The latest on the buggy September Office patches. In the last issue we told you about some buggy Office updates that are best ignored. What progress from Microsoft after a fortnight? The Office 2010 patches that got themselves into an infinite loop of updating are apparently now fixed. The Never
Apple’s office compatible apps are now free. Buried in the new iPhone hype was some interesting news for anyone editing Office documents on iPhone or iPad. The ‘iWork’ apps are now free on new devices. That’s Pages (word-processing), Keynote (presentations) and Numbers (spreadsheet). Each app cost $9.99 in the past
Make eye-popping headlines in Word Word 2010 and Word 2013 have a greater range of text effects than earlier versions of Word. There’s an array of color, outline, shadow, reflection and glow options. Enough to satisfy most people and also enough for most people to make horrible design choices. Text
OneNote for iPad/iPhone has been updated with some important and essential additions. With version 2.1 you have proper control to create notebooks on Skydrive. At last you can create, rename and delete sections. Until now OneNote users had to switch to their computer or Office Web Apps to rearrange notebooks
Office 365 and Exchange Online users get double mailbox size for no extra charge. Microsoft has announced a major increase in the mailbox size for Office 365 / Exchange Online customers. For most people this means their mailbox can now grow past 25GB to 50GB. That’s a lot of space
There’s no nice way to say it – this month’s Office 2013 update is, in military speak, ‘Fubar’ With the usual collection of security patches this month, Microsoft released an update to Office 2013 with various fixes and adding one major bug that amazingly managed to get through testing. The
Microsoft adds a bit more to the dying Technet. Microsoft is closing its too popular Technet program but hopes to dull the pain with a three month bonus. Over the next few weeks Technet subscribers should find their expiry date extend by three months. To qualify your Technet subscription had
Updating Office 207 can literally go on forever! Many users are reporting a problem with the patches for Office 2007. The three troublemakers are: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760583/ (KB 2760583) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760411/ (KB 2760411) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760588/ (KB 2760588) No matter how many times you install them, manually or automatically. Given the widespread nature of the
No details on an update to Office for iPhone. Microsoft has pushed out an update to Office for iPhone and it achieves a new low in the sad history of updates to Office software. Office-Watch.com is accustomed to Microsoft updates with poor documentation and we’ve written about them for many
How accurate is Excel compared to universal needs. On page 45 of the Sept/Oct 2013 Mental Floss magazine is a small item ‘Why do we care so much about the digits if Pi’ which includes this trivia: “The computers that keep the International Space Station humming round off pi at
An online tool from MIT helps you see what the government can see. The Media Lab at MIT has an online service which shows how revealing ‘metadata’ or ‘identifiers’ collected by the US government can really be. Microsoft, the US government and others defending the controversial PRISM program have been
There’s several spam checks of incoming email, which one is working for you. As we’ve mentioned before in Office-Watch.com, there’s usually more than one anti-spam filter on incoming messages. If those filter don’t work or are too aggressive you might miss out of messages you want to see. Typically an
Evernote for Android now comes with the ability to edit Office documents. Our favorite notemaking system, Evernote, now has the ability to edit Office documents within their Android version. Yes – we very much prefer Evernote over Office Onenote. Evernote runs very well, syncs seamlessly and completely across all popular
It’s reassuring to see the experts get it wrong. One of the very minor sub-plots in the story of the Ballmer resignation came from ValleyWag. Steve Ballmer sent a company-wide email announcing his retirement plans. The Managing Director of Microsoft Research, Roy Levin, replied from his Windows Phone. Only his
An extended report on our Editor-in-Chief’s visit to Christmas Island or Kiritimati. Kiritimati is a largely unknown dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean – Google Maps. Known in English as ‘Christmas Island’ though there’s two islands of that name, the other is an Australian territory in the Indian
A good explanation of web & email encryption plus how it’s crippled by the US government. Discover Magazine has a good explanation of the maths behind encryption used in web secure pages and email. It’s somewhat misleadingly headlined “How to create codes that even the NSA can’t break“. The article
Full list of fonts available in both modern Office for Mac and Office for Windows The following fonts are available on both Macintosh OSX 10.4 and later with Office for Mac and Windows 8 or later with Office for Windows You can use these fonts in Office documents, knowing that
What can Office for Mac users do instead of font embedding? Since Office for Mac won’t let you embed fonts, what can you do instead? We’ll look at the options that Office for Mac users can try when sharing a document with Office for Windows. Going the other way (Office
Linux developers think ahead, I mean waaaay ahead. Gotta hand it to Linux developers, they think ahead. “At 15:30:08 UTC on Sun, 4 December 292,277,026,596 …. 64-bit based Unix time stamps will overflow as the time stamp will exceed the register space; save your alarm, however, as this is much
Microsoft makes Office for Mac compatibility harder by omitting an important feature. In the feature list of Office for Mac is one vital omission, one that Microsoft definitely doesn’t like talking about. It effects anyone trying to operate in a ‘mixed’ Office Windows/Mac environment. In theory, a document made on
Some reader suggestions for a renamed Skydrive. With the news that Microsoft’s Skydrive service will be renamed, came some suggestions from readers. Microsoft Cloud Storage 2013 Home and Student edition Office 365 Drive Bob Drive – time to give the ill-fated Microsoft Bob a new job. Universal Microsoft hasn’t used
A quick overview of Word on Android phones. You can open and view documents in either docx or doc format but will only edit docx documents. If you open a .doc file, press the menu button and Save As to the newer format. When you open a document you’re first
Microsoft loses a court battle – Skydrive is no more. Microsoft has lost a court case regarding use of the term ‘Sky’ and is being forced to rename their ‘Skydrive’ cloud storage service to something else. While the case was held in the UK and only covered use of the
Office apps, of a sort, come to Android phones. Hot on the heels of Office for iPhone comes Microsoft’s version of Office for Android phones. The Android release is very similar to Office for iPhone, which effectively means both are quite limited in features and availability. Office for Android (officially
