There are new computers sold with ‘free’ Office 365, what does that mean and how does it work? The offer isn’t what a lot of people expect. Happily, Microsoft has a way to still use the offer even if you already have another Office 365 plan. It’s not ‘Free’ Let’s
Some ‘money saving tips’ for Office 365 aren’t what they seem. We’ve noticed some wrong tips that keep being repeated. Also a vital money savers that are usually not mentioned even though it’ll save you more money over time. Office Watch has specialized in Microsoft Office for over twenty years.
A recent forced disclosure by the US government demonstrates the use of NSL’s which access your personal data from Microsoft OneDrive and Outlook without a warrant or regular oversight, let alone notice to you. Microsoft, Google, Facebook and many other tech companies (including gaming services) have received National Security Letters
The Upload Center, that annoying little extra in modern Office is being closed down. It’s being replaced with ‘Files Needing Attention’ alerts within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Visio. The Upload Center controls documents being uploaded from Office to online storage like OneDrive and SharePoint. If you haven’t noticed Upload
As we suspected, there are more holes in the Office Document Inspector. Our clever readers came up with some possibilities for revealing secrets in documents, worksheets and presentations. Document Inspector is good but could be better. As you’ll see, there really should be a warning about objects with multiple layers.
Slowly but surely we’ve moving towards another name change for Office 365. The main Office consumer products are likely to be renamed ‘Microsoft 365’ and here’s just four indicators that a change is coming. This has been looming for some time. Microsoft has been mostly successful getting organizations and consumers
Surface pens will now turn on the Draw tab in Word, Excel and PowerPoint automatically. When you pick up a Microsoft Surface Pen, the Draw tab in Office 365 will automatically appear to choose color, thickness of the digital ink. There are a few requirements, but they are pretty obvious:
Word 365 for Mac is getting what’s called the ‘Edit PDF’ feature, already available in Word for Windows. Don’t get too excited, Word can’t really edit a PDF file and the results might not be what you want. The ‘editing PDF’ feature is now available to Office for Mac insiders
PowerPoint has many choices for printed/PDF handouts to go with a presentation. Here’s a guide to the options spread in different places on the PowerPoint ribbon and menus. Quick PowerPoint Handouts Under File | Print is the basic handouts option to print slides and lines for people to handwrite notes.
In long overdue news, Microsoft has finally agreed to synchronize email signatures between Outlook on different platforms. The news came in the form of a post on the Uservoice site: “We’re happy to report that we’re working on sync’ing signatures across devices. More details to come as we have them.”
A funny story from satirical ‘The Chaser’ shows what could happen when corporate PowerPoint presentations are taken too far. LinkedIn executive presents moving PowerPoint eulogy at mother’s funeral “Before a packed congregation of relatives and friends, the senior executive paid tribute to his mother through a series of bullet points,
The famous game, Civilization, has been impressively recreated in Excel as Solly’s Cellivization. Civilization was an early computer game that started in 1991 for MS-DOS and has undergone many reincarnations for Windows, Mac and gaming devices now almost forgotten. Here it is in Microsoft Excel … Even with the power
Here’s a list of the known Office install/update error codes with possible fixes. All thanks to a diligent and long-suffering Office Watch reader. Ron S has compiled these lists from web sites and forums based on experiences of other people. Doesn’t Microsoft have all this? Yes, they probably do but
There’s no direct ‘watermark’ option for PowerPoint Handouts which is a shame because it would be very useful to add ‘Confidential’, ‘Draft’, ‘Private’ or other very obvious notices. You can fake it with a little PowerPoint trickery. Add a Watermark Picture In short, make an image with the watermark text.
The newer File | Open panes include a Search option to quickly find Recent Documents by name. That means it’s practical to expand the Recent Docs list to a higher or maximum value in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. In any of the three programs go to File | Options |
Here’s this months non-security bug fix updates.for Office 2016 and Office 2013. They are only for .msi installs, not ‘Click to Run’ modern installations. For most systems, they’ll be applied automatically. This is the full list with extra notes on a few fixes which caught our eye. Office 2016 updates
Just as there is a Handout Master to control how slide printouts look, there is also a Notes Master which has more control over how PowerPoint printed notes with slides will look. If you’ve used the Handouts Master, Notes Master will be warmly familiar to you. Notes Master is like
The error messages on Office 365/2019 setup and update are notoriously unhelpful, so here’s a guide to fixing Office install or update problems that work out here in the real world. Error messages like the infamous ‘Something went wrong” should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The error
If you get an error message when installing or updating Office 365 or Office 2019 there’s little help available beyond Microsoft telling you ‘Something went wrong’. What looks like specific error message are general statements that don’t identify the problem. These troubles aren’t any surprise to experienced Microsoft Office users.
While printing PowerPoint handouts for your audience with just the slides can be useful, sometimes you may want to give them your notes as well as the slides, which is where Notes Print comes in. Contrary to its name, Notes Print includes slides as well as your notes underneath them.
Microsoft Word’s dictionary is updated more regularly, especially for Office 365 customers. A good example of that is the addition of Brexit related words. We typed into Word various words that the people of the UK are too familiar with, just to see what’s in the Microsoft dictionary. The same
The upcoming Rewrite feature in Word will offer alternative phrases or wording for your sentences. Rewrite is another cloud based feature so anything selected for Rewrite is sent to Microsoft. The feature is supposed to be in Office 365 for Windows Insiders build 1908 (11901.20018), English only but hasn’t appeared
Handout Master lets you customize your presentation handouts more than the basics; changing the position and formatting of headers/footers, adding a background color or gradient. Maybe you can help uncover some unexplained mysteries of Handout Master, see below? Our Quick PowerPoint Handouts article showed you how to go to File
There are many ways to make a paper/PDF version of a PowerPoint slide deck, this is the quick ‘only a few clicks’ option. There are other choices that we’ll cover in upcoming articles. PowerPoint has some ‘Handouts’ features but they aren’t all in the same place and some aren’t even
