Microsoft’s cloud service and annual ‘subscription’ strategy continues to work for shareholders. The latest financial results showed an 8% increase in revenue from their Office consumer products and cloud services. There are now 24 million Office 365 consumer ‘subscribers’. As always, we put the word ‘subscription’ in quote marks. The
Microsoft Cloud staff have their chests bursting with pride with the announcement that they’ve met some US Dept. of Defence standards. The blog posting is headed How the Office 365 U.S. Government Cloud meets the regulatory and compliance needs of the Department of Defense which sounds impressive. Regular Office-Watch.com readers
Microsoft is teasing an important Office related announcement for next Wednesday, 2nd November. That might not sound like a big deal, after all, Redmond is always boasting about ‘important’ announcements that turn out to be a damp squib. We know this one is truly important because the head honcho, the
The many downsides of ‘Brexit’, the UK’s departure from the European Union, now include Microsoft’s UK customers. Retail Office 365 customer may be next. The company has announced that British sales of “enterprise software and cloud services” will go up in price from January 2017. The increases will be between
Microsoft makes Office updates very confusing with different support expiry dates depending, not just on the software, but how you bought it. There’s talk around that Office 2013 is ‘expiring’ in about 4 months time, February 2017. But that doesn’t match with Microsoft’s own ‘Lifecycle’ subsite which is clear. The
BT Sync is our essential tool for synchronizing and backup between computers and devices. It’s just been renamed to Resilio Sync. Documents, music, video and other files can all be kept ‘ in sync’ between computers (Windows, Mac and Linux) and also devices (Apple and Android). Some NAS devices support
Tap is a new feature coming to Microsoft Office that’s worth a look. It’s a way to find other documents that relate to the document or email you’re currently writing. Then copy from those past documents into the new creation. Or as Microsoft says ‘leverage and re purpose existing content
We’ve been talking, again, about the possibility of hacking via a RTF (Rich Text Format) document. Some readers have asked why the RTF format is so commonly requested for job applications? Is it the fact that RTF is commonly available, even to people who don’t have Word, or any other
Another month, more security holes in Microsoft products being fixed. This month, another problem with opening RTF (Rich Text Format) documents. Almost all Office variations are affected. Office 2016 back to Office 2007 for Windows. Office 2016 and 2011 for Mac. Word Viewer for Windows Sharepoint, Office Web Apps and
An alternative collaboration option is Dropbox Paper, still in beta, but working nicely. It’s a simpler and entirely browser based way to share a document plus messaging/comments on the side. Documents can be shared with people, all of whom can view/edit the document at the same time in their browser.
The October preview of Outlook 2016 for Mac is now out with some features from other releases now on the Mac. Version 15.27 (161003) As explained by Microsoft: More functions: In Excel, use CONCAT or TEXTJOIN to shorten your text formulas, or Excel try the forecasting functions to help you
Now Facebook has joined the race for business money with Workplace by Facebook, a non-social network for your work colleagues. How does it work with Microsoft Office? Workplace by Facebook joins Office 365, Slack and others in providing a central location for people to communicate on work matters. A team
Peter Nadin is our Excel hero. He’s gone to extraordinary lengths and used the power of Excel to save money on his electricity and gas bills. In various countries, there’s been a deregulation of the energy market which was intended to save consumers through a choice of suppliers. It’s led
Maybe you don’t want a full list of stock prices or exchange rates to lookup various values. All you want is a single stock price or exchange rate to update your worksheet. That’s certainly possible by narrowing down the query so it returns a single value and no more. Select
The last two weeks we’ve been looking at getting current information from the internet into a worksheet, like currency exchange rates and stock prices. Now let’s look at how to take that information and use it in your worksheets. For this article, we’ll be using Excel 2016 for Windows because
At the 2016 Ignite conference LucidChart received a few gongs in the Office App awards. Lucidchart Diagrams for PowerPoint Add-in won the “People’s Choice Award” and a second place award for “Most Business Value for an Office Add-in.”. Source: LucidChart Office-Watch.com had a look at Lucidchart a few months ago.
There are ‘Office Online’ plugins for both the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers. These extensions sound great and, from the hype, seem amazing but are little more than fancy links to the browser based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Sway. The extension sits as an icon in
A more likely breach of your privacy than government intrusion is identity theft by hackers. Data stored online is a like a smorgasbord open 24/7 of personal information waiting to be stolen. LexisNexis Risk Solutions have released a survey showing how much critical personal info people are saving ‘in the
Anyone who uses email or cloud storage should be worried about some news stories of last few days. They show how email hosts and cloud storage is regularly snooped on by law enforcement who also act to keep it secret. This isn’t targeted court orders against specific people. This is
We’re in the middle of a series on getting live internet data directly into Excel and it’s been a pleasant surprise. Currency Exchange Rates and Stock/Index data can automatically update your Excel worksheets. Microsoft has been improving the data connection features in Excel, especially Excel for Windows. It’s happened gradually
Visio is coming to mobile devices, according to Microsoft. Apple, Android and Windows. The Visio for iPad preview program was started last month. The app lets you view Visio diagrams that reach your iPad from email, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and Sharepoint. View files from OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or
Last week we showed you how to get currency exchange rates into Excel as well as the overall method for grabbing info from the web to add to your worksheets. We had a lot of feedback (thanks) and it’s clear that many readers want a simple way to import the
Here’s another method of getting stock prices into Excel. It’s part of a series: introduction and using MSN Money in Excel. This time we’ll use the improved Query system in recent versions of Excel combined with data from Google Finance. It’s a sad indictment of Microsoft Office that the best
Here’s how to grab stock price and indexes into Excel via MSN Money. It’s part of our series on getting ‘live’ data into Excel – Introduction and the Google Finance option. Microsoft dropped the MSN stock quotes option from Excel but they are still available. Use the ‘web page scraping’
