Here’s how to make a message (letter or card) to make it ‘appear’ from a PowerPoint envelope graphic. This message can be personal or professional, depending on your preference. In Make your own Envelope graphic for PowerPoint we showed how to make an ‘open envelope’ graphic in PowerPoint with some
An envelope graphic—crafted entirely in PowerPoint! It’s a versatile design element that works for both personal and professional needs. Whether you’re communicating with customers, making special announcements, or enhancing presentations with a creative touch, an envelope icon is a powerful visual asset. It can also be used effectively to showcase
Microsoft 365 has introduced ‘Kermit,’ a new typeface specifically crafted to make reading more accessible and enjoyable for young audiences. Kermit the font aims to address the challenges faced by early readers, including those with dyslexia but has uses for everyone. Developed in collaboration with the type design studio Underware
Copilot could become a ‘toxic brand‘ because of pushy way Microsoft is adding it to Microsoft Office. We have some ‘modest proposals’ for how Microsoft can improve their AI offering and keep paying customers onside. Or, put another way, some grumbles about the way Microsoft is force-feeding Copilot to its
Maybe you’ve seen the little blue men appearing in the margins of your Word documents? They are Accessibility Recommendations and, yes, there is a way to get rid of them. There are two ways to hide these little creatures, both take a little digging. Right-click on any Accessibility icon then
Copilot is now appearing on the Microsoft Word title bar as part of the combined search and help, now called “Copilot Search”. The Copilot ‘ads’ for blank documents keep changing too. In the latest Word 365 Insiders builds the Search box (which combines Find, Help and broader Searches) is now
Stricter requirements are coming on mass mailings to Microsoft hosted mailboxes including Outlook.com. The new rules also affect anyone with a Microsoft managed Inbox. Any organization (domain name) sending “over 5,000 emails daily” will have to comply with new rules from 5 May 2025. At the same time, Microsoft is
Emails you want to see might end up in Junk Email as Microsoft imposing new standards to ensure emails are legitimate. Microsoft isn’t allowing any way to bypass their new rules for emails you want. The new standards apply to senders but there are important and less well promoted effects
Paste Text only in Word for Windows and Mac has a keyboard shortcut but to do that Microsoft changed long-standing Word keyboard shortcuts. New Paste Text only shortcut This is the new keyboard shortcut: Paste Text Only Ctrl + Shift + V Mac: Cmd + Shift + V This ‘Keep Text only”
There’s a little undocumented surprise on the right-click menu. Tucked away at the top is ‘Search the menus’ help. Sadly the underlying help system is still woefully inadequate. Right-click in a document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook) and the top item isn’t ‘Cut’ but a “Search the menus” box. This
Microsoft has introduced a new feature allowing users to upload images directly from their mobile devices to Microsoft 365 Copilot. A nice trick but there are other ways to do the same thing, including two from Microsoft itself! The idea is to streamline tasks such as transcribing handwritten notes, summarizing
Excel is getting Value Tokens but what are they good for? Do they add any ‘value’ or are they just a ‘token’ extra? The ‘Value Token’ appears in the formula bar when you select a data linked cell e.g. Stocks, Currencies, Geography or custom data types. According to Microsoft “This
The Oxford English Dictionary has a list of new English words for 2025. We’ve checked to see if the Microsoft Word dictionary understands all these new terms. Some of the ‘new’ words are very familiar (‘load’, ‘class’ or ‘terror’) but with new meanings. Others are quite new (‘gigil’, ‘ludraman’ or
Two new Microsoft 365 “mini-apps” are being rolled out to some customers. People and File Search are coming for business and enterprise customers. Microsoft buries the important limitations of the two new apps, so we’ll put them first to save you wondering. Microsoft 365 Companions Both File Search and People
There are better ways to chart differences between matching values like budget vs actual than the simplistic one offered by Excel. A variance chart in Excel shows differences and trends at a glance and is easy to make. In Excel, a variance chart visually compares data sets, such as actual
A once common and Microsoft recommended OneNote app is on the way out and has only six months to live. Make sure you’re using the right “OneNote for Windows”. You’re forgiven for being confused because this is a problem entirely of Microsoft’s making. There was a time when Microsoft insisted
There are a few ways to quickly tell which OneNote app you have on Windows. The OneNote that will continue development or the OneNote for Windows app which is gradually being allowed to die. Previously we’ve explained about the upcoming changes for OneNote, including how Microsoft have decided to keep
The Pie, Pizza and Pie Chart icons in Microsoft Office are boring and dull. Jazz up those SVG to look a lot better in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Just part of our tongue-in-cheek Pi 𝜋 Day and Pie series of articles. Icons (SVG graphics) at Insert | Illustrations | Icons
Three Pie emoji 🥧 🍕🍰 in Microsoft Office (Windows or Mac) plus some Stock Images, one for ‘Pi’ and a lot more for ‘Pie’. Just part of our tongue-in-cheek Pi 𝜋 Day and Pie series of articles. Pi 𝜋 emoji There is no emoji for 𝜋 because it’s a text symbol
Use these handy Excel formulas for circle and sphere calculations! Whether they’re a distant memory from school days or a recent discovery, you can easily compute them using Pi (π), or as Excel dubs it, PI(). Many formulas rely on Pi 𝜋 so Excel has a simple function Pi() which
Microsoft recommends a strange method for converting Publisher files into Word documents. We tested this ‘approved’ trick to see if it works in the real world. Microsoft Publisher is ending in October 2026 and many people are wondering how to keep using their .pub files, especially Publisher 365 will stop
The reason Microsoft Word prefers ‘corporate speak’, phrases and language but there is more than one way to change Word’s grammar and style suggestions to suit you. Quite often on social media there are complaints about Microsoft Word’s grammar and style suggestions like this one. “MS Word suddenly dislikes the
Check out this headline ‘ramen’ font that looks great and has a clever name – Times New Ramen. Seine Kongruangkit made a font from photos of noodles, nifty use of Photoshop and an undying love of Ramen noodles <g>. Times New Ramen – you have to love it, just for
Shapes, images, and other items can be grouped together and often should be in Word, PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office apps. When you group shapes or objects, you can move, resize, rotate, flip them all at once, as if they were a single object. If you’ve ever had trouble moving
