Updates to Office Mix – a new way to make PowerPoint interactive. A while ago we told you about Office Mix, Microsoft’s way to put a presentation online with quizzes and other interactive elements. Mix has been updated with a wider range of examples via a Public Gallery It’s nice
Microsoft doesn’t see the main problem as they apologizes & explain the Lync and Exchange outages. In a blog post, Microsoft has explained what happened in the cloud service breakdowns earlier this week but exposes their lack of understanding for customers’ needs with cloud services. The break in Exchange Server
Some great tips on table formatting. Joey Cherdarchuk has a nice posting on a very different table styling to the type that Microsoft prefers. Under the banner ‘Clear Off the Table’ he suggests getting rid of gridlines and colors to simplify the look of tables. In his example, Joey takes a
QuickOffice is no more but Google improves MS Office document support Google has announced improvements to their direct support for Microsoft Office document formats as part of a reshuffle of their apps. The Google apps for viewing and editing documents will be updated to include editing of Microsoft Office document
Office 2013 has some clever tricks when you touch the screen. Tony G writes: ” … there are some subtle features in Office 2013. I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 and I have observed that the right click menus and some other features are different when called up by the
Another update to Office 2011 for Mac, mostly Outlook 2011. Microsoft has released another patch for Office for Mac 2011 called the 14.4.3 update. The update is available from here or AutoUpdate on your Mac should grab and install the patch. Microsoft is typically cagey about what’s changed in the
Email services for Office 365 and Exchange Online should now be resumed but Microsoft handled it really badly. In Microsoft’s world, damage to sales is far worse than any failure to meet customers service needs. So on that score, Microsoft has done well for itself in the last day or
Microsoft raises the bar for cloud storage quantity but not quality. Microsoft has laid down a serious challenge to Google, Dropbox and other online storage provider with big increases in OneDrive storage limits for free and paying customers. Sadly, no mention of improvements to OneDrive itself, especially security and privacy,
What does the new Amazon phone have for Office users? The new Amazon Fire Phone is interesting though it remains to be seen whether features like ‘Dynamic Perspective’ are useful or gimmicky. For us, the main question is Microsoft Office compatibility both for users of the Fire Phone and anyone
How can you tell which type of Office 2013 installation you have? Office 2013 comes with two quite different installation methods. Ideally there should be no difference between the two but the latest patch bug only affects some users with one type of installation called ‘Click to Run’. Since there’s
An interesting font idea from Spain – handwriting of homeless people turned into fonts. HomelessFonts.org is a series of fonts based on the handwriting of homeless people. For example, here’s the Francisco font. There are five fonts at present with more promised. Priced per font at €19 Euros for individuals
You can get match results automatically in Outlook Once great thing about Outlook’s Internet Calendar feature is that it can be updated automatically. The 2014 World Cup (football/soccer) is a good example. As we’ve already explained, you can make a separate Outlook calendar with the match schedule for your time
There’s the fix (we hope) for the latest Office 2013 install bug. The most recent set of security fixes from Microsoft includes a nasty surprise for some Office 2013 users. Microsoft isn’t telling much about the problem, not even which patch is causing the trouble. No clues about who specifically
How to get the World Cup schedule into Outlook automatically. The football/soccer World Cup is about to start with 64 matches being played over the next month. Here’s how to get a reliable schedule into your Outlook calendar quickly and easily. Outlook lets you import an Internet feed of calendar
What’s in the latest Office 2011 for Max update? In late May, Microsoft quietly released an update for Office 2011 for Mac taking it to version 14.4.2. If this was Office for Windows, it would be called a ‘Service Pack’ but somehow, not Office for Mac. Update Secrecy One thing
Gpg4Win is one way to improve and expand Outlook’s poor encryption support. Google’s End-to-End got us thinking about how to improve Outlooks lame email encryption and make it ready for End-to-End. The End-To-End addin uses OpenPGP, an email encryption system not directly supported by Outlook but you can do it
Google’s End-to-End secure email tool is a great idea – will it force Microsoft to improve Outlook? Google has announced an upcoming tool ‘End to End‘ which promises a way to send and receive encrypted emails from within a Chrome browser using web-based email systems (apparently not just Gmail). That
A funny item in Britain’s Viz magazine. Viz magazine is a British institution and not to everyone’s taste, including ours. But this recent item struck a chord. Printer Prints What Man Wanted it to Print With a happy ending where the printer maker honors its warranty promising: “We will happily
Does pasting an image into Office take up more space than inserting it? Gary Z read our tip about pasting images into Office and asks: “I remember reading years ago that graphics are copied to the clipboard in BMP. Huge files. Then if paste HUGE increase in Word file size.
Microsoft Word does badly against the National Spelling Bee joint champions. The Scripps US National Spelling Bee is over for another year with unprecedented joint winners Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe. Congratulations to both winners who were commendably gracious while sharing the trophy. Like last year, we were interested in
A simple solution to uninstall problems with Office 2013/Office 365. If you’re trying to uninstall Office 2013 you might get some unhelpful error messages like: Couldn’t uninstall OfficeWe’re sorry, Office couldn’t be uninstalled. Please try uninstalling Office again. ‘Try later’ isn’t a very useful suggestion. How much later? A minute,
The competition among cloud storage providers continues with Box improving their Android app. The competition among cloud storage providers continues with Box improving their Android app. The new Android app for Box includes ‘lightning fast’ document viewing including for Word, Excel and PowerPoint as well as PDF and images. Specifically
A look at the latest rumors for Office 15, Office Gemini and Windows 9. All manner of rumors about Microsoft Office with varying degrees of reasonableness. Here’s what’s on the rumor-vine at the moment. The next desktop version of Office ‘Office 16’ (wrongly called ’15’ in some reports). is said to
Does this Microsoft document give a peek at the touch screen version of Office aka Office Gemini? A document from Microsoft Research has got some people excited because it might reveal how Office software as a touch/Metro/Modern app (aka Office Gemini) will look. As part of a discussion about ‘Great