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What’s New in Microsoft Office 2021? First, Microsoft is giving Office 2021 a visual overhaul, much like the company is doing with Microsoft 365. It’ll have the rounded corners we’ve grown to know and love, and it’ll also sync with your theme, including your light/dark choice. As far as features are concerned, Microsoft is adding lots of the stuff that has already made its way to Windows 365 versions of Word, Excel, and all the other apps....

Firewalls are there to protect you from threats on the internet (both traffic from the internet and from local applications trying to gain access when they shouldn’t). Sometimes, though, you’ll want to allow otherwise restricted traffic through your firewall. To do so, you’ll have to open a port. When a device connects to another device on a network (including the internet), it specifies a port number that lets the receiving device know how to handle the traffic....

If you use Microsoft Excel for time tracking, you’ll likely need to get final tallies. You can add hours and minutes to see your total time spent or subtract start and end times to see the amount of time worked. Add Times in Microsoft Excel You might be keeping track of the time you spend working on a task or project. When that work is complete, you’ll want the total time you spent....

If you want to add a business card template to an existing contact in Outlook, you can do so without having to enter all of the information again. We will also show you how to customize the layout and format of the text on the card. Microsoft provides a couple of business card templates you can use. We will use their Blue Sky template as an example. To open the archive file for the template you downloaded, double-click on the ....

We see color scales representing all sorts of things: temperatures, speed, ages, and even population. If you have data in Microsoft Excel that could benefit from this type of visual, it’s easier to implement than you might think. With conditional formatting, you can apply a gradient color scale in just minutes. Excel offers two- and three-color scales with primary colors that you can select from, along with the option to pick your own unique colors....

RELATED: How (and Why) to Port Your Old Phone Number to Google Voice What Happens When You Block a Number When you block a number, Google Voice blocks all calls and texts from that number. That person will hear a “Number not in service” message when trying to dial your Google Voice number. This should effectively solve recurring spam problems. If both you and the blocked person are in a group chat, then you’ll still be able to see each other’s messages....

You may think of a moving average for forecasting stocks or investments. But you can also use it to see trends for inventory, sales, or similar data. Without equations or functions, you can calculate a moving average easily in Excel. RELATED: How to Use the Built-In Stocks Feature in Microsoft Excel Add the Data Analysis Tool in Excel While you can perform calculations and create a line graph to display your moving average in Excel, there’s an easier way....

Microsoft Edge has a dark theme that will be activated if you enable Windows 10’s dark theme (or Windows 11’s dark theme.) If you’re using the light theme on Windows 10 or 11, but want Edge to run in dark mode, you’ll need to manually enable a theme in Edge’s application settings. How to Enable the Dark Theme in Microsoft Edge To enable the dark theme in the new, Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser, click the menu button and select “Settings....

We’re all familiar with touch screen tablets, but some laptops also have touch screens. We think they’re pretty useful, but if you tend to use your laptop with the standard keyboard and mouse combination, you can disable the touch screen on your Windows 10 device pretty easily. RELATED: Touch Screen Laptops Aren’t Just a Gimmick. They’re Actually Useful Maybe you’re showing someone how to do something on your laptop and you end up touching the screen and doing something unintentional....

Microsoft recently rolled out two-factor authentication for Windows Live accounts, and here’s how to enable it. Enable Two-Step Authentication For Your Windows 8 Account Head over to the Microsoft Account portal and sign into your account. Then switch over to the security info section, here you will see a link to “Set up two-step verification”. This is more commonly known as two-factor authentication. You will then be told that some of your apps won’t work after you enable 2FA, but that’s fine....

If you’ve ever noticed that your phone’s battery goes from 60% to 50% in a matter of minutes, only to remain on 50% for what seems like ages, it probably means the battery needs to be calibrated. Why Your Phone’s Battery Percentage Becomes Inaccurate RELATED: How to Calibrate Your Laptop’s Battery for Accurate Battery Life Estimates This is a problem that occurs in most battery-powered electronics these days, so this process should work on iPhone, Android, and even tablets or laptops (almost all of which use lithium ion batteries)....

Web browsers are gaining more and more features websites can use, and with them come permission options. Your web browser has a variety of permissions you can apply to individual websites, restricting them in various ways. These apply to specific websites, not web pages. For example, if you changed the permissions for a page on howtogeek.com, it would apply to all pages on our website, not just the specific page....

Command line interfaces can be downright boring and always seem to miss out on the fresh coats of paint liberally applied to the rest of Windows. Here’s how to add a splash of color to Command Prompt and make it unique. By default, Windows Command Prompt is white text on a black background. It gets the job done, but maybe you want to add some color to it. To get an overview of what we can do with the color command, let’s enter:...

Android 5.0 Lollipop is still trickling to Android users but we’ve already found a stream of great new features we want to talk about. Pinning a screen is nifty little security feature that lets you put your device into a glorified kiosk mode so the user can only use one app. If you’ve ever used a tablet instead of a printed menu at a restaurant, you know how this works....

Every device that includes Google Assistant has access to a bunch of jokes, Easter eggs, and games. A smart display such as the Nest Hub is great because you can see the games on the screen and use more than just voice—although you don’t have to. RELATED: The Best Jokes, Games, and Easter Eggs for Google Assistant There are two ways to access the games on the Nest Hub. First, you can simply go to the “Games” tab on the home screen....

Why Kernel Upgrades Cause Problems The kernel is an integral part of a Linux system, so depending on your device and setup, a kernel update has the potential to cause problems for you or for your installed applications. Issues can range from quirky graphics behavior to a totally unusable system. If your situation is the latter, you’re in a real pickle. To remedy this problem, many modern distros keep an older or different kernel installed that you can access at boot....

If you keep running out of memory on your Mac, it’s easy to determine which application or process is eating it up in Activity Monitor. This utility is included with every copy of macOS. Here’s how to check, and some things you can do to fix this issue. To get started, open Activity Monitor. You can do this by pressing Command+period (.) or by clicking the Search icon in the menu bar....

Your iPhone includes two cameras: one in the front that faces you, and one on the back you can point at other things. While taking photos or using FaceTime, sometimes you need to switch between the front and back cameras. Here’s how to do it. How to Switch Between Front and Back Cameras in the Camera App If you’re taking a selfie in the iPhone Camera app, the front-facing camera is ideal, because you can see what you look like on your screen....

The Start, or Modern, screen doesn’t have a taskbar, so when you run Modern apps you might lose track of which apps are running. There are a few ways to check which Modern apps are running and switch among all running apps. One way of seeing which Modern apps are running is to press Alt + Tab. A dialog displays showing thumbnails of all apps running from the Modern screen....

iTunes is good enough as a media player, there do exist better options, but when it comes to managing an iOS device, it has some pretty neat tricks up its sleeve. Chief among these are the Apps settings. With the Apps settings you can quickly and easily manage apps and home screens using your computer. In addition to being able to effortlessly remove apps that you’ve installed from the Apps Store, you can also reorganize app icons and the order that they appear, you can drag apps to different home screens, and you can even rearrange home screens, with just a few drags and clicks....