The secret to a timeline chart in Excel is the data. Emily writes asking “How can I make an Excel chart with dates on the X axis with a proper time scale – even if the dates aren’t regular? “ We could not understand Emily’s question until we asked for
The Notes Pane is the key to some useful Footnote and Endnote options Now that Print Layout is the main editing view in Microsoft Word, the Notes pane has been somewhat forgotten but it’s the home of details in the Footnotes and Endnotes. Get to the Notes Pane Switch to
Getting started with Word’s footnotes and endnotes. Footnotes is one of those Word features that’s been around for a long time and so it often ignored in all the hoopla about new features. In this article we’ll have a close look at Footnotes and Endnotes. In Word there are Footnotes
Headline your next document with cats! Looking for something really different to headline your next document or presentation – why not use ‘Neko Font’ the font made out of cats. Strictly this isn’t a font you can download, instead you type text into a web page, choose the size (Large,
Adding some text, an arrow or graphic to an image should be an easy task in Word … and it is … once you know the trick. You can insert an image into Word or a Word created email in Outlook but the defaults make it hard to add overlays.
The BBC has an interesting piece on the effect of AutoCorrect and word suggestions for quicker typing. I dunno about ‘boring’ but AutoCorrect in Office does have a downside – it makes you and your typing fingers stupid. If you type stupdi into Word it will fix it to
The Insert | Symbol feature in Office is overdue for an overhaul. Our venture into the new Unicode symbols and symbol fonts highlighted how much work Microsoft needs to do on this part of Office. Insert | Symbol has changed for a long time and many versions of Office. Here’s
Microsoft celebrates 25 years of the software suite. Microsoft quietly celebrated the 25th anniversary of their Office suite on 1 August 2014 but were they being a little ‘previous’ in their celebrations? While Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows were around on 1 August 1989, were they sold as ‘Microsoft
How can you get the new Unicode symbols in Office documents? There’s plenty of new symbols included in the Unicode 7.0 standard, here’s how to get them into your Office documents. Most fonts do NOT have all the Unicode characters, after all, there are over 133,000 of them. There are
Microsoft makes a ‘one stop’ page for the latest Office update details. Figuring out what are the latest updates for Microsoft Office isn’t easy which is why we’re delighted to see Update center for Office, Office servers, and related products from Microsoft. It’s been a long time coming but as Sam
Access Archon Column #229 – Fixing Normalization Errors Access versions: 2002-2013 Level: Intermediate Introduction Sometimes when you take over an Access database created by an amateur (or at least, someone with a minimal understanding of normalization), you will find data such as employee names stored in a Text field in
Why RE and FW are the best options for email subjects When you reply or forward a message your email program will add a prefix to the subject line. The question is – do you choose the standard ‘English’ prefixes RE: and FW: or your local equivalents? There’s plenty of
Why your PowerPoint slides should NOT make much sense … Over on Slate there’s a nice little slideshow about making PowerPoint presentations that don’t bore your audience into a coma. In short, the advice is to make your slides incomprehensible. Well, not quite. The idea is that the slide content
Can you use the free Getty images in your PowerPoint presentations? Getty Images, has announced that 35 million of their images are now available free. Does that mean you can use them in your PowerPoint presentations or Word documents? Sadly, no Getty Images is now allowing free embedding to some
Farewell, Mike Parker who brought Helvetica to the mainstream but alas not to Microsoft Windows or Office for Windows. Mike Parker isn’t a household name but the chances are the every household has an example of Helvetica, the font he helped make popular. When he worked for Mergenthaler Linotype Co.,
A list of Microsoft Office versions and their latest Service Packs. If you don’t have Office 2013, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Here’s a list of the latest service packs for each version of Microsoft Office going back more than a decade. For the recent versions of Office, at least
How to update Microsoft Office with the new name, OneDrive, and remove the old SkyDrive name. Recent versions of Office have the name SkyDrive (with the extra capital letter) in the supplied dictionary. However the new OneDrive name hasn’t made it to the Office dictionary yet. Here’s what you’ll see
How to find your pictures to insert into an Office document. Even a simple thing like adding a picture to an Office document or email has subtleties and annoyances. When you choose Insert | Picture in recent versions of Office, it opens, by default, in the Picture Library. That seems
Get Outlook to show changes in Dropbox folders Dropbox has one excellent feature, the ‘Events’ view that lists files added, deleted or modified. You can use that feature to get custom Outlook alerts when certain things happen to your Dropbox account, like when a file is added to a shared
How to get a message when certain RSS feeds are updated As you probably know, it’s possible to get an alert or an action when certain email messages arrive into Outlook using the Rules feature. Office-Watch.com shows how to do the same thing for an RSS feed. It will let
2014 looks like the year of long movie titles with colons – here’s how to save yourself some typing. More and more movies are sequels and that means longer and longer movie titles. Most have colons because the studios don’t trust us to figure out that a movie is a
An industrial dispute involving CAPS has ended. One of the most interesting industrial disputes of 2013 has now ended with a new agreement between staff and management of the Melbourne Fire Brigade in Australia. Being an emergency service, the administrative staff didn’t feel that a full ‘stop work’ strike was
What wins in a conflict between custom and exclusion dictionaries? In Office-Watch.com we’ve talked about the custom dictionary (which lets you add words to the Office dictionary) and the exclusion dictionary (which removes words that would otherwise be considered OK. But what happens if a word is in both the
Examine US public health data in Excel. One of the great things about the recent Internet is the availability of previously hidden data. Large blocks of information have been collected, checked and published online. Combine that with a tool like Excel and you can do your own analysis! Here’s just
