Get blank paper from Word
This tweet shows there’s plenty of ways to use Microsoft Word. I mean, who wants all that hassle of opening up the paper tray when software can deliver a single page right to your hands? And nicely warmed up too!
Microsoft Word vs Spelling Bee – 2015 final
The US Scripps National Spelling Bee is over for another year with another tie between two amazing young people. Both winners are impressive to us mere mortals but also compared to Microsoft Office. As we have for the last few years, we’ve made a list of the championship words to see how Microsoft Office’s English […]
How to safely (securely) send an Office document
How can you send an Office document safely and securely to another person? A simple question with no simple answer. Who you are guarding against? A random snooper at the recipient’s end who accidentally finds the document, or someone targeting your or your data, such as a commercial rival, nosey journalist, law enforcement, the […]
Office ‘gets’ Game of Thrones
Almost a year ago we sarcastically complained about the lack of words from ‘Game of Thrones’ in the Office dictionary. We didn’t expect Microsoft to do anything out it and, if they did, thought they’d tell customers. Slate magazine has noticed that many Westeros names now don’t get a red squiggly line. Back in January, […]
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 […]
Office Lens expands to Android
Microsoft has released an Android version of their Office Lens app. What is Office Lens? Office Lens main feature is an image to text conversion. You can take a photo of a document, receipt etc and it’ll convert into plain text (OCR) for use in OneNote, Word etc. It comes with three modes: Photo – […]
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. […]
Old Romantic words in the Office dictionary
We love words, especially old words that have been largely forgotten. This Valentine’s Day there’s a short item in The Independent UK about 10 old words that modern romantics might like to revive. We tried them out in Office 2013 to see if the in-built dictionary could cope. No real surprise that 9 of them got the […]
Is AutoCorrect making you boring or stupid?
The BBC has an interesting piece on the effect of AutoCorrect and word suggestions for quicker typing. I dunno about ‘boring’ but AutoCorrect in Office does have a downside – it makes you and your typing fingers stupid. If you type stupdi into Word it will fix it to stupid as soon as you […]
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! […]
Document Property formatting curiosities
While delving into the details of Office document properties, we found some curious anomalies. They aren’t major but worth keeping in mind if you use document properties in Word documents. When you enter a document property it should just add the text and the same document property will show the same text in each place […]
Ebola in Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office has Ebola … meaning it’s in the supplied dictionaries for Word 2013, Word 2010 and Word 2007. As a proper noun, the disease name has a capital letter. Without it, Word marks it as a spelling error. The surname Pooley isn’t in the dictionary and, as we’ll see, maybe deserves to be better […]
Document Properties in Word and Office
Document Properties is one of those long-standing parts of Office that is worth another look. It can be quite useful and not always in the ways that Microsoft intends. At first, document properties looks like a fixed and rigid feature with limited use. However it can be used in much wider and creative ways. Any […]
Creative alternatives to Word
While Microsoft Word lumbers along, there’s some interesting and genuinely creative word processors out there. We’re not talking about direct rivals to Microsoft Office 2013 like OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Kingsoft Office Free, Google Docs, iWork or earlier versions of Office. Instead we’ll look at software that takes a very different approach to putting words on the screen […]
