Office ScreenTips in other languages
A free way to show Microsoft Office help in other languagesOffice Screentips is a way to show tooltips for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other programs. This free addon from Microsoft doesn’t interfere with how the programs work or the wording of the tabs and ribbons. Only the tooltips that appear when you hover your […]
Picture problems in Office
How to find your pictures to insert into an Office document. Even a simple thing like adding a picture to an Office document or email has subtleties and annoyances. When you choose Insert | Picture in recent versions of Office, it opens, by default, in the Picture Library. That seems sensible, at least to Microsoft. […]
Dropbox Alerts in Outlook
Get Outlook to show changes in Dropbox folders Dropbox has one excellent feature, the ‘Events’ view that lists files added, deleted or modified. You can use that feature to get custom Outlook alerts when certain things happen to your Dropbox account, like when a file is added to a shared folder. That list can be […]
Get alerts from Outlook RSS feeds
How to get a message when certain RSS feeds are updated As you probably know, it’s possible to get an alert or an action when certain email messages arrive into Outlook using the Rules feature. Office-Watch.com shows how to do the same thing for an RSS feed. It will let you filter down a larger […]
Sending files using Dropbox
A simple guide to sending files via Dropbox. There are many ways to send files that are too big for email (usually over 20MB). In this article we’ll look at how to do that with Dropbox either sending a ‘one-off’ file or regularly exchanging files with someone else. Dropbox is very popular, generally free and well […]
Outlook ‘settings’ file lead to ransom for your data
An email pretending to be ‘Outlook settings’ will actually lock up your data until you pay a fee – aka ransom. The tricks to separate you from your money and computer files continue to get more elaborate and this latest brazen effort from Russian scammers shows. For the last few years there’s been virus attacks […]
Hiding Private appointments from Calendar views
Keep your calendar clear by hiding private appointments like reminders to take medicine. Sometimes we have appointments or events that we want to keep private or at least hide from the regular calendar views. You can have appointments in Outlook which will pop-up reminders when necessary but not show up in your regular calendar view. […]
Outlook RT unveiled
With Windows 8.1 for Surface RT comes a new Outlook – what’s it like? If you have a Surface RT device then there’s an update to Windows 8.1 available* and within that is a new Office program – Outlook RT. The ‘RT’ versions of Office programs look much like the traditional Windows programs but have […]
Office 2013 update F-up
There’s no nice way to say it – this month’s Office 2013 update is, in military speak, ‘Fubar’ With the usual collection of security patches this month, Microsoft released an update to Office 2013 with various fixes and adding one major bug that amazingly managed to get through testing. The update is http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2817630/ which has […]
Office 365 mailboxes enlarge
Office 365 and Exchange Online users get double mailbox size for no extra charge. Microsoft has announced a major increase in the mailbox size for Office 365 / Exchange Online customers. For most people this means their mailbox can now grow past 25GB to 50GB. That’s a lot of space even for the most aggressive […]
Email Immersion and your privacy
An online tool from MIT helps you see what the government can see. The Media Lab at MIT has an online service which shows how revealing ‘metadata’ or ‘identifiers’ collected by the US government can really be. Microsoft, the US government and others defending the controversial PRISM program have been relying on the subtle difference […]
What is detecting spam emails?
There’s several spam checks of incoming email, which one is working for you. As we’ve mentioned before in Office-Watch.com, there’s usually more than one anti-spam filter on incoming messages. If those filter don’t work or are too aggressive you might miss out of messages you want to see. Typically an email is sent to your […]
Even Microsoft execs make mistakes with email
It’s reassuring to see the experts get it wrong. One of the very minor sub-plots in the story of the Ballmer resignation came from ValleyWag. Steve Ballmer sent a company-wide email announcing his retirement plans. The Managing Director of Microsoft Research, Roy Levin, replied from his Windows Phone. Only his reply didn’t just go to […]
Microsoft and the NSA … Microsoft’s response
Microsoft’s official response to the latest news about their work with the NSA and FBI. Office-Watch.com has posed a series of specific questions to Microsoft which we hope will get a response in the next few days. In the meantime here’s their official response to the Guardian article about Microsoft’s collaboration with the NSA and […]
Microsoft and the NSA … a ‘team’ to get more information from us
New disclosures about how Microsoft actively collaborates with the NSA to infiltrate Skydrive and encrypted messages on a large scale. The Guardian newspaper today has damaging revelations about how Microsoft had gone beyond simply responding to specific requests from the US government for information on individuals using Outlook.com, Skydrive and other cloud services. According to Microsoft, […]
Outlook rules – a good idea
An Office-Watch.com reader with an excellent idea for Outlook rules and there’s a part workaround available now. Larry D saw our article on limitations in Outlook Rules and came up with a great idea: ” I think the most important function this feature could offer (which it doesn’t) would be, once you read a message […]
