Since its founding in 1975, Microsoft has grown dramatically. As new products and eras came along, the firm changed its branding image over the years to match. Here’s a look at all of its major logos from the past 47 years. Groovy Lines: 1975-1980 Back when Microsoft was “Micro-Soft,” graphic artist Simon Daniels created the firm’s first corporate logo using the Aki Lines typeface in 1975. The typeface, created by Akihiko Seki in 1970, utilizes sets of seven sweeping lines to form the shapes of the letters....

Alternative text (alt text) allows screen readers to capture the description of an object and read it aloud, providing aid for those with visual impairments. Here’s how to add alt text to an object in Microsoft Excel. RELATED: How to Add Alternative Text to an Object in Google Slides To add alt text to an object in Excel, open your spreadsheet, add an object (Insert > Picture), and then select the object....

For as long we can remember, the go-to music app on Windows has been Windows Media Player (WMP). Sadly, WMP hasn’t been updated since Windows 7, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, but it’s not exactly the latest nor greatest app for playing your MP3s. In Windows 10, there’s a new music app called Groove Music and if you’ve used any type of music-oriented application recently, then Groove should be pretty self-explanatory, but let’s take a few minutes and walk you through some of its more notable features....

When placing text over a graphic in Microsoft Word, you may need to take an extra step. By adding a bit of blur or transparency, your readers can still see the image, but your text will be more readable. Luckily, Word offers a few built-in image editing tools that can help. With a tweak or two, you can give that image a more subtle appearance. Whether you want to blur the image or make it more transparent, we’ve got you covered....

Google Sheets makes it easy to add and remove items from the existing drop-down menus in your spreadsheets. You can also change your drop-down settings, and even completely remove them if you want. Here’s how to do that. Sheets lets you selectively make changes to your drop-downs. This way, you can select a drop-down and make changes to it, while keeping all other drop-downs as is. RELATED: How to Create a Drop-Down List in Google Sheets...

If you’ve ever been showing a presentation or a video, you know how embarrassing it can be when system sounds such as alerts, errors, and notifications interrupt your audio, especially when you’re projecting to a PA system or loudspeakers. In OS X, there’s a couple of cool little options that you can apply to your audio settings so that, if you are say, listening to your music while you clean, or showing a movie on your big TV, then you won’t be interrupted by Frog, Funk, Bottle, or any of the other system alerts....

If you’d like to limit what apps a user can run on a PC, Windows gives you two options. You can block the apps you don’t want a user to run, or you can restrict them to running only specific apps. Here’s how to do it. RELATED: How to Use System Restore in Windows 10, 11, 7, and 8 NOTE: Be absolutely sure that you are making changes to a user account you actually want to restrict, and that you always have an unrestricted administrative account available to undo those changes....

Not all scanners are created equal. Even if you buy a top of the line model, it might not be the right tool for the job, and you’ll waste time, get inferior results, and curse the day you bought the wrong model. Why the Scanner Type Matters Sure, all scanners perform the same process: they use a combination of mirrors, glass, a light source, a CCD chip (just like the one in your digital camera), and some combination of belts, motors, and rollers to move the document and/or the pieces of the scanner around in order to capture your paperwork or photos in their entirety....

The one thing Mac owners probably take for granted is its customizability. True, Apple does impose strict rules on how the interface looks and acts, but in between all that, there are countless potential lost hours just adorning your system with new wallpaper and icons. Replacing your system’s icons is one of the most distinct changes you can make which will have an immediate impact. Interacting with OS X is largely icon-driven (as it is with all graphical user interfaces) and thus it tends to be bright, colorful, and a general pleasure to look at and click....

You don’t need the ability to turn your lights on and off, adjust the thermostat, or unlock the door from your wristwatch but it’s the 21st century and with a little help from a home automation hub and a smartwatch you can live like the future is now. Read on as we show you how to control your home with your Pebble. What Do I Need? For the following home automation tutorials you’ll need a Pebble smartwatch and then, based on which branch of the tutorial you follow, you will also need either a Philips Hue lighting system or a Wink -based hub system–you can use either the lighting-only GE Link hub or the full-fledged Wink hub....

