Don’t believe most of the Windows 10 reviews out there. Many seem to come from writers who have swallowed whole the Microsoft hype. One ‘technology expert’ on the TV could only mention one downside to Windows 10 – the game ‘Hearts’ is missing. Oh please! There’s some nice stuff in Windows 10
There are times for all computer users when you just want to go back in time. You want to recover some words of wisdom from a past draft, or perhaps a file was deleted or lost in the ether. Just today there’s a story in the New York Post about
We were excited to see headlines about Google Drive being available within Microsoft Office. There were comparisons with Dropbox and Box, both also have links into Office. Alas, things aren’t quite what they seem. We don’t rely on press releases to write Office-Watch.com articles. Wherever possible, we actually test software
Effective Outlook Calendars is out now for Outlook 2013, Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2016. A greatly expanded and revised version of our popular ebook. An extensive guide to Outlook Calendar, appointments, events and reminder. How to use them on many computers, phones and devices. The Calendar part of Microsoft Outlook 2013
With the release of the ‘final’ Windows 10 build (10240) it’s a good time to look at the free Office apps for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. These apps only work on Windows 10 but are free and worth getting even if you’ll be installing the full Office software. The apps
Microsoft has released Office 2016 for Mac – a full set of Office programs for Macintosh OS X computers. There’s updated programs for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. All the new programs support Mac goodies like Retina display, Full Screen and Multi-touch. Overall, there’s little surprising or truly new
Excel has great charting features and they get better in Excel 2016. Sadly many long time Office users have been scared off charting because of the difficulties in making and editing charts in years gone by. Rest assured, Slowly but surely, Excel charts have improved. They are more robust; sometimes
Before you make an Excel chart, check the rows and columns you’ll base it on. A lot of chart problems are caused by incomplete or badly formatted data. Excel is smart at turning numbers into charts but it’ll get confused easily. Have a look at this simple table imported from
Microsoft has updated the test version of Office 2016 with some changes in features. Most likely, Office 2016 has been updated automatically, you can check from File | Account and make sure the version is 16.0.4201.1006 or later. Excel Charts The most interesting part of the update are the new
The biggest complaint about Excel in recent years has been the lack of innovation in charts. There’s many interesting and useful charting options available in other software and web services. Poor old Excel’s charts are looking tired. Excel 2016 changes that with six new chart formats. They are the first
After a short preview period, Microsoft has publically released Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Android phones. They are available to everyone for free and are a handy companion to ‘real’ Office for Windows or Mac. Office 365 subscribers get some extras but most of the core features are available to
This tweet shows there’s plenty of ways to use Microsoft Word. I mean, who wants all that hassle of opening up the paper tray when software can deliver a single page right to your hands? And nicely warmed up too!
Last year, the UK government announced that they were using the Open Document Format (ODF) rather than Microsoft’s similar Office Open XML (docx etc.). Let’s look at how that can be done in Microsoft Office. When you install Microsoft Office, the default document types are set to Microsoft’s preferred formats;
The Bank of England has now banned Outlook’s Autocomplete feature after an embarrassing email misaddressed incident. We’ll look at Autocomplete and its various traps for the unwary. The Bank (the equivalent of the US Federal Reserve) have a secret contingency plan for the UK leaving the European Union. Well, it
Microsoft has announced that the Facebook ‘social connectors’ that link products like Outlook have stopped working. No warning, it’s just happened. This affects a wide range of Microsoft products including Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013. We’ve copied below Microsoft’s full list of affected products. Microsoft is blaming Facebook for this but,
Microsoft has pushed out an update for the Office 2016 Preview with some feature updates and, presumably, bug fixes. The company is highlighting the following things in the update: Real Time Presence in Word–While Real Time Typing will ship in subsequent builds, we are rolling out a key part of
The preview version of SQL Server 2016 has an interesting feature which shows that Microsoft can offer secure cloud storage if they want to. Until now, the focus has been on securing data ‘in transit’ between the server and computers or between different servers. The data itself is ‘in the
Last week we noted that Facebook has joined Google and Yahoo with support for the OpenPGP encrypted email standard. Microsoft in Windows or Outlook doesn’t support this standard. Gpg4Win adds OpenPGP for Windows. It also has GpgOL, an Outlook plug-in but only for 32-bit Outlook. If you have 64-bit Office /
Among all the announcements from Apple yesterday, there’s one that caught our eye – multi-tasking. This is coming in iOS 9 … the next version of the Apple operating system. Source: Apple At least Apple calls it ‘multi-tasking’ it’s really just a split screen so you can have two apps
Skype has an embarrassing bug where a simple set of characters, easily mistyped, will crash the iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows apps plus (as we just discovered) Skype for Windows. The characters are http://: (note the extra colon)which is easily done when typing a web link. We just tried sending
Facebook has made Microsoft look bad with their latest innovation: encrypted email. Facebook probably didn’t mean to do it, but their announcement shows up Microsoft’s lack of proper support for secure email. First the good news … Facebook now has the option to have their maintenance emails sent in encrypted
The US Scripps National Spelling Bee is over for another year with another tie between two amazing young people. Both winners are impressive to us mere mortals but also compared to Microsoft Office. As we have for the last few years, we’ve made a list of the championship words to
We’ve just released Clever Outlook Contacts, an extensive guide to Outlook’s Contacts list and using that list on many computers, phones and devices. The Contacts part of Microsoft Outlook 2013 & 2010 is quite amazing. It goes far beyond just recording phone numbers and addresses. Far beyond just Outlook on a Windows computer.
This week has seen three bits of news from Microsoft about more apps and features coming our way. Let’s have a look at what’s supposedly in store; Flow, Office Now and OneClip. Two could be interesting and useful, the other will send chills up the spine of anyone with a
