Microsoft has announced that the community support forums for Office 2013 and Office 2010 are ending next month, July 2018. The Community Support Forum are online forums where Microsoft staff and volunteers answer questions from Microsoft customers. From July 2018 Microsoft won’t be responding to queries in these forums: Office 2010, 2013 Windows 7, 8.1, […]
Office 2011 for Mac is just one of many programs that won’t work at all on the upcoming MacOS release ‘Mojave’. That’s not a surprise for anyone who follows Apple’s policy announcements. Many years ago, Apple warned that they’d eventually stop supporting 32-bit programs with 64-bit applications becoming the required standard. Among the programs that […]
Microsoft has announced that a perpetual licence version of Office for Mac will be released later this year. Office 2019 for Mac will come out alongside Office 2019 for Windows. Both are for non-subscriber / perpetual licence customers only. Anyone with Office 365 ‘subscription’ doesn’t need to bother with these ‘2019’ releases. Source: Microsoft The […]
For the first time in a decade, Microsoft is making substantial changes to the Office ribbon interface. But not to worry, the changes don’t appear to be enough to put anyone off Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. The existing ribbon is retained, that’s an important point that’s not emphasized enough in the leaked Microsoft video. […]
Modern Excel can grab information from multiple files in a single folder. Just open the worksheet, refresh the query and it’s up to date! This article is a condensed version of just one chapter in Real Time Excel – the new 2nd edition has a lot more detail and example files ready to use. […]
Criminal have found another way to (mis)use Microsoft Office and infect computers using the latest ‘zero-day’ hack. You may know that Adobe’s Flash was a popular add-in for web pages to display multi-media content. But Flash was very insecure and unstable so it’s been mostly replaced with other secure systems. Most modern browsers block Flash […]
As usual, Microsoft has released non-security updates and bug fixes for Office 2016 and Office 2013 on the first Tuesday of the month. A few caught our eye: Late last year, Microsoft was caught out leaving a horribly vulnerable Equation Editor in Office for 17 years. A new patch restores the MT Extra font so […]
Two Indian banks clamped down use of unlicensed Microsoft Office, leaving staff to use calculators or open-source alternative spreadsheets. Mid-Day.com reported that Bank of India and Saraswat Bank had some licenses for Microsoft Office but not enough for all the computers the bank had allocated to staff. Branches were instructed to uninstall Office from many […]
A recent news story about the Australian airline, Qantas, caught our eye because of the email signature block. “We work flexibility at Qantas. I’m sending this message at a time that suits me. Please feel comfortable know that I don’t expect you to read, respond to or action it outside of regular working hours.”
Both Windows and Office send an astonishing amount of data from your computer to Microsoft. Here’s how to see what’s being sent. The Diagnostic Data Viewer shows, as it happens, what your computer is sending to Microsoft. The tool does NOT give you the choice to not send your private information. It only tells you […]
Later this year, you’ll be able to buy an Office 365 annual ‘subscription direct from the App Store on a Mac. Buying through the App Store will be a bad move for any Mac users. That was one of the lesser noticed announcements at Apple’s WWDC 2018 conference. The whole App Store is being redesigned and […]
Office Watch reader, John Hoffmann has some more detail on variable fonts, now supported in Windows 10. Variable fonts are a single package that includes many variations (Light, Heavy etc), instead of having separate font files for each variant. That takes up less disk space (important on tablet devices) and, as John explains, are easier […]
There are plenty of audio and music options available in PowerPoint, if you want to give your audience a break from your voice. We’ll go beyond the simple ‘adding music’ help to give some practical advice for audio in presentations: opening or closing music playing one song after another music playing over the entire presentation […]
In late 2016, Microsoft removed the PowerPoint audio ‘Change Picture’ option from the right-click menu for the music icon and they show no interest in bringing the choice back. The feature hasn’t gone away, it’s just not on the right-click menu where it should be. The workaround is on the Audio Tools | Format ribbon […]
It’s time again to put the mighty brains and resources of Microsoft against the best and brightest of American youth. Yet again, the kids put Microsoft Word to shame. Each year, Office-Watch.com get the word lists from the finals of the US Scripps National Spelling Bee and runs them through the Microsoft Word dictionary. There’s […]
An overdue and very welcome addition to OneDrive for Office 365 customers is password protected sharing links. Until now, you could send a link to a OneDrive stored file or folder but there was no control over who used that link. If the link ‘escaped’ to other people, they could download or even edit the […]
Microsoft has extended their OneDrive Files Restore feature to all Office 365 customers, not just their business users. It’s a simple way to recover files that have been lost, in particular if you’ve been caught in a ransomware attack. Ransomware will encrypt all the files on your computer and network so you can’t access them. […]
The increasing popularity of Office 365 hosting has a downside; targeting of the platform by hackers. Just like Microsoft Office software, the wide deployment of Office 365 means it becomes a large target for baddies to try infiltrating. They are succeeding. A report from Beazley Breach Response Services suggests that attacks against Office 365 are […]
The latest early release of Office for Windows/Mac gives you ‘choices’ for sharing diagnostic information about Office. You can choose to send Microsoft a lot of information or just a little data but you can’t refuse completely. There are legitimate questions about what information is being sent to Microsoft and how it’s being used. That […]
Office 2016 for Windows or Mac has an inconsistent set of privacy and diagnostic data options depending on exactly which Office variant you have, your ‘Insider’ choice and even the toss of a coin! Microsoft’s intention is clear … they want more information about how you use Word, Excel and Powerpoint to the extent that […]
