Kerning is a font setting that’s important in Word and PowerPoint. We’ll explain kerning and why you mostly don’t have to worry about it except for large size text like titles and headings. Kerning adjusts the horizontal space between letters so they look right to the human eye. It’s necessary
Insert the TEL – Telephone symbol ℡ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. TEL – Telephone ℡ symbol is a single character with the letters TEL, normally used to prefix a telephone number in a letter heading or footer. How
Type the Tilde ~ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Plus an emoji alternative to Tilde. Tilde is used to mean ‘approximate’ as in “ ~30 minutes late”. In maths it means ‘similar order of magnitude’ e.g. “ a ~
There’s a way to view the attachments to items in a Outlook.com mailbox either in the web browser or, the better option is Outlook desktop software (Windows or Mac). Finding attachments is useful for recovering a lost file or past version of a document. Also vital to reducing the mailbox
The 2022 Word of the Year is “Permacrisis” according to one dictionary, is that and other new words recognized in the Microsoft Word dictionary? Surprisingly, one of the 2022 words is and there’s another strangeness in the Word Grammar and Style checks. According to the Collins Dictionary, the 2022 Word
Yet again, Microsoft finds itself accused of “censoring” some “politically incorrect language” in another outbreak of the culture war. It puts Office Watch in the unusual situation of defending Microsoft, using some facts about how Microsoft Word really works. There are all sorts of accusations being spread, most of which
Changing the order of styles in Microsoft Word’s Style Gallery is possible but buried way down inside the message boxes. A standard Word Style Gallery looks like this. Right-clicking on a style gives some options, including Remove from Style Gallery. Moving the styles into another order is more complicated. You’d
Managing Styles and priority / order settings in Word for Mac is harder but possible if you’re willing to dig in document or template settings. Word for Mac has two style lists available, just like Word for Windows. The Quick Style Gallery across the ribbon Home tab (called Style Gallery
Word can check if you use a single or double space after a sentence (fullstop/period) but how can it be changed single space to double throughout a document? The Sentence Spacing settings (single, double or don’t care) is in Word’s Grammar settings see Sentence Spacing in Word. These days, sentences
There are many ways to save an Outlook email or other items to a separate file. Which one you choose depends on your needs. One Outlook message or many? Compatible for many people or not? Easy to search or not? Some options work for a single message only. Others can
Ronny, a loyal Office Watch reader asks “OK, I now understand that entering dates in Excel as plain text isn’t a good idea. How do I convert my cells with MM/DD text into proper Excel dates?” It’s a trap for Excel novices. Typing in a date as plain text seems
These days it’s quite simple to share a video or any large file via email, here’s how. You’ll need a cloud storage service, Google, iCloud or OneDrive. We’ll use OneDrive because it comes with Microsoft 365 and it’s well integrated with Outlook. The same steps apply to any large file
Here’s a handy Excel worksheet for visitors to Europe, including UK citizens. It’ll help you stay within the legal limits for ‘short stays’ by visitors to the EU Schengen zone. Most visitors to Europe are allowed to stay in the Schengen group of countries for 90 days out of the
It’s easy to make your own views for email, calendar and contacts and switch between them with Outlook Custom Views. Outlook does not have to look the way it does ‘out of the box’. Perhaps you’d prefer a different color scheme for read and unread messages? Maybe with more lines
There’s a Pray / Thank You 🙏 emoji you can drop into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Pray / Thank You 🙏 symbol in Western cultures can be used to show prayer or devotion more generally as well as thanks
There are options in Microsoft Word to limit access a document in different ways. It’s more fine-grained control of what people can do in the document rather than the entire Word document permissions options we’ve mentioned before. Restrict Editing options let you collaborate on a document more broadly without the
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
