There was a time when you had to have Microsoft Office installed to create, edit, or even view a Microsoft Word document. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. There are a number of free alternatives for working with thos…
For reasons I cannot fully understand, I decided to use Outlook on my Mac. That’s when I discovered that Outlook was making me click “Download Pictures” on every single email, which is really annoying. Here’s how to make Outl…
If you use Excel spreadsheets to collect data from other people, but find that they often fill your carefully-planned cells with the wrong kind of information, data validation can help.
By default, Excel doesn’t show the leading zero in any non-decimal numerical data set. But if you need to show the leading zero — usually because of some weird numbering system at your job, it’s easy to keep that zero in …
Properly formatting bibliographies has always driven students crazy. With modern versions of Microsoft Word, though, the process is streamlined to the point of almost being automatic, and today we’re going to show you how to …
A Comma Separated Values (CSV) file is a plain text file that contains a list of data. These files are often used for exchanging data between different applications. For example, databases and contact managers often support C…
Odds are pretty good that you create the same types of Excel spreadsheets over and over again. Creating a custom template can help make that process a lot smoother.
Excel spreadsheets can be hard to read at a glance, thanks to dense information and the grid formatting. Spending a little time on your spreadsheet to make it easier to read is a solid plus, starting with the borders around d…
Macros are basic bits of programming that let you hit a quick button or keyboard shortcut to trigger a pre-recorded action. Here’s how to make easy ones in Word.
When you create multiple columns in Word, they default to a set width. It’s easy to change that default width for each column. Let’s look at two ways you can do that.
Like peanut butter and chocolate, a word processor with some basic spreadsheet chops makes a fantastic combination. When you want some rather easy number-crunching embedded in an otherwise ordinary text document, Microsoft Wo…
When you open Microsoft Word, a list of recently-opened documents appears on the left side of the screen. You can clear documents from this list or, if you’d rather not see recent documents at all, disable the list entirely….
The Windows version of Microsoft Office has always been the gold standard for office suites, as far as features are concerned. Office exists on other platforms too, like the Mac—but those versions are missing some products …
Sideheads (where a document’s subheads appear out to the side of the text) and pull quotes are really just two specific uses for text boxes in Microsoft Word. Here’s how to set them up.
If you’re on a collaborative team of workers, or you’re simply dealing with several revisions of your own work, it’s important to be able to track incremental changes. In Microsoft Word, the ability to compare every differenc…
Microsoft Word will mark contractions like “I’m”, “don’t”, and “doesn’t”, as grammatical errors, showing that dashed line under them. For more casual documents, this can be annoying.
When you paste text from a web page into OneNote, it won’t just paste the text. You’ll also get a link to the web page you got it from. You can disable this feature if you like, forcing OneNote to only paste the text you actu…
Since the beginning of the computer age, people have always enjoyed making computers talk to them. These days, that functionality is built right into Windows and you can easily use it to have your PC read documents to you….
When you email someone a copy of your Word document or PowerPoint presentation and they don’t have a font installed, Microsoft Office shows that document with the default font instead. This can mess up the whole layout and ma…
Adobe’s PDF standard is handy whenever you need to distribute some information and be sure that it’s seen the same way by all recipients. But PDF files are also infamously tough to edit.
Microsoft Office applications have a built-in Safe Mode feature. This helps when you can’t use Office normally. Perhaps Word crashes every time you open it, or maybe Excel crashes when you open a single file. You can start th…
For most of its long history, Microsoft Word has used a proprietary format for its saved files, DOC. Starting in 2007 with the updated version of Word (and Microsoft Office), the default save format was changed to DOCX. This …
If you’ve worked with too many documents in which others have used spaces to align text and images, you know it can be very time consuming to manually remove the extra spaces from the beginning and end of each line….
If you copy text from the web and paste it into Word, it can be annoying when the hyperlinks transfer with it. Here’s how to easily paste text without the hyperlinks, or remove hyperlinks from text that’s already in Word….
