Microsoft has never been great about documenting patches and bug fixes but this month they have sunk to a new low. Maybe it’s a delayed April Fool’s prank with Microsoft ‘taking the Mickey‘ or treating Office customers with contempt? Sustained Engineering isn’t sustained Maintaining Office software is the thankless job of the Office Sustained Engineering […]
One of the first major Word viruses, the Melissa virus, is 20 years old. It’s amazing to see how much and how little has changed over two decades. Office viruses today follow much the same pattern as they did back in the 20th Century. Melissa was a Word macro virus which infected computers then spread […]
Thanks to everyone who tried out Microsoft Forms by filling out our example survey. Here are the results. Our form was mainly an example of what’s possible in Microsoft Forms as part of Microsoft Forms – a quick look and sample We took the opportunity to get a better idea of what Office software our […]
We’re delighted to announce something new at the Office Watch bookstore. Beating Bots, Spies & Cock-ups is all about safely and securely sending files and documents. Keeping your personal and business information private on the Internet. suits Windows and Mac, Office 365, Office 2019, Office 2016 and earlier We all send personal information over the Internet. […]
An embarrassingly simple security breach in Microsoft account logins (including Office 365) has been fixed but it took Microsoft way too long to do anything. It was possible for someone to take over the logins of Microsoft account users to get login details including passwords. There’s over 400 million Microsoft accounts including anyone with Office […]
The latest ebook from Office-Watch.com is a little different, it’s a heartfelt ‘Thank You’ to our Office Watch donors. Peter Deegan has been quite astonished and humbled by the generosity of readers to our first ever reader appeal. Both the money and kind remarks have been a considerable morale boost quite beyond the practical help […]
If you do enjoy the stuff we do here at Office Watch we’d really appreciate it if you’d chuck a few dollars at our first ever fundraising drive. We won’t bore you about how hard it is to stay afloat in the modern media (though it’s very true). The financial support of readers is the […]
Microsoft has re-released the October 2018 update to Windows 10 after (hopefully) fixing the bug which deleted some customers vital files. The October 2018 update problem was caused by changes to Known Folder Redirection or KFR which we’ll explain below. Windows 10 October 2018 update – take two The Windows 10 October 2018 update is […]
New Zealand is getting some unfair bad publicity after a change in their laws which allows Customs officials to ask for the passwords to access computers or devices brought into the country. Customs officials all over the world can usually search anything you bring in and that includes password protected Office documents, hard drives, USB […]
Microsoft’s Project Natick now has two live camera feeds showing fish around their underwater data centers. One of the big problems for server farms is heat. All those computers generate a lot of heat that must be dissipated somehow. Microsoft’s servers store your OneDrive files, Azure data, run Office cloud features and a lot more. […]
A North Carolina woman and her son are accused of sharing their discounted Microsoft Office access with her ex-husband, a clear breach of the Home Use Program. Source: WLOS, “your Western Carolina News Leader” We’ve been talking about the Home Use Program for many years. It’s a heavily discounted Microsoft Office available to employees of […]
Microsoft’s second quarter 2018 results came out with some pleasant surprises for the financial analysts. Both earnings per share and overall revenue beat market predictions. No wonder MSFT stock price went up 4 percent after the results went public. Office commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 10% mostly driven by Office 365 commercial revenue […]
A faulty Microsoft Windows security update not only didn’t fix the bug in VBScript, it opened another way for hackers to access a computer. Patching software is a complex thing, but this blunder is unforgivably bad and the delays make it even worse. It undermines confidence in Microsoft security testing and their willingness to fully […]
The Information is reporting that Facebook is considering moving from Office 365 to Google Apps for their 27,000 employees. The report from two sources would mean a “180” by Facebook which moved away from Google to Microsoft Office 365 only two years ago. Follow us on Facebook, it just takes a moment. At the time, […]
When you first go into Teams it’s a confusing jungle of terms and options. As usual, Microsoft assumes we’ve all been born knowing how their software is arranged. It’s not as difficult as it looks … once you get the structure or logic of Microsoft Teams. Wrap your head around Microsoft Teams with this article […]
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 […]
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, […]
The Microsoft Build conference has many promises and announcements of future technologies. They aren’t things you can use right now and some of them are familiar from Microsoft conferences in years and decades past. The demos are very impressive and looks really easy. The reality of development and use is often a lot harder and […]
Talk about being behind the times. Google is reportedly about to release an SMS Replacement called Chat. Chat is an attempt to modernize SMS beyond simple text messaging. It will have group texts, videos and images, typing indicators and read receipts. Chat isn’t an app, it’s part of the Android operating system replacing the current […]
It’s been a busy few weeks for Richard Appiah Akoto the Ghanaian teacher who taught Microsoft Word with only a blackboard. Mr Akoto was flown to Singapore for a Microsoft Education conference where he received a standing ovation. Quite something for his first trip outside Ghana. “I wanted to teach them how to launch Microsoft […]
With all the news about data leaks from Facebook and others, we thought it was time to restate our privacy policy. Office-Watch.com deliberately keeps as little information as possible about our readers and customers. That costs us dearly as a business but we feel it’s the right thing to do. Newsletters For our newsletters, all we […]
