As part of the Outlook for Mac release, Microsoft has indicated their Office for Mac plans. A new Office for Mac (Office 2015 for Mac?) will be released in the second half of 2015. Office 365 subscribers/renters will be able to switch to the new Office for Mac at no extra charge. There will also […]
While Microsoft Word lumbers along, there’s some interesting and genuinely creative word processors out there. We’re not talking about direct rivals to Microsoft Office 2013 like OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Kingsoft Office Free, Google Docs, iWork or earlier versions of Office. Instead we’ll look at software that takes a very different approach to putting words on the screen […]
More than a few Outlook users have seen this error message “The Microsoft Exchange administrator has made a change that requires you quit and restart Outlook” Problem is, the Microsoft message is lying! All too often Outlook users restart Outlook, even restart the computer, but the same message keeps appearing. Grrrrrr. Happily you can click […]
Forget the Romans … what use is a smartphone? The Guardian has an interesting article “From cameras to keycards, everyday devices killed off by the smartphone”. It could read like a scene from Life of Brian titled: “What have smartphones ever done for us?” “Well, aside from mobile phones, landlines, pay phones, cameras, Walkman, Dictaphones, […]
Microsoft needs to play ‘catch up’ with email encryption. Yahoo is going to join Google is supporting not just email encryption but the same type of email encryption. Sadly we’ll have to wait until sometime in 2015 for Yahoo to release their version of OpenPGP. That’s good news … but where is Microsoft? For all […]
Some programs let you email documents directly – here’s now. Microsoft Office for iPad has an ‘Email as attachment’ as one of its limited options for sharing a document. Here’s some clever ways to make use of that and workaround the Office for iPad limitations. Some cloud services offer an ‘incoming email’ option so you […]
Unicode adds more characters to an already large list. Unicode has added another 2,834 new characters in the Unicode 7.0 specification, mostly support for 23 new scripts. That takes the total to a whopping 113,021 characters! But we’ll have to wait for these new characters to appear automatically in Office, Windows and mobile devices. The […]
Do the latest Microsoft data encryption promises mean much? Microsoft has announced more encryption services for customers but it’s more ‘papering over the cracks’ than a real effort to protect customer’s data. Microsoft has made some vague changes to protect the transmission of your emails and documents, but nothing to protect that information on their […]
Microsoft doesn’t see the main problem as they apologizes & explain the Lync and Exchange outages. In a blog post, Microsoft has explained what happened in the cloud service breakdowns earlier this week but exposes their lack of understanding for customers’ needs with cloud services. The break in Exchange Server is down to “an intermittent […]
Office 2013 has some clever tricks when you touch the screen. Tony G writes: ” … there are some subtle features in Office 2013. I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 and I have observed that the right click menus and some other features are different when called up by the touch screen and using the […]
Email services for Office 365 and Exchange Online should now be resumed but Microsoft handled it really badly. In Microsoft’s world, damage to sales is far worse than any failure to meet customers service needs. So on that score, Microsoft has done well for itself in the last day or so. They had a major […]
You can get match results automatically in Outlook Once great thing about Outlook’s Internet Calendar feature is that it can be updated automatically. The 2014 World Cup (football/soccer) is a good example. As we’ve already explained, you can make a separate Outlook calendar with the match schedule for your time zone then overlay that with […]
How to get the World Cup schedule into Outlook automatically. The football/soccer World Cup is about to start with 64 matches being played over the next month. Here’s how to get a reliable schedule into your Outlook calendar quickly and easily. Outlook lets you import an Internet feed of calendar items. This is better than […]
Gpg4Win is one way to improve and expand Outlook’s poor encryption support. Google’s End-to-End got us thinking about how to improve Outlooks lame email encryption and make it ready for End-to-End. The End-To-End addin uses OpenPGP, an email encryption system not directly supported by Outlook but you can do it via Gpg4Win. Gpg4Win is a […]
Google’s End-to-End secure email tool is a great idea – will it force Microsoft to improve Outlook? Google has announced an upcoming tool ‘End to End‘ which promises a way to send and receive encrypted emails from within a Chrome browser using web-based email systems (apparently not just Gmail). That is a great move which […]
Another easy way to get images into Word and other Office documents. Last week we mentioned a faster way to get a scanned image into Word via the ‘scan to clipboard’ option available in some scanning software. There are similar options available for copying existing image files into Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents as well […]
A quicker way to do some regular tasks in Outlook. Quick Steps is that big block in the middle of the Outlook 2010 and 2013 Home tab Quick Steps let you customize and combine Outlook functions into a single click without resorting to VBA. The defaults are meant to be examples of what is possible. […]
Can you scan a picture or document directly into Word? Back in the day, you could click a button in Word to scan a document or image and drop it into a document. Can you still do that? Alas no. Microsoft dropped its imaging services within Windows and so Word lost the scan button. The […]
Court confirms that any US controlled cloud server is vulnerable to US government access. Here’s a story that got little coverage but deserves a lot more. A US district court has confirmed what has been known for the last decade, that US companies have to supply data to the US government from any server they […]
Why RE and FW are the best options for email subjects When you reply or forward a message your email program will add a prefix to the subject line. The question is – do you choose the standard ‘English’ prefixes RE: and FW: or your local equivalents? There’s plenty of alternatives to RE and FW […]
