Microsoft highlights how they shortchanged Office customers
The latest Microsoft Office promotion is a rare example of an ad which shows how a product was deliberately crippled with less features. The ‘Twins Challenge’ is a series of very selective videos that are supposed to highlight differences between Office 2019 (single purchase, less profitable for Microsoft) and Office 365 (annual payment, highly profitable). […]
New Office 365 Save option ain’t so bad
Office 365 is getting yet another way to save a document and it’s not as bad as the advance publicity suggested. We’ve now had a chance to use the new Save dialog ourselves and it’s not another attempt to force customers to OneDrive. The change is now available for Office Fast Insiders and eventually all […]
Wiping drives or shredding files in Windows
Here’s a quick and easy way to totally erase file, folders or free disk space so there’s no trace of the original data. Also erasing an entire drive before handing over or selling. As you may know, deleting a file doesn’t really remove it from your computer. Even after deleting from the Recycle Bin, the […]
Have a happy Year of the Pig emoji in Word and Office
It’s the Chinese Year of the Pig and there are some symbols in Word, Excel and PowerPoint to mark the occasion in Office for Windows or Mac. The Unicode standard has three Pig related emoji, Pig, Pig Face and Pig Nose. Once you know the names or hex value, they can be found with the […]
Google Translate with Office documents
If the Translation options in Microsoft Office don’t do it for you, try the Google Translate full document translation option instead. For a long time, Google has a word and text translation between languages. The app is a godsend to travelers around the world, and the locals dealing with them! Entire Office documents can also […]
Live subtitles and translation in PowerPoint – how it works
Adding automatic subtitles with optional translation to presentations is a step closer with the latest PowerPoint 365 for Windows Insiders release. Last month we told you about this promised addition to PowerPoint and now we can see it working compared to Microsoft’s promises. At the moment it’s just PowerPoint for Windows, Insiders. Subtitles will spread […]
Office memory leak finally patched by Microsoft
An astonishingly simple security breach in Microsoft Office has finally been patched two months after Microsoft confirmed the problem. The unanswered question, why did it take so long to discover it? Mimecast.com discovered the ActiveX memory leak back in November 2018 and told Microsoft. Two months later Microsoft fixed the problem in their January 2019 […]
Make your own ‘Snow Flakes’ posters in Word or PowerPoint
The British Army has new recruitment posters for Millennials or ‘Snow Flakes’. Make your own versions in Microsoft Office with either Word or PowerPoint. The campaign targets “snowflakes”, “millennials” and “selfie addicts” with a call-back to the famous Lord Kitchener “Your Country needs YOU” poster. Here’s our re-creation in Microsoft Word as it might appear […]
New Office app coming to Windows 10
Microsoft is replacing the current ‘My Office’ gateway app with a new ‘Office’ app for Windows 10. The Office app is a gateway to your Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents plus Outlook, OneDrive and SharePoint. Source: Microsoft The official Microsoft blurb: ” Quickly switch between apps. See all your Office apps in one place and switch […]
Pantone Color of 2019 – available now in Microsoft Office
Pantone has announced its Color of the Year for 2019 but before you run off to grab color swatches, here’s how to get it in Microsoft Office – Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. The color of 2019 is <drum roll> ….. Living Coral … As usual what’s more amazing than the color is the description from […]
PowerPoint 365 gets live captions and translation
The long-standing Presentation Translation plug-in will be included in PowerPoint from January 2019. It will add real-time captions to slides for what you say, either in your language or translated to another language. Office Watch told you about Presentation Translator back in July 2017. It’s a Microsoft Garage test project that’s about to hit the […]
Why can’t you buy individual Office programs?
Office Watch reader, Meredith M. asks a question we’ve heard many times before. Why can’t you buy individual Office programs instead of paying for an Office bundle with programs you don’t need? “My issue: I need ONLY Word, Excel and Access–but I NEED them. I know that I cannot buy them separately but does anyone […]
New Icons for Microsoft Office 365
It’s been five years since the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office icons were given a new look. Now they’ve been announced and, frankly, we could not care less. New look icons don’t make any difference to anyone’s daily use of Office. It’s like supermarket groceries that boast ‘New Packaging’ as if any customers care? […]
Printing slide selections and in different orders for PowerPoint
Dig a little into PowerPoint for some slide printing choices. They apply to printing slides only, slides with notes, outline or handouts. See also: Print part of a Word document Print selected pages or sections of a Word document in any order Print selection and other choices in Excel The choices are at File | Print […]
Online Video hack now ‘in the wild’ and Microsoft won’t do anything
A previously theoretical way to misuse Office documents to infect your computer is now ‘in the wild’ and Microsoft isn’t interested in stopping it. Last week we told you about a new way for Office documents to get malware onto your computer. Cymulate discovered that the Online Video feature could be manipulated to download malware […]
Online Video now a risk for Office users
Cymulate is reporting how embedded video in Word or other Office documents are another way for criminals and hackers to infect your computer. It’s yet another example of how Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents can be used to get malware onto computers to steal data, becomes bots or other nasties. This trick uses the relatively […]