Outlook has a really annoying and inconsistent physical address glitch that Microsoft has ignored for years while it’s rival at Google got it right from the start. The problem comes when you paste an address into the Location field of an appointment. Very often, addresses are formatted across two or more lines like this: As […]
A follow up on our story about the Corel patent case and the more confusing case of a developers licence to use the MS Office ribbon interface. As we noted, the Microsoft page that explained the rules for using the Office interface were ‘retired’ even though they are still relevant. Even more relevant since Corel […]
A rare factual error in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver that, amazingly, is related to Microsoft Word. In an item about The White House Calligrapher, Oliver said the job was easy because there’s already a font with the job title in Microsoft Word. And he shows a Word for Mac font list with a […]
A follow up on the story of the Ghanian teacher who has to draw Microsoft Word on his blackboard to teach the program. He’s Richard Appiah Akoto a 33 year old teacher at Betenase M/A Junior High School in the town of Sekyedomase in central Ghana. A place so obscure, by modern standards, that it […]
Here’s how to stop Office Watch, or other newsletters, from being moved from the Gmail Inbox to the ‘Spam’ folder or their ‘Promotions’ tab. At the moment neither Office Watch nor our friends at Popbitch are considered ‘spam’ by Gmail, but that can change. Any changes you make to Gmail’s settings have to be made […]
Here’s how to stop Outlook.com/Hotmail from wrongly marking email as spam. These are messages that end up in the Junk Email folder. We’ve already explained how to move messages from the Junk Email folder to your Inbox. But that doesn’t stop future messages from the same sender going to the Junk Email folder. The option […]
Microsoft’s mail service Outlook.com moves Office Watch to Junk Email. Here’s how to stop it doing that. The same advice applies to other newsletters and emails that are wrongly marked as Spam / Junk Email. The famous UK newsletter, Popbitch, is treated the same way. Spam filters aren’t perfect No spam filter is perfect, they […]
The Corel patent dispute raises the interesting question, can other developers use the Ribbon interface in their own products? The answer isn’t clear. There was a clear path to follow but Microsoft has managed to confuse the issue. The Ribbon with it’s tabs, buttons, galleries, collapsing view as the window narrows etc was developed by […]
A jury has found Corel guilty of six patent violations in it’s WordPerfect and QuattroPro products which have breached Microsoft Office related patents. Yes, WordPerfect and QuattroPro are still out there! We were surprised too. The patents relate to the Office interface like the ribbon. In WordPerfect, Corel even goes so far as to say […]
SoftMaker Office is moving into the Macintosh world with the public beta/preview of Office 2018 for Mac. Softmaker is a German based company that already makes Office suite software for Windows, Linux and Android. Source: Softmaker The Office for Mac suite contains a word processor, TextMaker 2018. The spreadsheet PlanMaker 2018 and presentation application Presentations […]
Office Watch has a presence on Facebook, finally, https://www.facebook.com/OfficeWatch/ Our new Facebook page has the very latest Office related news posted to it as soon as we publish. Go to https://www.facebook.com/OfficeWatch/ and click Follow to see our posts in your timeline. Admittedly, we’ve been slow to adopt social media. We’ve focused on quality Office journalism, […]
The makers of Wannacrypt made some quick money for a small investment. That means other’s will copy their success or take advantage of the fear and confusion. WannaCrypt has received a lot of attention but it’s important to remember that ransomware isn’t new. The global publicity about WannaCrypt changed how it was handled. It’s different from […]
There’s now a way to recover files locked up by Wannacrypt ransomware without paying the attackers a thing but there are some catches. Adrien Guinet at Quarkslab has developed Wcry, decryption code for WannaCrypt. At the time of writing it only works for Windows XP computers, even then, it needs a bit of luck. Windows […]
Microsoft overuses the term ‘exciting’ to describe their latest work but the new ‘Transform by Example’ for Excel looks genuinely exciting. However you get data for Excel, the common problem is ‘massaging’ it to fit your needs. Dates need changing to match Excel, addresses need splitting into address/state/zip and names separated into first/middle/last. Excel’s Get […]
A New York Times article raises our blood pressure and not because the paper is a mouthpiece for left wing bleeding hearts and fellow travelers.* In Ransomware Attack, Where Does Microsoft’s Responsibility Lie? accepts the standard line that Microsoft is doing its best to solve security problems as they arise. No mention that Microsoft made […]
Microsoft played a great PR game over the last few days. They managed to deflect responsibility for the WannaCrypt ransomware global outbreak and even make the company look like the victim. Make no mistake, the main responsibility for the WannaCrypt trouble lies with Microsoft. Some blame can be directed to the US Intelligence agencies and […]
Microsoft has moved quickly to block a security hole in their own anti-virus software, Windows Defender. We’re used to seeing email or instant messaging used to infect a computer when opening a document in Word or Excel, maybe an email in Outlook. But this is quite different and very worrying. The bug is in Microsoft’s […]
There’s no doubt that the Microsoft Surface is a nice piece of kit but you pay extra for it and even more than that! Microsoft’s usual trick in promoting their Surface machines is to EXclude the price of the keyboard. That lets them promote a lower headline price which most media copy into their puff […]
Sensepost has revealed an interesting way to hack your computer via Outlook. Microsoft’s public response has been to deny there’s a problem and put the responsibility on customers. The method hasn’t been used ‘in the wild’ and it’s not easy to infect Outlook. But we’ve heard that before (especially from Microsoft) and history tells us […]
