Word, Excel and PowerPoint have options to stop people from changing a document, making them ‘read only’ in tech speak. These options protect your documents from unauthorized editing or even reading them at all. There are different levels of protection, they are all under File | Info | Protect Document.
There’s no way to stop someone copying a picture of your signature (or any image) but there are some tricks to stop the image being misused. Thanks to Office Watch reader, Tim P. for the excellent question: “I liked your article on inserting signatures. In relation to inserting a picture
There are some nifty tricks to inserting a picture of your signature into a Word or other document. Tips that make the result look realistic and professional. We’ve already explained the many ways to get a picture of your ink signature into Office. Now you have a picture of your
Adding your signature or signing a document digitally is possible in different ways using Microsoft Word or other Office programs. Before we start, let’s clarify some terminology because ‘signing a document’ can mean several things in the computer world: Adding a signature to a document. Inserting a copy of a
Type the ‘Plus or Minus sign’ ± into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Plus-Minus ± symbol isn’t just used for equations, it’s also used as a shortcut for ‘plus or minus’. In statistics you’ll often see results given as being
Here’s a rare peek inside the C++ programming code that makes Microsoft Office possible. Zachary Henkel gave a speech at CppCon 2022 titled “Microsoft Uses C++ to Deliver Office – Huge Size, Small Components” which is now available on YouTube. Mr Henkel speaks from experience, he’s worked at Microsoft for
Microsoft Word can check if you use a single or double space after a sentence (fullstop/period) but how can it be changed throughout a document? Make all sentences end with a single space instead of double spaces, triple or more. The Sentence Spacing settings (single, double or don’t care) is
Sending out party and other non-business invitations is quite possible in Outlook. While the system is primarily intended for meetings in companies, individuals can use it too. Microsoft has tinkered with the look of Outlook but the fundamentals remain the same. Using Outlook you can email invitations which include links
Check mark or tick has two options, normal ✓ or heavy ✔ to insert into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Checkmark ✓ symbol is used for bullet or check lists and other indicators. There’s also Heavy Check Mark ✔ which
Type one of the four diagonal cross Mark ✗, multiplication or ballot symbols into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. The X or Cross Mark ✗ symbol is used for bullet or check lists and other indicators. It’s the opposite of
There’s a useful and long-standing Office add-on for people who have many documents open at once and prefer them to appear in tabs (like web pages) instead of separate windows. Office Tab switches Microsoft Office for Windows from the usual ‘one document per windows’ view to ‘many documents in a
Microsoft released an interesting new tool for Office 2013/2016 which promised to be a major improvement on current ‘speech to text’ options. Most media have just reported Microsoft’s hype, we actually tested Dictate and here’s what we’ve found. What made Dictate different is the use of Cortana voice recognition technology.
There’s a lot more printing and money saving options available if you know where to look or use a little cunning to get what you want. Microsoft Word documents with rescaling paper size, saving money in ink or toner, double-sided printing, two pages to a sheet, poster sizes and booklets.
Here’s three ways to add a PDF into your Word document. Like many things in Microsoft Word, there is more than one way to add a PDF file into a Word document. From a simple link to another file to converting the PDF into a Word document. In most cases
To my horror, I encountered something strange while working on a Word document with “strung out” or ‘stretched’ text on the last two lines with huge gaps of space between them. Here’s the two ways it can happen and the four fixes available. A stretched-out line in a Word document
It IS possible for Outlook 2013 (and earlier Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007) to connect with Google Gmail accounts, despite what you may have heard. We’ll explain what’s happened, why and how login is still available for older Microsoft Outlook’s. There’s a lot of misinformation about changes in Gmail’s login
When Microsoft Word was first released, all those years ago, it had a Paste feature but it was dumb and literal. These days Word’s Paste (Word for Windows and Word for Mac) is a lot smarter and does very useful things that you may not realize or appreciate. Before the
Type the three different types of Ellipsis … marks in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Ellipsis … symbol is used for a gap or break in some text, usually to drop out some irrelevant text or speech. The same applies
Like it or loath it but the comma ellipsis has arrived ,,, as an alternative to the more common ellipsis with dots. Here’s how to use it in Word and Office. The comma ellipsis is a modern, more casual version. It’s used as a more dramatic, even annoyed trailing off
How can you change the Author name in an Office document? How can you know that the name in a Microsoft Word document is the actual person not an imposter? It’s easy enough to go to File | Info to see and change the document Author name. We did that
Combine or divide adjacent Microsoft Word or PowerPoint table cells into a merged single cell or split a cell in two. Welcome to ‘Merge Cells’ where you can combine adjacent cells into a single cell. It’s very handy for table formatting tricks and other unusual situations like a longer than
The simple and easiest way to convert text dates to Excel dates is using Text to Columns on the Data tab. It’s a simple ‘one off’ method that works well and takes you through the steps. If you need something more automated, for new text dates entered from time-to-time use
Type the Yen ¥ currency symbol into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Yen is used for Japanese currency and the Chinese Renminbi / Yuan. Microsoft Excel also offers the Yen symbol for Mongolia even though the tögrög currency uses another
More ideas and a wish list for ending a PowerPoint presentation with a different slide. After our article on the ending slide options for PowerPoint, Vivian from the UK writes: “… it’s really very easy to do what I always do at the end of PPT presentations. Just add a
