Microsoft is now rolling out more of their Mentions feature showing that it goes beyond a simple addition to Outlook. Mentions uses the idea of @<username> tags (borrowed shamelessly from Twitter) to extend your options for searching within messages. The feature is in the current previews of Office for Windows
Here’s a ‘no fuss, no muss’ way to grab the latest exchange rates and use them in Excel. No need to lookup a rate and type it in, let Excel do all that work for you. You might expect Excel to do this out of the box. After all, Microsoft
Last week had more news stories about email accounts being hacked and contents made public but don’t feel sorry for the victims, they only have themselves to blame. Colin Powell uses Gmail – which was hacked. The US Democratic Committee had their Microsoft Exchange mail server hacked releasing 19,252 emails
Outlook.com will soon get the ability to attach photos from Facebook into your messages. A slap in the face for paying Office for Windows customers. Also coming are links to Google Drive (links to OneDrive, Dropbox and Box are already available) but what sticks in our craw is the Facebook
Microsoft has opened data centers in Germany which have significant advantages over their server farms in other countries. The data centers in Frankfurt and Magdeburg (near Berlin) are being called the ‘Microsoft German Cloud’. What’s different about these data centers compared to Microsoft’s other locations in US, UK, Australia, Asia
The battle between printer makers and third-party ink/toner makers continues with news that Hewlett-Packard has added blocks to stop non-HP ink being used in their printers. Here’s how to avoid paying more than you need to. This has been going on for years. Printer manufacturers now make most of their
Coming in the next few days to Android and iPhone is Google’s entry into the world of online messaging – Google Allo. Allo has some interesting ideas but lacks two important features that disqualifies it from use for us and most Microsoft Office users. Security Allo disappoints in terms of
Organizations should watch out for a Microsoft sale technique where a licence ‘audit’ is just a way to gather customer data and try to upsell to Office 365 TechRepublic reports on some forum threads that report MS salespeople trying to get a ‘voluntary’ audit of software licences by making various
Office for Apple devices adds more cloud storage options plus a unique feature for PowerPoint. Edmodo and Tencent cloud storage is now supported. Tencent is a very large Chinese Internet company. It has a cloud storage service called Weiyun (in Chinese). Edmodo is an educational collaboration service based in California.
Office 365 Groups, workplace collaboration system and Microsoft’s answer to Slack, will now accept guest users with some conditions. Until now only registered users, part of an organization, could be part of an Office 365 Group. Now outside contractors, partners etc can be invited to join the conversation. Source: Microsoft
OpenOffice, a free MS Office alternative, may stop improving in the near future. Developers seem reluctant to contribute the time necessary to keep the project alive. In the words of volunteer Vice President Dennis E. Hamilton, OpenOffice “has limited capacity for sustaining the project in an energetic manner.” Even if you
In addition to the security fixes for Office, the same update has many other changes and fixes. Some of these ‘Nonsecurity-related fixes and improvements’ caught our eye: The expansion of the programming interface into Office continues with the addition of DialogAPI 1.1 and Mailbox 1.4 in Office 2013 programs VBA
September 2016 has the usual collection of patches for security lapses in Microsoft products. There’s the standard collection of Windows and browser fixes including Internet Explorer and the new Edge browser. For Office customers there’s only one patch. Yet again, hackers have found a way to hack an Office document
Microsoft’s customers in the United Kingdom can now choose their own country as the place for data to be stored. Microsoft has announced that they’ve opened UK data centres in London, Durham and Cardiff which can store Office 365, Azure, OneDrive and other Microsoft hosted data. These ‘local’ data centres
From 1 Nov 2016, only a few weeks away, Microsoft will stop updating their junk email filter in Outlook for Windows and Mac. What does that mean for you and your Outlook Junk Email settings? What’s happening? Microsoft won’t be updating their email spam ‘Smartscreen’ technology any more. That’s the
Microsoft has announced that they’ll stop updating the Outlook spam filter (“Smartscreen”) at the end of this month – on 1st Nov 2016. This might be a worry, but not a disaster, for most Outlook users and we’ll explain why. What’s Happening From 1st Nov 2016 there will be no
Mercedes has announced a new project ‘In Car Office’ which will put your calendar, contacts etc on your car dashboard, starting in 2017. This is interesting because there’s some specifics and a date. Usually these car related tech announcements are long on catch phrases (‘strategic alliance’, ‘future’, ‘vision’) and short
Microsoft has released details of a new way Office documents can be used to infect your computer. The documents can contain disguised OLE objects which are the real danger. We’ve often said that ‘new’ Office documents (.docx .xlsx etc) are safer than their .doc etc predecessors. That’s because the new
Microsoft is gradually adding to Office some interesting new Ink related features; Replay and Math. Rewind and Replay Until now drawings or ‘ink’ in Office documents has been static and fixed, much like real ink. OneNote Mobile for Windows 10 is the first Office app to make ink additions animated.
Microsoft is expanding their public testing program for Office Insiders and adding options to accept changes quickly or slowly. Microsoft ‘Insiders’ programs let the public become testers of upcoming software with the risks that come with using somewhat untested programs. Strange as it may seem to many, there are people
A quick look at importing data into Excel. Excel has sooo many ways to import information into a worksheet. Go to Data | Get External Data to see the selection. There are options to grab information from other databases, cloud services, web page tables etc in a variety of ways.
When typing or importing data into Excel, the program tries to set the cell type (number, date etc) based on simple rules. This is the default ‘General’ cell format at work. But Excel’s guesses aren’t always right. We humans insist on typing or importing data that doesn’t comply with Microsoft’s
A new report shows that Excel is causing errors to creep into genetic studies because of data conversion problems. Excel tries to figure out the type of information you are typing or importing into a worksheet. Those rules work most of the time, but not always. If Excel converts a
Sometimes we wonder what happens in Microsoft development meetings because the software we get from those discussions seems so out of touch with reality or even sense. Today’s example comes from Outlook for Windows and it’s curious ‘one way’ translation feature. Office for Windows has good language translation options, though
