Excel has a huge range of charts available and endless ways to customize them, but after working to get it just right, you don’t want to have to go through the whole process again next time you want to make a similar chart. Fortunately, you don’t have to because Excel
It’s time again for the monthly drop of security updates for Windows and Office. Here’s what caught our eye; two Excel security bugs and a Windows update which kills VMWare Workstation. Commentators are calling this a ‘light’ month for security patches because there are a mere 59 patches instead of
Mac users can now update their computers to MacOS Catalina release but there’s important things to do before updating and some good reasons to wait a little while. Microsoft Office compatibility As we warned back in June, older Office for Mac will not work with MacOS Catalina. If you have
There are many situations where you need to split up text into separate columns. Names, phone numbers, dates, addresses and lot’s more can be managed with Excel’s Text to Columns, Text to Columns allows you take data from one column, and split it out into multiple columns. This can be
Outlook on the web is now blocking another 38 email attachments because they can be carriers of viruses. But Microsoft doesn’t block the most commonly used files for infecting computers. Far and away the most common infected email attachment is old-style Word documents, with .doc extensions. Excel .xls worksheets and
Here’s a complete, searchable and sortable list of all the email attachments that are or soon will be blocked by various types of Microsoft Outlook. There’s confusion and inconsistencies in the Microsoft documentation and application of these new blocks. They have a list of blocked attachments for Outlook in “Office
A recent forced disclosure by the US government demonstrates the use of NSL’s which access your personal data from Microsoft OneDrive and Outlook without a warrant or regular oversight, let alone notice to you. Microsoft, Google, Facebook and many other tech companies (including gaming services) have received National Security Letters
As we suspected, there are more holes in the Office Document Inspector. Our clever readers came up with some possibilities for revealing secrets in documents, worksheets and presentations. Document Inspector is good but could be better. As you’ll see, there really should be a warning about objects with multiple layers.
PowerPoint has many choices for printed/PDF handouts to go with a presentation. Here’s a guide to the options spread in different places on the PowerPoint ribbon and menus. Quick PowerPoint Handouts Under File | Print is the basic handouts option to print slides and lines for people to handwrite notes.
A funny story from satirical ‘The Chaser’ shows what could happen when corporate PowerPoint presentations are taken too far. LinkedIn executive presents moving PowerPoint eulogy at mother’s funeral “Before a packed congregation of relatives and friends, the senior executive paid tribute to his mother through a series of bullet points,
The famous game, Civilization, has been impressively recreated in Excel as Solly’s Cellivization. Civilization was an early computer game that started in 1991 for MS-DOS and has undergone many reincarnations for Windows, Mac and gaming devices now almost forgotten. Here it is in Microsoft Excel … Even with the power
Here’s a list of the known Office install/update error codes with possible fixes. All thanks to a diligent and long-suffering Office Watch reader. Ron S has compiled these lists from web sites and forums based on experiences of other people. Doesn’t Microsoft have all this? Yes, they probably do but
There’s no direct ‘watermark’ option for PowerPoint Handouts which is a shame because it would be very useful to add ‘Confidential’, ‘Draft’, ‘Private’ or other very obvious notices. You can fake it with a little PowerPoint trickery. Add a Watermark Picture In short, make an image with the watermark text.
The newer File | Open panes include a Search option to quickly find Recent Documents by name. That means it’s practical to expand the Recent Docs list to a higher or maximum value in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. In any of the three programs go to File | Options |
Here’s this months non-security bug fix updates.for Office 2016 and Office 2013. They are only for .msi installs, not ‘Click to Run’ modern installations. For most systems, they’ll be applied automatically. This is the full list with extra notes on a few fixes which caught our eye. Office 2016 updates
Just as there is a Handout Master to control how slide printouts look, there is also a Notes Master which has more control over how PowerPoint printed notes with slides will look. If you’ve used the Handouts Master, Notes Master will be warmly familiar to you. Notes Master is like
The error messages on Office 365/2019 setup and update are notoriously unhelpful, so here’s a guide to fixing Office install or update problems that work out here in the real world. Error messages like the infamous ‘Something went wrong” should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The error
If you get an error message when installing or updating Office 365 or Office 2019 there’s little help available beyond Microsoft telling you ‘Something went wrong’. What looks like specific error message are general statements that don’t identify the problem. These troubles aren’t any surprise to experienced Microsoft Office users.
While printing PowerPoint handouts for your audience with just the slides can be useful, sometimes you may want to give them your notes as well as the slides, which is where Notes Print comes in. Contrary to its name, Notes Print includes slides as well as your notes underneath them.
Handout Master lets you customize your presentation handouts more than the basics; changing the position and formatting of headers/footers, adding a background color or gradient. Maybe you can help uncover some unexplained mysteries of Handout Master, see below? Our Quick PowerPoint Handouts article showed you how to go to File
There are many ways to make a paper/PDF version of a PowerPoint slide deck, this is the quick ‘only a few clicks’ option. There are other choices that we’ll cover in upcoming articles. PowerPoint has some ‘Handouts’ features but they aren’t all in the same place and some aren’t even
The venerable SUM() function in Excel is simple, really too simple. It just adds up a range of cells with no way to filter or limit what’s included. SumIF selects what to add-up from a longer list. SumIf sometimes confuses people because they, understandably, expect the range to be SUMmed
A supposedly ‘new’ feature in PowerPoint 365 for Windows is already in regular PowerPoint? The latest Insiders version of Office 365 for Windows has no truly new features. The only ‘new’ feature is something that’s already in Office 365. As we looked down the list of changes in version 1909
The long-standing Ursnif trojan is back in a new form to infect computers and steal personal information, all via a Microsoft Word document. To begin, we’ll repeat a warning we’ve been making for years … No .doc files DO NOT open .doc files from any source (not .xls or .ppt
