Microsoft have rewritten the Excel 2003 memory manager so that it is no longer limited. You can now make serious use of all the RAM on your PC, at least up to a gigabyte. There’s some very good news about Excel 2003, and I didn’t want to let it slip
PDF isn’t a perfect format. But it beats the living daylights out of the DOC format for any files posted on the Internet. In the course of my DOC File Dumpster Diving (I like the ring of that phrase!), I recommended using PDF for any files posted on the Internet.
What’s causing Outlook 2003 to exit with the message “Changes have been made that affect the global template, Normal.dot. Do you want to save those changes?” If WinFax Pro is the source of the Outlook 2003 hang problem, what’s causing Outlook 2003 to exit with the message “Changes have been
The folks in Redmond have finally released a program which apparently removes hidden data from Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. After months – or is it years? – of kvetching from this corner, and dozens of documents that Microsoft posted on its own website laden with potentially embarrassing
We try to uncover why Outlook 2003 won’t quit for some users and why the icon remains in the System Tray. In a previous article, Office Watch reader BT told us about his problems getting Outlook 2003 to quit. BT clicked the “X” in the upper right corner, he clicked File
We show you how to clean up after people who inevitably type two spaces after every period – quickly and easily. My last missive on co-opting the “backwards P thingy” button on the Standard toolbar brought an avalanche of mail. And I was shocked! Many of you took me to
We take you through a few of the more common sources of unexpected information in Word documents. Office Watch last week and again this week exposed all sorts of hidden information in Word documents posted on the Internet. I’ve heard from many of you, wondering how we got into this sorry
Microsoft has released the spec for WordprocessingML (WordML), SpreadsheetML (ExcelML) and FormTemplate Schemas (for InfoPath) to the world. Here’s another news story that I just don’t get. Microsoft has released the spec for “WordprocessingML” (WordML), SpreadsheetML (ExcelML) and FormTemplate Schemas (for InfoPath) to the world. Cool. But the stories! “Microsoft
No doubt you’ve heard by now that Office 2003 ships with a font that contains two swastikas. (I think Reuters first published the story, but apparently Microsoft itself fed the story to the press). Apologies have been made all around, MS has promised a tool for removing the offending characters
We take a secondary look at one reader’s field code related problem. Okay. I blew it. What can I say? In the last edition of Office for Mere Mortals I told you about my friend and his untimely encounter with a weird {HYPERLINK …} thingy in one of his Word documents.
Microsoft isn’t the only group that’s waving its dirty laundry in the wind. Last week I talked about the importance of stripping “hidden” information from Word documents before posting them on the Internet. I took you through a bunch of examples of docs on Microsoft’s own site that included detailed
A reader writes in with a problem related to field codes in Word. An old friend – I last saw him at Comdex when Comdex was Comdex, if ya know what I mean – wrote with an interesting question: “As usual, I have a weird Word question that’s baffling me,
Word hides important, personal information inside its documents. You can get rid of some of the information most of the time – but it’s very, very difficult to delete potentially embarrassing information all of the time. I’m astounded at how many people just don’t get it. Word hides important, personal
If you’re going to send a .doc file to someone, or post it on the Web, seriously consider converting it to PDF before you let it go. Three years ago, I recommended that you convert your documents to PDF format before handing them out. I’ve mentioned PDF a dozen times
Microsoft Word documents are notorious for containing private information in file headers which people would sometimes rather not share. The British government of Tony Blair just learned this lesson the hard way. A few weeks ago, Richard Smith – whom many of you will recall as a tireless defender of
We continue our look at the bogus “Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert” report. All of you regular Office Watch readers know that Microsoft hired a PR firm to come up with a completely bogus testimonial – “Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert” – which MS posted on
The “Arial Unicode MS” font – which is regarded by many as the ultimate Unicode font, containing virtually every character from every written language – disappeared from the Microsoft website in August 2002. Sometime in mid-August 2002, Microsoft removed a giant reference font from its Web site. The “Arial Unicode
Outlook 2002 doesn’t respect any of Word’s settings – even if you’ve told Word 2002 to remove any personally identifiable information. If you’ve been following along with the privacy revelations in the latest issues of Office Watch, you know that any Office file sent as an attachment to an Outlook
The _AuthorEmailDisplayName field was the undoing of Microsoft’s planted “Mac to PC Convert” lady, Valerie Mallinson. Now we know how it got there. You eagle-eyed Office Watch devotees no doubt recognized one of the File | Properties entries mentioned in the preceding article. _AuthorEmailDisplayName was the undoing of Microsoft’s planted “Mac to
When Word 2002 asks you if you want to merge changes back into the original document, clicking “No, And don’t ask again” won’t help you. It’s like the paper clip all over again! Word MVP Beth Melton has helped me enormously in sifting through the Byzantine details of the 16 October
“Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert” croons the headline on Microsoft’s Web page. Who would have thought it was written by Microsoft PR? “Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert” croons the headline on Microsoft’s Web page. “After eight years as a Macintosh owner, I switched to a PC
We have a look at the File | Properties dialog in detail. No doubt you know that you can open any Office file, click File | Properties, and get at a bunch of worthwhile information about the file – when it was created, who created it, and so on. If
Directly view the travel itineraries created by travel agents or airlines. Almost all the travel bookings you make either directly or via an agent get placed on enormous mainframe computers. In recent years these computers have become available to the public, but travel agents and airline like to keep it
The Office Watch privacy statement – summary and full text. Here’s the fast track summary of our privacy statement:: When subscribing to any of our email newsletters, we only ask for your email address. That information is only used to send you our famous free email newsletters. We don’t rent,