Back in 2010 an Office Watch reader drew our attention to this Microsoft Knowledge Base article 2008277 (update: after we published this article the KB article was totally removed by Microsoft). “Error message “The command cannot be performed because a dialog box is open” when opening a Word file from outside
An essential part of Word’s citations and bibliography feature is the Source Manager dialog – here’s how to, er, manage the Source Manager. Open the Source Manager from References | Citations and Bibliography | Manage Sources. There is a Current List (at right) which is saved in the current document.
The workload of students and academics has been made a lot easier with the arrival of Citation features in Word. They are useful for everyone, not just in academia. Citations are individual references to source material you’ve quoted in your document. A Bibliography is a list of citations and sources
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
In Microsoft Outlook you can view two calendars ‘side-by-side’ or overlaid to look like a single calendar. Select two calendars from the left-side pane of a Calendar view. Choose from ‘My Calendars’ or ‘Other Calendars’. The selected calendars appear ‘side-by-side’ in different colors. Overlaid with other calendars Click on the
Excel has six different choices for removing content, formatting, comments or everything from cells. Five are on the ribbon plus another hidden away. Plus three useful keyboard shortcuts, one obvious and two very obscure. Home | Clear On the right of the Home tab is a selection of five ‘Clear’
Microsoft Word has three different keyboard shortcuts to clear formatting, each with its own special variation on how to remove things like bold, italics etc. from text. Choose from Ctrl + Space , Ctrl + Q or Ctrl + Shift + N depending on exactly what you want to remove
Sometimes text formatting can get confusing in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher and OneNote. There are several ways to clear the additional formatting and return to original settings. The formatting styles in your text can be easily restored to their default settings by clearing all formatting. Users can waste a lot
There are many online tools that will summarize or paraphrase a long Word document into something shorter and more readable. These five tools also have other uses. Originally, Word 2007 had an Auto Summarize feature, but it was dropped in Word 2010, so Word users will need to rely on
There are several ways to add images into an Office SmartArt graphic; the official Microsoft way plus some others that aren’t usually mentioned for Word, PowerPoint and other Office apps. In the introductory piece, Much better lists with SmartArt , we looked at the SmartArt basics which are much the
SmartArt is available in all Office desktop programs for Windows and Mac. They let you turn a plain boring text list into something more compelling and understandable. SmartArt works and options do vary between the programs, especially PowerPoint. Office for Mac menus look a little different but the primary features
What can you do with a file attachment that has no file extension? Sometimes you get a file, probably an email attachment, that has no file extension. Without something after the dot/period (.doc .docx .xlsx .pptx etc.) Windows doesn’t know what program to use. This is most likely to happen
Improve your Word, Excel, Outlook or PowerPoint Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) beyond the small changes allowed by Microsoft directly. This works in all modern Office for Windows including Microsoft 365, Office 2016/2019/2021/LTSC. You’ll be able to shorten the overly long text labels or change icons (because too many are the
Numbered or bullet lists don’t have to look the way Microsoft sets automatically here’s how to change them to suit your needs and style. In Microsoft Word, it is simple to create a numbered or bullet list. Simply select your text | Home Tab | Paragraph Group| Select the Numbering
There are two exponential function options in Excel. Like many things in Excel, what looks simple has some traps for the unwary. We’ll explain why the Power() and ^ don’t always give the same or even correct result. Exponentiation is an operation in mathematics, written as an, involving the base
Let’s imagine you’re in Word’s Print Preview and you’ve suddenly noticed an error in your document. You close print preview to make the change, then you go back to print preview again or you can discover Print Preview Edit Mode. Print Preview in Word has all sorts of goodies for
Previously we talked about How to add a Drop-down List in Word, but you can also work more efficiently in Excel worksheets by making use of drop-down or pull-down lists. We will show you how to use Microsoft Excel’s data validation function to create useful lists within your spreadsheets. How to avoid the trap that lies waiting for the unwary
There’s another way you can force a page break before a paragraph in Microsoft Word. By setting this up, the page breaks can automatically appear without you having to worry. This is particularly useful if you have long documents with several different headings. Just simply modify the style to include
Interactive checkboxes can easily be added to your Word document for a variety of uses. Perhaps you need to create a to-do checklist to help monitor the completion of tasks on top of a collaboration document, or make it simpler for users to read and complete surveys or forms. Either way, we will provide
Microsoft has released a patch for the MSHTML security bug that’s being used with Office documents to infect computers. The bug is in MSHTML, the browser rendering engine used by Microsoft Office. If someone is tricked into opening a hacked Office document with ActiveX control, they could infect their computer
Outlook’s Folder Pane displays all folders which lets you quickly move between folders and views. Minimise the Folder pane, you will no longer be able to see your folders. As a result, some users get puzzled as to how they can bring back the expanded Folder Pane view. There are a few ways that
Printing email messages is something that we all do at various times, and in theory it should be as simple as clicking the Print icon in your email program – but what if the message won’t print out properly? Sometimes the printed version of an email message (or web page)
Here’s what you need to know about the two official international document formats, Microsoft’s OpenXML (.docx .xlsx etc) and Open Document Format (.odt .ods etc) both supported in Microsoft Office and most other office suite software. Each format has been recognized by international bodies so there are two ‘official’ document
Excel’s PivotTable allows you to evaluate trends, comparisons, and patterns within datasets. Once a PivotTable is setup, you can filter “Drill down” into it to focus on key information. These days there are several ways to filter a PivotTable, Slicers (which Microsoft loves to boast about), AutoFilter and by Field