ScreenTips in Word are small popup windows that display descriptive text about the command or control your mouse is hovering over. You can also create your own ScreenTips for words, phrases, or images in your own documents. Normally, ScreenTips are created using a hyperlink which would take you to a different location in the document or a web page or create a new email message, if it’s an email link....

Vibrations are a great way to alert you when someone is calling or texting without notifying everyone else around you. The only problem: you may not know who is contacting you unless you pull your iPhone out of your pocket. We’ve shown you how to assign different vibration patterns and ringtones to your iPhone contacts. We’ve even shown you how to add your very own custom-made ringtones to your iPhone so you can trick it out just the way you want it....

You can easily convert PDF files to editable text in Linux using the “pdftotext” command line tool. However, if there are any images in the original PDF file, they are not extracted. To extract images from a PDF file, you can use another command line tool called “pdfimages”. NOTE: When we say to type something in this article and there are quotes around the text, DO NOT type the quotes, unless we specify otherwise....

There’s nothing worse than working on a formula in your spreadsheet only to receive an error instead of a result. Here, we’ll look at the formula parse errors you may see in Google Sheets and how to fix them. What Is a Formula Parse Error? A formula parse error in Google Sheets is an error that happens when Sheets is unable to process a formula because of conflicting data, missing data, or an incorrectly written formula....

If you know you’re going to be using your PC in a location without an Internet connection, and you need access to maps, you can download maps for specific areas in the “Maps” app in Windows 10 and use them offline. To open the “Maps” app, click the Start button and click “Maps” in the “Most used” list on the Start menu. If you’ve hidden the “Most used” list or removed the “Maps” app from it, click “All apps” at the bottom of the Start menu to access a list from which you can select the “Maps” app....

Adding a header of footer in Word allows you to add information that’s displayed on every page. There may be various reasons for adding the filename to the header or footer, and we’ll show you how to do this. NOTE: We used Word 2013 to illustrate this feature and, for this example, we added the filename to the header. Click the “Insert” tab and insert an empty header or footer as described in our article about adding a header or footer to your Word document....

NVIDIA’s SHIELD is the first Android TV box to get the Google Assistant, and you can already do some cool thing with it—like use it with the TV turned off. If you’d like a visual notification that it heard you, though, there’s a hidden tweak for that, too. There’s actually a pair of toggles found in the Developer Settings menu that will force the controller or SHIELD itself to blink when it detects the words “OK Google”, making it a lot easier to use when you’re away from the TV…assuming you have the controller nearby, of course....

Welcome to the Raspberry Pi 4 Raspberry Pi’s started from humble beginnings and scaled up to the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi 4. Raspberry Pi 4’s can now be purchased with 8GB of RAM, and they are almost, or in actuality, like a real desktop workstation. The performance doesn’t match most modern day systems yet, however if one only processes some documents, surfs the Internet a few hours, and watches some video’s, the Raspberry Pi 4 is surely up to the task....

The icons that Windows uses for your documents and programs are saved in an icon cache, so they can be displayed quickly instead of having to slowly load them every time. If you ever have problems with the icons on your computer, rebuilding the icon cache might help. Sometimes the icon cache gets out of date, causing icons to display incorrectly, or even go missing. For example, maybe you upgraded an application and the new version came with a new icon, but you still see the old icon on the desktop....

7-Zip is a fantastic Windows program for advanced file zipping, whether you’re password-protecting your archives or just trying to compress them down even smaller. There’s just one problem: its icons are ugly as sin. RELATED: Everything You Need to Know About Zip Files Normally, I wouldn’t mind too much that an app is ugly–especially one as mundane as a file archiver. But it’s not just 7-Zip’s in-app icons. It also changes your Windows icons for ZIP, 7Z, TGZ, and other archive file types to these horrific, blurry, pre-Vista-looking icons that permeate my hard drive....