OneNote for Windows can straighten handwritten, digital ink, text so it’s nicely even across the screen. We tested Straighten to see how it really works … and it’s not bad. Microsoft doesn’t provide a working example of straighten just a mockup with grey lines and nothing like the real OneNote
A strange case of letter spacing with a Microsoft font showing differences between Word and PowerPoint. Here’s the anomaly with three possible fixes for it and similar situations. Office Watcher Paul B noticed this peculiar spacing between a fullstop/period and digit 1 with the Tenorite font. In PowerPoint, the two
Computers are being infected with at least eight different viruses in an attack that uses steganography to hide nasty code in images linked from Word and Excel documents. But there’s good news for most Office users. Steganography is a way to hide text or code in an image or object.
Quickly switch accounts while using Microsoft Office 365, Office 2019 and Office 2021 for Windows and even have different logins in separate programs. Many people wear different ‘hats’ while using Office. There’s a Work ‘hat’ or ‘hats’ with more than one job. Plus your personal or home role. Sometimes even
The File Open and Save dialog boxes in Office have many not-obvious features which let you do a lot of file management and housekeeping on the spot. You try to save a document and realize you need a new sub-folder. Or open a document and want to move it to
Pictures in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook can make the file sizes at lot larger than you expect. Here’s how to make images smaller (in file size) for Office documents without changing the look of the document, slide etc. The images in a document are what take up a lot
Microsoft has announced ‘extras’ for Microsoft 365 Basic but we can’t see anything new that wasn’t promised over a year ago and delivered six months ago. It’s a just a simple PR stunt that worked. The ‘Microsoft 365 Basic’ plan has just 100GB of OneDrive storage plus a 50GB Outlook.com
The world can be divided in many ways — how about by paper sizes? Letter/Legal/US sizes vs A4/Metric. Microsoft Word makes it easy to cope with both even with different paper sizes in one document. There’s a very handy way to rescale between Letter <> A4 for printing. Amazing Maps
How to insert the Coin 🪙 symbol or emoji into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. How Coin 🪙 looks in different fonts Only Segoe UI Emoji font has the coin symbol in standard Windows. Coin 🪙 codes These are the
There’s a way to link someone to view a specific slide in a PowerPoint presentaion which is a lot faster than hunting through a big slide deck. Providing a direct link to a specific part of your slideshow not only streamlines the process of receiving feedback but also enables them
Outlook for Windows has both automatic and manual options to translate incoming messages into a language you understand. We’ll explain the choices available and the Outlook settings that are in a strange order. Microsoft Translator supports over 100 languages, enabling users to translate text across a diverse array of linguistic
For many readers being able to edit incoming Outlook messages is just a handy feature, but for anyone in the legal or corporate world it could have ‘interesting’ consequences. In Outlook for Windows, open the email in a full window (not the Reading Pane) then go to Message | Move
There’s a useful but niche Excel warning about date with two digits for the century. That’s a useful precaution but sometimes the warning is wrong! Those of us around at the turn of the century will remember the Y2K problems and possible mistakes with a date that has only two
Copilot AI makes writing Excel formulas a lot easier but you still need to check the results to make sure Copilot has understood want you want and gives the right answer. There’s a lot of hype and promises about how AI can help make work easier. That’s not as true
Drop in some Easter flavor to your documents, slides or emails from right inside Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel. Either religious (Ascension, Crucifix etc) or secular (eggs, chocolate, bunnies) images and graphics are available. Modern Office, especially Microsoft 365 have stock images and icons from a large collection compiled by
There’s more than one Credit Card 💳 image available in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. How Credit Card 💳 looks in different fonts. Only two standard Windows fonts have the credit card symbol; Segoe UI Emoji and Segoe UI Symbol.
Grouping in Excel lets you collapse or expand sections of a sheet so you can see the ‘big picture’ but still drill-down to how totals were made. Another use for grouping is hiding rows or columns from view. You can organize and manage data more effectively by grouping together rows
A respected author has a warning about the future of AI using the mixed history of spreadsheet mistakes as an example. Tim Harford is an excellent columnist and author known as “the Undercover Economist”. Check out his “More or Less” podcast for the BBC. In a recent article he argues
Excel has some nice choices for clearing out cells quickly. You can remove the contents, the formatting only or both contents and formatting plus choices for deleting just notes, comments and cleaning up links. As you can see the drop-down menu Home | Editing | Clear offers options such as:
Here’s how to switch away from the new Aptos fonts in Microsoft PowerPoint and back to the old Calibri fonts or something else. Microsoft has forced a change to Aptos as the new default font in PowerPoint but that change doesn’t suit everyone. In particular, Aptos doesn’t make much (or any) visible difference for
Get rid of the over large ‘AutoSave’ slider on the Word, Excel or PowerPoint status bar. The Autosave button (strictly a label plus slider) takes up a lot of room on the top row of modern Office apps. That space is quite crowded and you need it to fit as
Excel has some useful options for printing less than an entire workbook. Printing a selection, active sheets or just a table. As Office-Watch.com has discovered before, there’s a lot more available in Office than a quick look suggests. See Print options are at File | Print then choose the menu
There are shortcuts that automatically format bold and italic text in Word. The same shortcuts and more work in WhatsApp texting as well. There are now four more formatting options; bullet lists, numbered lists, quotes and inline code. AutoFormatting Bold and Italics as you type In Microsoft Word and Outlook
Make an unpleasant point with the world’s ugliest color. A ‘drab dark green’ can be used in any Word document, Excel sheet or PowerPoint slide. And we’ll explain the recommended complement color and font. It’s not our opinion, but the market researched result of an effort to find the most
