’s happening. Warning! This article is unusually explicit (NSFW) for Office Watch. If sexually explicit but standard
Is it possible to share or send a single Excel tab or worksheet from an entire spreadsheet? Sharing a single worksheet or tab isn’t possible. Excel’s sharing features work on the workbook or entire document level. But it is possible to send out or share a single worksheet/tab with a
Outlook replies can be a problem of invisible or hard to read text when the incoming email has a color background. We’ll explain the problem and how to fix your reply email. Messages with colored backgrounds might look OK to the sender but are a pain when you try to
If you want to change the background color on an email, Outlook’s option to do that has changed name and location. At least Windows users can change background color, Outlook for Mac users lost this option at few years ago! A color background can be nice in an email but
How to insert either of the Tilde ~ ∼ symbols into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Tilde ∼ symbol is easy on some keyboards but for other keyboards, there’s no specific key for Tilde. The two Tilde symbols There are
Microsoft loves tinkering with WordArt and in Word 2010 the entire feature was expanded to Text Effects and split into two features on different tabs. Here’s how to find all the old WordArt features plus a lot more. Back in Office 2007 there was one WordArt feature on the Insert
We’ve looked at design and typography in 2001: A Space Odyssey and how to use the ‘2001’ look in Microsoft Office. Two readers asked about some curious kerning in our version of the title font.Maybe you’re not interested in the fine detail of the text in a fifty year old
Use Word tables to do formatting tricks, make complex formats easily and solve Word formatting problems. There’s more to Word tables than just showing grids of information like this: Tables have all sorts of little tricks in them and let you do clever things in Word. Here’s a look at
Insert the Black Chess Queen ♛ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Black Chess King ♛ symbol is useful for users that want to represent the chess piece as a symbol, rather than an image. Or just a generic crown icon. How Black Chess Queen ♛ looks in different fonts. Examples of
Rename Word styles or give them alternative names/aliases. Sometimes you’ve got no choice but to make an alias because the original style name is fixed. Any style can have an alternative name which appears in the Style Gallery. That’s a useful trick because there’s limited space for the style name
The Word Style Gallery doesn’t have to be left the way Microsoft supplies it. Fix the Gallery to make it work better for you. Microsoft Office often has menus and options aren’t designed for the customer. Instead they are setup for Microsoft’s needs in ‘out of the box’ demonstrations or
Microsoft Word, since 2007, has developed a confusing mish-mash of lists, galleries and dialog boxes to view, select and manage styles. We’ve received a few questions about finding style options so this Office-Watch.com article will try to make sense of all fourteen places. It’s a guided tour to the various
A lesser known Excel file, the .XLL, is being used to spread password stealing malware across the Internet by email and online contact forms. As reported by Bleeping Computer, emails and online forms are getting spammed with links to fake and malicious web sites which entice people to download the
Excel Charts can be even better looking by completely replacing those plain color blocks with pictures. We’ve already shown how to overlay an Excel Chart with an image now we’ll replace the block with a picture. Although commonly differentiated by differing colors like this, how about we look at different images instead? First, click on the plot area within the column, here we’ve
Word lets us down when it comes to viewing a document’s styles and how they link together. The only way to see a detailed list of styles is to Print them! In the print pane, choose the drop-down list under Print All Pages and scroll down until you see the
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
Outlook’s AutoComplete seems simple and useful. It’s certainly useful but it’s hardly simple and occasionally it’s been downright dangerous or embarrassing. AutoComplete makes it too easy to send an email to the wrong address. We’ll look at AutoComplete, how it works, the pitfalls and the few settings available. First we’ll
There are web links or .ics files that let you add an appointment direct to your Outlook calendar without retyping. Airlines and some theater and concert events offer them at the end of online booking. They are simple to use but there’s also tricks to make them even better. We’ll
There’s a limitation in Word’s Table Styles; no individual cell styles within a Word table We’ll explain the problem and several options to workaround it. Along the way it’s a chance to dig into some interesting parts of Word and Office and make them do things that might not have
The Drop Cap function in Microsoft Word provides a simple way of capturing the ornate look of an old book or manuscript. There are many options that can be used to change the look, positioning and behavior of any drop cap to suit your formatting needs or taste. Drop Caps have been in 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
PowerPoint videos have more options and work better if they aren’t streamed from an online source like YouTube. How can you copy an online video to a separate video file, saved on your computer? To download or ‘rip’ a YouTube video, you have to enter the world of YouTube downloading.
Typing or formatting cells of repetitive data can be very boring, but Excel has an Auto Fill feature to make it easier by automatically filling in data for you. We thought we knew Auto Fill, but just found nine surprising and useful tricks. Auto Fill goes beyond simple incrementing numbers
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
