A Word document and a floppy disk caught a serial killer back in 2010. There are still lessons for anyone wanting to keep their personal or business data confidential. Known as the ‘BTK killer’, he murdered 10 people in Kansas between 1974 and 1991. The murderer was finally caught in
After the report of pirated / illegal Microsoft Office from an Amazon retailer (and Amazon’s initial refusal to act) how can you protect yourself from a similar problem on Amazon or other sites? Your entitlement to a refund or redress for a illegal product is different depending on whether you
If you look in folders that contain Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) you might see the occasional .tmp file. What are they? Could they be useful? How to look inside. Can they be safely deleted? The quick answers are: probably Word or Office document remnants, could be handy to recover
Meeting or party invitations don’t have to be plain, old white background emails, go for something a little more fancy or useful. Officially, Microsoft suggests using their Stationery themes to change the look of an email. But that’s not available for invitation emails. There are some formatting choices also missing
We’ve warned against incoming ‘old’ Office documents (.doc .xls etc) because of the virus risk, so how can you setup Outlook to warn you about emails with those attachments? Sadly, it’s not easy. Outlook has automatic Rules to check incoming messages, but none of those rules can test for the
Many of the dangerous emails arriving in your Inbox have one thing in common — they use the old (and risky) Word .DOC format. .DOC .XLS or .PPT are exactly the sort of email attachments you should avoid. The main ‘red flag’ is the email attachment of a .DOC file
How to make mail links on web pages or emails open in Outlook for Windows instead of some other mail app. Fix this in Windows 11, Windows 10 and earlier Windows. Sometimes Outlook ‘forgets’ that it’s the place for all email work. You click on an email address and get
Microsoft is hyping a new “Outlook for Windows” as a coming replacement to the familiar Windows program giving both the same “Outlook for Windows” name even though the two programs are completely different and the proposed replacement is quite crippled. Let’s start with a little naming explanation because Microsoft seems
Here’s eight better but simple table formatting options not available from Microsoft Word’s Table Style gallery. Word’s Table Style gallery is a tempting selection of table formats but it doesn’t show you all the options to make your table look good. Some of these variations are right there on the
There are five different types of style (collection of formatting settings) in Microsoft Word. There’s three styles for text plus Tables and List styles. Paragraph styles Originally, Word only had paragraph styles. Styles could only be applied to an entire paragraph. Any changes to an individual word or phrase had
There are two ways to reveal or un-hide a hidden style, most commonly “Body Text” style. There’s the long-winded Microsoft approved method and the faster way. By default, Body Text style in Microsoft Word is ‘hidden until used’. That seems like a Catch-22, its not visible until it’s used but
The default ‘Body Text’ style in Word needs some changes to suit your needs. Here’s some suggestions for things to alter or check to make sure they suit your, er, style. Can’t see a Body Text style? See Make Body Text style appear in Microsoft Word Body Text style can be
Microsoft Word has a simple and quick way to reveal the Unicode value or character number for any letter, symbol or emoji using the Alt + X shortcut. As you may know, each character shown on a computer is really a number. There’s an accepted list of symbols called Unicode
Two ways to change the default or opening paper size for Microsoft Word documents. Change to Letter , Legal, A4 or any other paper size. These two options haven’t changed for many years. The fundamentals haven’t changed since the very first Word for Windows. This will change the paper size when you
Here’s your four choices for making text fit within an Excel cell. About wrapping text, adding line breaks and merging cells in Excel. There are plenty of options to fit text in Excel but not all of them are obvious. At first, when you type text in a cell it
A small but very welcome change to the File menu in Office 365 for Windows to handle the overflow at the bottom of the window. It’s one of those changes that Microsoft doesn’t promote or even mention. Maybe because it’s quite small or perhaps because it fixes an embarrassing design
It’s very easy to change the paper size in Microsoft Word, whether just for a single document, or change the default paper size for all your documents. You don’t always want to use the same paper size for all your Word documents – different types of projects require different paper,
Did you know that the U.S has two feet? Meaning two different measurements for the term ‘foot’? That got us wondering how Excel’s Convert() handled the standard ‘foot’ and the US Survey ‘foot’. Excel Convert() supports the International Standard Foot and, indirectly, the US Survey Foot. America Has Two Feet.
Microsoft Word has a booklet printing option but there’s a simple alternative if it’s not working or you’d like options not available in Word. Here’s how to booklet print in Word and also a simpler alternative. Word’s Booklet Printing is done in the document (Layout | Paragraph | Page Setup
Here’s how to apply the same formatting, borders and picture styles to more than one picture or graphic in Word, PowerPoint or Excel. There’s an unexpected and easy way to do it. Picture Format tools don’t have custom styles (Microsoft please note) only the in-built pre-sets. If you want to
Put the Reference Mark ※ into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Reference Mark ※ or reference symbol is used in Asian writing (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) like the Asterix * in western languages. It marks some additional notes to text. It’s called
Why you must use the Microsoft Office Document Inspector … and why you can’t completely trust it. The Office Document Inspector is an important tool for anyone who shares or sends out Office documents. It helps prevent legal troubles and personal embarrassment. Inspect Document is only in Office for Windows
When including images or other objects in a Microsoft Word document, it can sometimes be a bit fiddly getting the text to flow around them in the way you want. The text wrapping break lets you specify the point where the text should drop down below the picture. When you
People working on a shared Word document can now assign tasks ‘To Do’ within the document, then mark a task as resolved or even reassign it. Here’s how Assign Tasks works and who gets it. Assigning Tasks is an extension of the existing Comments feature for shared documents. When you
