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 […]
