Articles
The questions this software exists because of
Each of these answers a real question properly, including the parts of the answer that point somewhere other than us. Our own product appears in one section at the end of each, marked as ours, because an article that hides the recommendation until the reader has been softened up is not an article.
15 October 2026 · 5 min read
How to use an office suite’s ribbon without a mouse
Press Alt (or F10) and every ribbon tab shows a letter; press it, and every command shows one too. F6 moves between the ribbon, the document, the panes and the status bar, and the arrow keys move inside each. With those few keys, everything in the ribbon is reachable without a mouse.
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15 October 2026 · 4 min read
How to turn on High Contrast in Windows, and what it does to your programs
In Windows 11 it is Settings, Accessibility, Contrast themes; Left Alt+Left Shift+Print Screen turns it on and off. A contrast theme replaces every program’s colours with a few strong ones of your choosing, which only works well in programs built to follow it.
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15 October 2026 · 4 min read
What “Uninstaller error 2” means when a program updates, and how to get past it
The new version’s installer tried to remove the old version’s files and could not, almost always because the program, or a part of it, was still running. Close it completely, end anything left of it in Task Manager, and run the installer again; a restart clears what is left.
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15 October 2026 · 4 min read
What a software bill of materials is, and what you can do with one
A software bill of materials (SBOM) lists every component a program ships: each library and file, its version, its licence and a hash of it. It lets you check a program against published vulnerabilities and licence rules without taking the maker’s word for what is inside.
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15 October 2026 · 4 min read
Why exporting a video is slow, and how hardware encoding speeds it up
Most of an export’s time goes into encoding: compressing every frame into H.264 or a similar format. Nearly every computer made in the last ten years has a chip that does that far faster than the processor can, and a video editor that uses it exports in a fraction of the time.
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15 October 2026 · 7 min read
How to redact a PDF so the words are really gone
A black box drawn over words hides them on screen and leaves them in the file, where anybody can copy them out. Real redaction takes the words out of the page and out of everywhere else the PDF keeps them, and then you check the result by searching it.
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15 October 2026 · 6 min read
How to make a scanned PDF searchable without uploading it
A scanned PDF is a stack of pictures, so Find and copy have nothing to work with. Text recognition (OCR) reads the words and writes them in as an invisible layer under each page. Free programs do it on your own computer, so the scan never has to leave it.
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15 October 2026 · 6 min read
How to turn a pile of receipts into a spreadsheet
Decide the columns first, keep each receipt beside its row, and check every row by its own sums: the items add up to the subtotal, and the subtotal and tax to the total. Reading the figures by machine saves typing, and the sums are what tell you whether to trust them.
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15 October 2026 · 6 min read
How to remove hidden information from a Word document before you send it
A .docx can carry its author’s name, comments, tracked changes, hidden text, the cropped-off parts of its pictures and a whole workbook behind a chart. Word’s Inspect Document clears most of it. A few things need doing by hand, and words that must not travel at all need taking out of a copy, not hiding.
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15 October 2026 · 6 min read
How to fill in and sign a PDF without printing it
If the PDF has form fields, any good reader fills them in; if it has none, you type on top of the page. A signature placed as a picture is what most forms want. A digital signature is something else: a certificate proving who signed and that the file has not changed since.
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15 October 2026 · 6 min read
How to make a fillable form in Word
Turn on the Developer tab, put content controls where the answers go, then restrict editing to filling in forms so people can type only in the fields. A Word form stays a Word form: saving it as a PDF does not make PDF form fields.
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12 October 2026 · 6 min read
How to keep your old Outlook mail when you stop using Outlook
Mail on an IMAP or Exchange server follows the account into any other program. Mail that lives only on your computer does not: export it to a .pst (or an .olm on a Mac) while Outlook still runs, keep that file untouched, and make an open copy beside it for the years ahead.
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11 October 2026 · 5 min read
How to show Hijri dates in Excel, LibreOffice and Google Sheets
A spreadsheet keeps a date as a number and the calendar is only how it is shown. So a Gregorian date can be shown in the Hijri calendar by its format, without a second column or a conversion formula. Excel and LibreOffice each have a format code for it; Google Sheets has none, and needs a formula.
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9 October 2026 · 6 min read
How to type Urdu on Windows and use your office software in Urdu
Writing Urdu on a Windows computer takes three things: the Urdu keyboard, a Nastaliq font, and paragraphs set to run right to left. Seeing the programs themselves in Urdu is a separate step, and how far it goes depends on the program. Here is how to set up each part.
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9 October 2026 · 6 min read
How to make your own template in Word, Excel or PowerPoint
A template is a file you start new documents from, so the letterhead, the styles and the layout are there before you type. Making one takes a single Save As. The part people get stuck on is finding it again, and that comes down to one folder and one setting.
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9 October 2026 · 5 min read
How to rotate a photo without losing quality
Turning a JPEG in an ordinary editor and saving it compresses the picture again, and each save loses a little more. There are two ways to turn one that lose nothing: change the orientation tag the camera wrote, or turn the compressed blocks themselves. A PNG can be turned and saved as often as you like.
