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 (see below). Currency symbols.
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
A story in the UK’s Daily Telegraph got us thinking about some of the traps when buying Microsoft Office with a new computer. The Telegraph reader bought a new computer and was told by staff that Office 2007 wasn’t supported on the new computer. The reader was sold, as a
Microsoft has announced that they’ll stop updating the Outlook spam filter (“Smartscreen”) at the end of this month – on 1st Nov 2016. This might be a worry, but not a disaster, for most Outlook users and we’ll explain why. What’s Happening From 1st Nov 2016 there will be no
A new report shows that Excel is causing errors to creep into genetic studies because of data conversion problems. Excel tries to figure out the type of information you are typing or importing into a worksheet. Those rules work most of the time, but not always. If Excel converts a
Sometimes we wonder what happens in Microsoft development meetings because the software we get from those discussions seems so out of touch with reality or even sense. Today’s example comes from Outlook for Windows and it’s curious ‘one way’ translation feature. Office for Windows has good language translation options, though
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
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
Getting Outlook windows into the positions you want, and keeping them there, is one of those mysteries that Microsoft offers to us mere customers. We’ll try to explain what’s going on but, alas, can’t guarantee any solid answers. Most Outlook users have more than one window open at any time.
Finally, in this series about the ‘not so permanently’ deleted Outlook items, how do you recover a supposedly ‘permanently’ deleted item? Or maybe check to see if something you want wiped from your computer has truly been removed. All this is embarrassingly easy (embarrassing to Microsoft). There are various tools on
The fact that Outlook doesn’t ‘permanently’ delete items (like it says it does) has advantages or disadvantages depending on your need. Both needs are, thankfully, rare but worth keeping in mind. Cons These days we’re all more concerned about data privacy and where information can be stored without us realizing
So now we know that an Outlook item is not ‘permanently deleted’ even if Microsoft says so. How can you truly delete an Outlook message, appointment etc. You might want to truly delete when you’ve received something in error (as in the Aussie case) or simply want to prevent sensitive
Here’s a simple way to speed up Outlook when connected to accounts via IMAP. In short, make Outlook work offline at all times except when connecting to send/receive messages. Go to Send / Receive and click Work Offline On the Outlook status bar it’ll show ‘Working Offline’. Then go to
Recently we mentioned a report about consistent failures of Windows Indexing that was finally solved by disabling Hyper-V. We’re now confident that there’s a conflict, because we’ve had two more reports from readers of the same problem and solution. ” Thanks for the coverage of Windows indexing problems. I spent
More than a few people have problems with the Outlook ‘instant’ search feature. It’s great when it works but too often you get the dreaded “Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed”. Sometimes all you need to do is wait until indexing is complete. Depending on
By Helen Feddema Access versions: 2007-2013 Level: Intermediate Access Archon #240: Introduction In a database (like the sample Northwind database) that records orders, you might want a quick and easy way to send order lists to customers. This article demonstrates how to send order lists to customers in both Plain
There’s plenty of other OneNote tricks hiding away. Make tables by typing Press Tab to start a table. Each tab key makes a new cell, press Enter to start a new row. Calculator Type a formula then the equals sign and a space, the result is automatically inserted. This only
You can select almost anything in Windows to paste into OneNote or paste a link to the original content. Clipper You can select web page content, copy then paste it into OneNote. If you do that, OneNote will automatically add a link to the original page. Or install the OneNote
OneNote has been around since 2003 and is available to many Office users as part of their Office suite or subscription. Why not try OneNote, it’s worth a look since it can be very useful. What is OneNote We’ll skip past the Microsoft hype and tell you that OneNote is
Microsoft has released v2 of the OneNote Clipper, a browser add-in to copy content from a web page to OneNote. It has some nice new features but still has a fundamental flaw or at least a strange behavior. New in version 2 There’s a different interface with more options. The
If you think that civilization is coming to an end, here’s confirmation. There’s now a book of Word porn, strictly speaking Clippy Porn. Now available on Kindle is Conquered by Clippy: An Erotic Short Story It’s a 4,000 word short story featuring a giant living paperclip. As the blurb explains
Microsoft has released their April pile of fixes for the never-ending list of security holes in their products, mostly Windows and Office. Some are interesting, but not for good reasons. Thought: with all the hype and promises for Windows 10, there’s no mention of improved security. It would be nice
