Microsoft has announced that Office desktop apps (Windows and Mac) can now co-author encrypted documents. Until now, encrypted docs could only have shared editing using Office on the web. What’s in the fine print is often overlooked, this feature isn’t for everyone. The announcement in bold from Microsoft has got
Microsoft has released a patch for the MSHTML security bug that’s being used with Office documents to infect computers. The bug is in MSHTML, the browser rendering engine used by Microsoft Office. If someone is tricked into opening a hacked Office document with ActiveX control, they could infect their computer
There are many API’s available on the Internet that can provide great and timely data in ways that Excel can understand, here’s how you can do it. We’ve recently received emails asking how to use Excel to import data from specific API’s. Always we have the same answers because most
Printing email messages is something that we all do at various times, and in theory it should be as simple as clicking the Print icon in your email program – but what if the message won’t print out properly? Sometimes the printed version of an email message (or web page)
Outlook 2007 has a feature which may help your outgoing messages be distinguished from spam. There’s a lot of talk about anti-spam measures but less talk about legitimate messages being mistaken for spam. When this happens your message might be overlooked in the receivers ‘Junk’ folder but at worst will
The Read Aloud feature in Word 365 and Outlook 365 is getting fewer but much better and realistic sounding voices. Read Aloud is how documents can be read to you. Great for ‘reading’ without adding more eye-strain or proof reading against an original document. These options are at Review |
The September 2021 release preview has a lot more than usual new and updated features in Office 365 for Windows. Almost as if Microsoft has been saving them up for a bumper surprise! It’s all in the ‘Current Channel (Preview)’ release v2109 build 14430.20088 that’s out now. This is the
Soon older versions of Outlook won’t be able to connect to Microsoft hosted mailboxes, even though both the software and service come from the same company. Here’s what’s happening, why, who is affected and what to do. Microsoft is finally ending older, insecure, ‘Basic’ authentication connections to their Microsoft 365
Office Depot in the USA has a good deal available now for both Microsoft 365 Family and Personal, but with an important limitation buried in the fine print. Both offers are for 15 months of Microsoft 365 for the price of 12 but you must buy a ‘qualifying product’ to
Simple, easy and free ways to convert audio files like WAV, FLAC and many others into a format that PowerPoint or your smartphone prefers such as MP3, MP4 or AAC. The BBC Sound effect downloads are in WAV format. That’s a good, high-fidelity and uncompressed format that works in PowerPoint
The hardware requirements for Windows 11 are surprisingly high especially the increased security requirements. Some brand-new computers, even Microsoft’s own high-priced Surface computers bought today might not be compatible with Windows 11. See all the Office-Watch.com coverage of Windows 11 Unlike previous major Windows releases, you can’t assume that a
The new Widgets pane in Windows 11 has three widgets for Outlook and Microsoft 365 users. Calendar, To Do and one only for Enterprise users. Widgets are a pop-up window of configurable small panes. The selection of widgets is quite limited, at least for now; Weather, Traffic, Stocks, Sports, Entertainment
If you think font selection is hard, spare a thought for lawyers who have to deal with different official rules, recommendations and accepted practice for court submissions. Jason Steed at JDSupra sets out the complications for US lawyers. The D.C Circuit court started ‘discouraging’ use of Garamond font but no
Microsoft has updated the Office programs to support the OpenDocument format (ODF) to version 1.3. Most people use Office Open XML format (OOXML) which is the official name for what is usually called the ‘new’ Microsoft Office formats, .docx .xlsx .pptx etc. OpenDocument files .odt .ods .odp etc are also
OneDrive on Mac computers won’t be supported on older macOS from mid-September 2021. The latest macOS and last two releases will continue work and be supported. Microsoft’s general policy for supporting Office on Mac computers is to support the most recent version of macOS and the two versions before that.
The Office for Android apps won’t be supported on Chromebook devices from mid-September. That admission was finally dragged out of a reluctant Microsoft. That leaves Chromebook users with Office on the web and Outlook.com in the Chrome browser. See Two ways to use Microsoft Office on a Chromebook Microsoft reluctantly
Here’s how to collaborate on a ‘live’ file (Word document, Excel workbook, PowerPoint deck or OneNote notebook) saved on OneDrive or other cloud service. It’s part of our series on accept a sharing request and collaborating on a ‘live’ document saved online. Microsoft spends a lot of energy getting people
Microsoft spends a lot of time explaining how to share a file (Word document, Excel workbook, PowerPoint deck or OneNote notebook) but very little on how to accept a sharing request and collaborate on a ‘live’ document saved online. Live or real-time collaboration lets two or more people work on
Chromebooks are low cost alternatives to regular laptops with great battery life. They can run Microsoft Office in different ways – two and a half by our count. There were two more, but Microsoft dropped support for them in September 2021. Quick Chromebook buying tips Web apps Chromebooks come with
Word 365’s Track Changes is getting a more refined option to remember just changes you make to a document, no-one else. Normally, turning ‘Track Changes’ on, means anyone working on the document has their edits tracked. On the Review tab, Tracking and under ‘Track Changes’ there’s a new choice ‘Just
A security company has revealed a dangerous setting in Microsoft PowerApps. Microsoft has fallen back on one of their oldest tricks, blaming the customer. There’s a similar ‘way too open’ option in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Power Apps provide ways for organization to make simple apps to access online data
Sometimes Outlook for Windows can download a lot of data that it doesn’t mean to. When we say ‘a lot’ we mean many gigabytes, sometimes far more than the size of the mailbox, which makes no sense at all. Here’s some options for fixing the problem with tips for using
Excel’s powerful data import feature is finally getting some control over the automatic conversion of incoming info into Excel data types. When Excel 365’s Get and Transform feature imports data, it looks at each field (column) and tries to work out what type of data it is. That’s for unstructured
A detailed look at a common email phishing attack, what to look for and how to avoid it. The most common form of phishing (password stealing) attack fakes a Microsoft account login. Most people have a Microsoft account for their work, home or both so it’s a large slow-moving target
