Microsoft 365 – the subscription / annual fee plan for Microsoft Office on Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android.
Includes Word 365, Excel 365, PowerPoint 365, Outlook 365 and many other ‘365’ programs, apps and services.
Why Windows Variable fonts are important
Office Watch reader, John Hoffmann has some more detail on variable fonts, supported in Windows 10 and Windows 11 Variable fonts are a single package that includes many variations (Light, Heavy etc), instead of having separate font files for each variant. That takes up less disk space (important on tablet devices) and, as John explains, […]
Office Emoji look different on other devices
Emoji in emails should be used with great care because what the receiver sees can be very different from the emoji you entered. This isn’t Microsoft’s fault. It’s in the complex nature of emoji with different fonts etc. The ‘take away’ is that emoji’s are great but keep in mind that they might not appear […]
US Election results in Excel
If you’re interested in the hard numbers about the 2016 US election, David Wasserman @redistrict has done the work for you. Channel your inner ‘Nate Silver’ <g>. Go to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133Eb4qQmOxNvtesw2hdVns073R68EZx4SfCnP4IGQf8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=19 to see a ‘read only’ Google Docs worksheet showing the state-by-state results. Not visible above are columns with the total number of votes cast in […]
Excel: easily get the latest currency exchange rates
Here’s a ‘no fuss, no muss’ way to grab the latest exchange rates and use them in Excel. No need to lookup a rate and type it in, let Excel do all that work for you. You might expect Excel to do this out of the box. After all, Microsoft has been banging on about […]
Why Excel causes errors in gene studies and how to fix
A new report shows that Excel is causing errors to creep into genetic studies because of data conversion problems. Excel tries to figure out the type of information you are typing or importing into a worksheet. Those rules work most of the time, but not always. If Excel converts a cell wrongly, it changes the […]
Microsoft cuts OneDrive for Office users
Microsoft has today dropped their promise of ‘unlimited’ OneDrive storage for Office 365 customers. Their lame excuse for the reduction is an insult to their customers. “Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away” What Office 365 subscribers (Home, Personal and University) now get: 1TB of OneDrive storage, down from ‘unlimited’ storage. If you’re using a lot […]
Safely Sending files via messaging apps
As we mentioned recently, one way to safely and securely send Office documents around is to use one of the new messaging apps that are available. The many apps vary in features and quality. Any of them have more and better features than standard mobile phone texting. In fact, these apps are expected to overtake […]
Outlook apps: Security concerns and Microsoft apathy
Rene Winkelmeyer was the first to detail the worrying and undocumented way the Outlook apps store your email account logins. Normal programs and apps keep your login details (server, name, password etc) encrypted on the computer or device. When needed the name/password is sent direct to the mail host to make a connection, send/receive data. […]
Microsoft reads private email on Hotmail/Outlook.com
When Microsoft feels the need, they read cloud emails on Outlook.com (aka Hotmail) or other Microsoft 365 hosted email. Microsoft has been caught reading private data stored on their cloud servers and it’s all quite legal. In 2012 screenshots of the, then unreleased, Windows 8 had been leaked and Microsoft wanted to know where the […]
Excel’s SUM is much more
There’s SUM and then there are all the useful SUM variations to choose from. Excel’s SUM() function is probably the first one we learn but there’s a lot more to it than simply clicking on the button to add up a list of numbers. In this article we’ll look at the options available in SUM […]
Excel’s effect on economic policy
A simple Excel worksheet mistake caused a change in economic policy. Was it a user’s mistake or Microsoft’s? A few weeks ago, came the news that a much-quoted academic paper was based on a faulty Excel worksheet. The paper titled “Growth in a Time of Debt.” from Reinhart & Rogoff was widely used to support […]