With the sale of fonts via the Microsoft Store, there’s now a complication in the familiar way fonts are managed in Windows 10 and how Office for Windows handles new fonts. For as long as anyone can remember, all Windows fonts where in a single folder: /Windows/Fonts But not anymore … Fonts installed from the […]
Here’s how to make a parallax slide transition from one slide to another. Strictly speaking, to fake it! The parallax effect is created by making a text box ‘below’ the visible slide then animating that text box into view. See Cool Parallax Slide Transition in PowerPoint Ideally, you’d be able to transition to the next […]
Here’s some Outlook tricks to help planning for the Soccer World Cup 2018 or any other event. (Obviously, we’re joking about ‘normal’ people. Our football loving friends are sure they are normal and pity humans with no interest in the round-ball game.) We’ve already looked at how to import a list of all World Cup […]
New and improved ‘Pro’ fonts are a lesser known part of the April 2018 update to Windows 10. You can install, free, updated alternatives for Windows standard fonts like Arial, Georgia, Gill Sans and Verdana. Windows 10 now supports ‘Variable Type’ fonts where a single font file contains many variations like bold, italic, regular, condensed […]
Sharepoint hosted by Microsoft Office 365 continues to get more features with a few indicating changes coming to broader Office products. Changed Opening Pane The Office.com pane is changing with a ‘Recommended’ section that lists items that Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence thinks you should see. Discover shows documents other staff are working on, including new documents […]
The North Carolina State Bar is proposing attorneys get an hour of computer training, including Microsoft Office, as part of their annual Continuing Legal Education (CLE). Only one US State, Florida, has a computer component of their current CLE. Amazing! In Florida, lawyers have to get three hours of technical training every three years. That’s […]
The upcoming Football World Cup (soccer) is a little more complicated than usual. There are 64 matches playing across three time zones in Russia which makes it hard to figure out what time the live broadcast will be for you. Outlook for Windows or Mac can help, combined with an online calendar of World Cup […]
Microsoft Word for Android devices has achieved a seemingly impressive milestone, 500 million downloads. Is that ‘half a billion’ number truly big when compared to the number of Android devices in use? We’re inspired by the wonderful More or Less program and podcast from BBC Radio 4 to ask the question ‘Is that a big […]
Here’s how to make the latest web ‘parallax’ effect in PowerPoint. Parallax effect is where a photo appears to move ‘out of the way’ as a new slide appears. You see it in modern web sites like this: See how the photo moves up, as the new slide also moves up? That’s the parallax effect. […]
Continuing our tutorial on making a parallax slide transition in PowerPoint. In Parallax Effect in PowerPoint, part one we setup the extended slide with the image and text boxes needed. We showed how to add text boxes outside the visible slide area, the vital selection pane, renaming objects so they are easier to identify and […]
It seems every other business is using the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as an excuse to sell something, so Office Watch has joined the bandwagon … with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Our book Keep Calm with Microsoft Office has sample Word documents and PowerPoint slides which have the original ‘Keep […]
It’s nice to see journalists used advanced Microsoft Word skills to keep government officials and politicians on their toes. CBC News, Canada received an early copy of a Manitoba government report on mental health. The final report was officially released a few hours later. The smart reporters at CBC compared the two reports to see […]
The so-called ‘Efail’ security bug affects Microsoft Outlook for Windows (among others) but only if you’re using a PGP encryption plug in like Gpg4Win and S/MIME. The bug means that messages that should be encrypted can, instead, be viewed in plain text. The current advice is to uninstall Gpg4Win. The EFF has instructions for disabling […]
This might rate as the most nerdy Microsoft Office news item of the year … Microsoft is changing the build number format for Office from four significant digits to five. Please try to contain your excitement … The current MS Office for Windows public release has a version/build like this: Version 1804 Build 9226.2156 – […]
Your deadline is in four hours, you’ve got pages to write and BAM! the ‘M’ key breaks on your keyboard …. What do you do? That happened to Colin Chambers, a University of Buffalo student when a drink spilled on his keyboard and as he put it: “The letter between “L” and “N” in the […]
Excel has three PercentRank() functions to give you the percent ranking of a value in a list of numbers. It’s different from the Excel rankings we’ve discussed before, because this is a percentage or percentile ranking Let’s start with a simple example. There’s a list of values from 1 to 29 on the left. Column […]
Here’s how to make a lookalike for the Law & Order TV show title card in either PowerPoint or Word. Last week we showed how to make the Law & Order opening screen image and how to use that look in slides or documents. Many readers asked why Office-Watch.com didn’t do the main title card. […]
You’ve been getting a lot of special emails from companies about the data and emails they send you. That’s all because of GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation that comes into force on 25 May 2018. We’ll explain a little about GDPR below but first we’ll explain what will change at Office Watch. No change, […]
There’s an amazingly simple but effective way to bypass some security scans used by Office 365 hosting and possibly infect a computer. Called BaseStriker, this trick is so simple. It’s amazing that any professional security software doesn’t check for it already. It hides a dangerous link from Microsoft’s own and other security scans, which allows […]
One of the recent security patches from Microsoft is being actively exploited by hackers hoping to trap people who don’t update their computer quickly. The security bug can use an Office document to infect your computer. The security hole is in the Internet Explorer browser and the VBscript engine. It affects Windows 7 onwards plus […]
