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
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
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
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