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9 October 2026 · 5 min read
How to add a picture watermark in Word, and why it vanishes on some pages
A picture watermark puts a faded logo or image behind the text on every page. In Word it takes a few clicks from the Design tab. It lives in the page header, which explains nearly every case of a watermark missing from some pages or refusing to be clicked.
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9 October 2026 · 8 min read
How to sync a desktop calendar and address book over CalDAV and CardDAV
CalDAV and CardDAV are the open protocols many calendar and contact services use, and they let a desktop program keep the same events and the same people as your phone. Setting one up comes down to the server’s address and, on many services, an app password. Here is where to find both, and what happens when two devices change the same thing.
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9 October 2026 · 8 min read
How to import and clean data in a spreadsheet with Power Query
Power Query, the Get & Transform tool in Excel, records each change you make to imported data as a step, and runs every step again when the source changes. It earns its place on a report rebuilt from the same export every week or month. For a one-off tidy of data already in the sheet, a formula is often quicker.
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9 October 2026 · 7 min read
How to automate a spreadsheet with scripts, and run them safely
A script is a short program that does to a workbook what you would otherwise do by hand, in the same order every time. In Excel the current way to write one is Office Scripts, recorded or typed. Before you run any script, and especially one somebody sent you, the question to ask is what it can reach beyond the workbook.
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8 October 2026 · 5 min read
How to compare two versions of a Word document
Someone sends back your document with changes and Track Changes was off. You do not have to read both side by side. Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs can all compare two versions and mark every difference as a tracked change you can accept or reject.
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8 October 2026 · 6 min read
How to open an old .doc, .xls or .ppt file
Files from Office 97 to 2003 still open in most office software, but some older ones are now blocked by default in Microsoft Office and others open with their layout broken. Here is what works, what to do with a file from the early nineties, and how to keep it readable from now on.
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8 October 2026 · 6 min read
How to write right to left in Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs
Arabic, Urdu, Hebrew and Persian need more than text aligned to the right. The paragraph itself has to run from the right, or punctuation jumps to the wrong end of the line and mixed text comes out in the wrong order. Here is how to set it up in each of the common word processors.
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26 September 2026 · 8 min read
How to do a mail merge: letters, envelopes and labels from a spreadsheet
A mail merge is one document and one list. The document says where each piece of the list goes, and the merge makes a copy for every row. It goes wrong in the same few places every time (dates and money in the wrong format, blank lines where a field was empty, the wrong sheet), and each of them has a plain fix.
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26 September 2026 · 6 min read
How to review a document with other people: tracked changes, comments and Restrict Editing
Three tools do the work. Tracked changes record who changed what, comments carry the discussion, and Restrict Editing stops reviewers changing more than they should. Each protects against one thing and not the others, and none of them keeps a document secret.
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26 September 2026 · 7 min read
How to build an index, a table of figures and fields in a Word document
An index, a table of figures, a caption’s number, a page number and today’s date are the same thing underneath: a field, an instruction the document keeps and works out again when asked. That tells you how to build each one and, more usefully, when each goes stale and how to bring it up to date.
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26 September 2026 · 6 min read
How to check a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file for accessibility
Every major office suite now has a checker, and each catches the same handful of problems: pictures with no description, headings that are only bold text, tables with no header row, colours too pale to read, slides with no title. Here is what they check, what they cannot, and how to fix what they find.
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26 September 2026 · 5 min read
What a password on a Word or Excel file actually protects
Office offers two kinds of password, and they are not the same thing. One encrypts the file so nobody can read it without the password. The other only asks the program to stop people editing, and anyone with the file can take it off. Knowing which one you set matters more than how long the password is.
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8 September 2026 · 8 min read
How to open a .pst file without Outlook
A .pst is a complete mail archive in one file, and almost nothing outside Microsoft Outlook can read one. Here is what is actually inside it, what your options are, and which of them will lose data.
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8 September 2026 · 7 min read
What is an .ost file, and can you recover mail from one?
An .ost is Outlook’s offline copy of a server mailbox. It is not an archive, it is not supposed to be portable, and when the account behind it is gone it becomes one of the more awkward files in computing.
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8 September 2026 · 7 min read
Why your .docx looks different in another program
It is rarely a rendering bug. Most formatting loss happens at save time, when a program rebuilds a file it only partly understood. That is a design decision, not an accident.
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8 September 2026 · 6 min read
What is actually inside a .docx file
Rename it to .zip and look. Understanding the parts explains almost everything about why documents behave the way they do between programs, and lets you fix a corrupt file by hand.
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8 September 2026 · 9 min read
Free alternatives to Microsoft Office, honestly compared
There are four serious ones and they are good at different things. The right answer depends almost entirely on who receives your files and whether you need to work offline.
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Also
The comparisons are next door
Rutba Office against each of the five alternatives, and four head-to-heads between products that are not ours at all.
Or just try it
Free, no account, and it installs beside whatever you use now.