Beware of ‘experts’ to toe the Microsoft party line on Office 365 vs. Office 2013. We continue to be amazed at some of the comparisons by ‘experts’ between Office 365 annual rental prices and buying Office 2013 as a one-off payment. Microsoft has deliberately made it hard to do ‘side-by-side’
Can friends share the cost of an Office 365 subscription/rental? The Office 365 Home Premium has 5 copies Office (Windows or Mac) that can be shared among different people. Could friends pool their money and share the cost of a single Home Premium subscription? Officially no … unless the friends
Where’s the value in Office 365 Personal? Microsoft has announced a new, lower price point for Office 365 subscriptions (rentals). Office 365 Personal will costs US$6.99 per month or US$69.99 a year (plus tax) at first. For that you get: Office for Windows or Office for Mac – one transferable
Does it matter if there’s an Office for iPad? Only if it’s a decent app that works properly. Microsoft is quietly delighted with all the coverage for a product they haven’t even admitted exists – Office for iPad. First there were stories about ‘internal divisions’ about whether to release Office
Why are some Word 2013 users not seeing ‘Welcome Back’ messages. As we’ve been mentioning, Word 2013 has a feature to put you back at the last place you were reading in a document … a little flag appears like this: That registry key will only store details for documents
How to block the ‘Welcome back’ message in Word 2013. Last week Office-Watch.com told you about how Word 2013 document details are saved without disclosure in the Windows Registry. Many readers asked how the feature can be turned off. A reasonable request in the circumstances but not according to Microsoft.
The more we dig, the more places we find trace of your Office document history. Recently we told you about some places where Word stores details of what documents you’ve opened, often much longer than you’d expect and with no direct way to remove these details. Yet another location is
How to convert a PDF into a Word document, even when Word 2013 can’t do it. Since Word 2013 can’t properly convert ‘image only’ PDF’s or you don’t have Word 2013 at all, how can you convert PDF’s? There are many options available including free and paid online services, OCR
Why won’t Word 2013 convert some PDF’s? Word 2013 lets you convert some PDF files into Word documents, but what about those it won’t convert to editable text? What’s going on? First a quick primer on two types of PDF. Image only Some PDFs are just pictures of pages. The
A free way to show Microsoft Office help in other languages Office Screentips is a way to show tooltips for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other programs. This free addon from Microsoft doesn’t interfere with how the programs work or the wording of the tabs and ribbons. Only the tooltips
Why your PowerPoint slides should NOT make much sense … Over on Slate there’s a nice little slideshow about making PowerPoint presentations that don’t bore your audience into a coma. In short, the advice is to make your slides incomprehensible. Well, not quite. The idea is that the slide content
Can you use the free Getty images in your PowerPoint presentations? Getty Images, has announced that 35 million of their images are now available free. Does that mean you can use them in your PowerPoint presentations or Word documents? Sadly, no Getty Images is now allowing free embedding to some
Your document actions are still stored even after you’ve told Office 2013 to remove them. Go to the File | Open pane in Word 2013, right-click and choose ‘Remove from List’ will delete any indication that a particular document/s had been opened. Right? Wrong – Office 2013 retains information about
Your document activity shows up in the registry in more places than expected. Jason Hale has done a nice job checking out where Office 2013 leaves footprints showing what documents you’ve worked on. Office programs like Word, Excel and PowerPoint have MRU – Most Recently Used – lists that let
SkyDrive saves more about your Office documents than it first appears. When you save a document to SkyDrive, Microsoft collects some more details than you’d expect but hasn’t bothered to tell its customers. We’ve already told you about Jason Hale and his discovery that the ‘Welcome Back’ details when re-opening a
You’d be surprised how Office 2013 knows ‘Where you left off’. One of the nice little features in Office 2013 is the ‘Welcome Back .. Pick up where you left off’ tag that appears when you re-open a document. Click on that tag and you’ll move to the last place
Farewell, Mike Parker who brought Helvetica to the mainstream but alas not to Microsoft Windows or Office for Windows. Mike Parker isn’t a household name but the chances are the every household has an example of Helvetica, the font he helped make popular. When he worked for Mergenthaler Linotype Co.,
A list of Microsoft Office versions and their latest Service Packs. If you don’t have Office 2013, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Here’s a list of the latest service packs for each version of Microsoft Office going back more than a decade. For the recent versions of Office, at least
What’s in SP1, how to get it and why you should wait. Microsoft has finally released a Service Pack for Office 2013, the first major update to Office 2013. It’s a bundle of fixes for known and previously unknown (secret) bugs in Office 2013. In this article we’ll tell you
How to update Microsoft Office with the new name, OneDrive, and remove the old SkyDrive name. Recent versions of Office have the name SkyDrive (with the extra capital letter) in the supplied dictionary. However the new OneDrive name hasn’t made it to the Office dictionary yet. Here’s what you’ll see
The name change to OneDrive has happened in Office 2013. As promised, Microsoft has changed the name of SkyDrive, their cloud storage service, to OneDrive. They did this after losing a legal battle with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV service over use of the ‘Sky’ name. Most references to SkyDrive have
The ‘hiding’ call toolbar, your privacy and bypassing countries that try to block Skype. Over the years we’ve shown a lot of people, mostly travelers, how to get more from Skype. As well as our Skype Hidden Extras article, here’s a few more tips from the Skype coalface. The call
There’s more to Skype than just free calls. Everyone knows that you can make free computer-to-computer calls via Skype, but there are plenty of other, hidden, Skype options. Some are free, others will save you money. There’s one free feature that Microsoft tries to trick you into paying for –
There’s one glaring omission from Skype that’s an embarrassment to Microsoft It’s been almost two years since Microsoft bought Skype, yet even the simple bits of integration with Microsoft Office haven’t appeared. The most basic mixing of Office and Skype is an Outlook social connector. This would let Skype contacts
