Public Domain images from ‘The Met’.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is the latest gallery to put many of their images into the public domain. Now you can, legally, use them to decorate your PowerPoint presentations or Word documents. The Met has released about 375,000 images under Creative Commons Zero CC0 licence. That means there are no rights […]
Office Touch Bar support is happening soon – 3 months late.
Microsoft announced Touch Bar support with much fanfare back in October 2016. Over 3 months later and paying customers are still waiting. There’s been lot of talk about this feature including web sites with ‘tips’ on using Office with the Touch Bar without noting that it’s not got into ‘insider’ beta testing yet. New Macbook […]
Office updates for Apple devices
The latest updates to Word, Excel and PowerPoint is the usual mix of good news and a mystery. The good news is for Excel and PowerPoint. You can now format multiple objects at once. Move, resize, or format them by taping and holding, then tap another object. It’s the equivalent of holding Ctrl or Shift […]
Office Lens, at last it’s available for iPad
Office Lens, a way to convert pictures of documents or whiteboards into text is finally available for Apple iPads. Back in 2015 Office-Watch.com demonstrated some of the clever crop and rotation tricks in Office Lens, plus the ‘convert to text’ option shameless stolen from OneNote. Source: Microsoft Images can be saved to OneDrive, OneNote or […]
New Office 2016/Win features near release
Microsoft has released a new version of Office 2016 for Windows to the ‘Slow’ insiders. This means Office 365 customers have more goodies to look forward to in coming months. You’ll need Office 2016 Version 1612 (Build 7628.2048) or above. The new features, as described by Microsoft are: View and restore changes in shared files: […]
View Australia … from Mars!
If you’re looking for a new PowerPoint background, desktop or screen-saver image, NASA always has something to impress. The latest from NASA and JPL is an image of Earth and the Moon, from Mars. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) needed calibration and pointing it ‘home’ allows that. The brown blob, centre right, on our planet […]
Pantone’s 2017 ‘Color of the year’ in Office
Another festive season (marketing) tradition is the Pantone ‘Color of the Year’ which gets a lot of media coverage. It gives us an excuse to explain how to convert (as best you can) a Pantone color into something to use in Microsoft Office. Pantone colors don’t have a direct match in Office because Pantone is […]
SVG graphics coming to Office … at long last!
Office 2016 for Windows will soon support scalable vector graphics (SVGs). Preview/Insiders can try them now and it’ll be available to all Office 365 subscribers in 2017. That means you’ll be able to make your documents look even better with vector-based SVG files that won’t pixelate when increased in size. SVG support has been a […]
Ink innovations coming to Office
Microsoft is gradually adding to Office some interesting new Ink related features; Replay and Math. Rewind and Replay Until now drawings or ‘ink’ in Office documents has been static and fixed, much like real ink. OneNote Mobile for Windows 10 is the first Office app to make ink additions animated. Office remembers how you’ve drawn […]
Using emoji in Microsoft Office
Emoji are those funny little icons that appear in text/SMS messages and some emails. Emoji have become quite the thing. More are being added to mobile phones, especially Apple devices. Originally intended to show emotions in text messages, they’ve expanded to other uses and overlap with many common symbols from Wingdings etc. They aren’t just […]
Office Remote for Android
The days of carrying a separate presentation ‘clicker’ may be over as Microsoft brings it’s Office remote app to Android. Office Remote turns a smartphone into a controller for a PowerPoint presentation, Excel worksheets (including Slicers and PivotTables) plus Word documents. Image supplied by Microsoft. The smartphone connects to your PC via Bluetooth. You need […]
What’s happening to LiveLoop?
LiveLoop was an interesting product. You could share a PowerPoint presentation via the web to any computer or phone. But not anymore. We use the past tense because new customers aren’t being accepted and existing customers have until 24 April 2015 to retrieve any data from the system. There’s nothing on the https://www.liveloop.com/ site to […]
Buy Android – get Office as well
Yet one more for the list of things you’d never thought you’d see from Microsoft. They now have a deal with major Android phone and tablet makers to include Office software in some of their products. That’s right, Microsoft is paying companies to put their software on non-Windows devices. At least we’re assuming Microsoft is […]
Delve goes public for businesses
After a preview period, Microsoft Delve has gone public for Office 365 Business users. More links into Delve have also been announced. Delve is a new form of search tool which bring in relevant data from a selection of sources. Some are private like a Sharepoint site, corporate address book , OneDrive for business etc. […]
December patch for Office – Fail!
One of the automatically installed patches for Office causes a new bug! Ouch. The new bugs aren’t common but even so, they are embarrassing. You can find the details under the Knowledge Base article headed ““Cannot insert object” error in an ActiveX custom Office solution after you install the MS14-082 security update”. Most people won’t […]
When web links don’t work in Office
When you type or paste a web link into Office, it normally converts it into a web link automatically. But occasionally that feature doesn’t work right. We found one example when researching the famous artist Roy Lichtenstein and one of his best known works. Click on the image to see the Wikipedia article about Whaam! […]
