What’s with Office Mobile apps and their secrecy? Quietly, ever so quietly, Microsoft released a new version of Office for iPhone. Version 1.2 was pushed out on 14 August 2014 to a complete silence from Microsoft. No blog post, no Knowledge Base article … nothing … not a sausage or even a sausage app. The […]
Make Tom Hanks and Office for iPad work together. All the talk in iPad land is about Hanx Writer; a typewriter app for Apple iPad. Hanx Writer is a pleasant novelty app. It looks and sounds like a typewriter. Having spent a lot of time delving into Office for iPad for our popular book, we […]
When the August 2014 update was finally released it disappointed in more ways than one. Oh dear, for all the hype, rumor and promise of the Windows 8.1 update, it turned out to be a damp squib. The feature additions were not as interesting as Microsoft strategic leaking led us to expect. When the August […]
Microsoft adds the Ruble symbol to Windows 8.1 and we show you how to add it to earlier versions of Windows. Part of the Windows 8.1 August 2014 update is the addition of the new Russian Ruble currency symbol. All Microsoft will say about this change is “This feature adds new Ruble currency support for […]
Why Excel PivotTables get messed up and how to stop it. Time and again we’ve heard from people who try PivotTables and only get nonsense tables. That’s understandable since Microsoft’s hype about PivotTable ignores the basics that we’ll cover in this article. You’ve probably seen a Microsoft demonstration of PivotTables where it looks sooooo easy. […]
How to add and remove data from a PivotTable. Thanks for the great feedback from our article on PivotTables. One concern some of you have is about adding or removing source data after the PivotTable has been created. That’s understandable because the original PivotTable releases where unclear and curiously sensitive about the data ranges used. […]
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 […]
Quickly insert symbols, characters and emoji in Microsoft Word without taking your fingers off the keyboard. Inserting Symbols into Word documents is a pain, go up to the ribbon Insert | Symbols | Symbol which takes time … or you can use a trick from the 20th century to keep your fingers on the keyboard. […]
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 […]
Updates now available free for our popular Windows 8.1 and Office for iPad ebooks. We’re pleased to tell you about TWO free updates to our ebooks that are now available. Free updates are just one of the unique benefits of Office-Watch.com ebooks. Office for iPad: The Complete Guide A third edition of Office for iPad: […]
Microsoft celebrates 25 years of the software suite. Microsoft quietly celebrated the 25th anniversary of their Office suite on 1 August 2014 but were they being a little ‘previous’ in their celebrations? While Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows were around on 1 August 1989, were they sold as ‘Microsoft Office’ or only as separate […]
The Insert | Symbol feature in Office is overdue for an overhaul. Our venture into the new Unicode symbols and symbol fonts highlighted how much work Microsoft needs to do on this part of Office. Insert | Symbol has changed for a long time and many versions of Office. Here’s Insert | Symbol in Word […]
A bad example of Excel and document sharing online. Over on Reddit there’s a sad example of sharing an Office document that does no credit to the author. A husband started a diary of his attempts at, shall we say, ‘horizontal folk dancing’ plus his partner’s reasons for not wishing to join him. He then […]
The latest Office for iPad announcement is misleading and accurate at the same time. You have to hand it to Microsoft .. they can write something that’s both accurate and misleading at the same time. It tricks customers and the media into thinking there’s more in a product than there really is. They’ve been doing […]
Only days after the v1.1 app updates, we’ve revised the matching ebook. A third edition of Office for iPad: The Complete Guide is now available. We’ve updated the book to include the changes made only a few days ago to the three apps (now version 1.1). The 3rd edition contains yet more things you should […]
More good stuff added to Office for iPad Microsoft has released version 1.1 of their Office for iPad apps with more useful features added. EMAIL to PDF Microsoft gets tricky with the wording of one new feature. They boast about “Export to PDF is available in the Share menu in all of our apps” which […]
A simple, practical and non-scary example of how Excel PivotTables can work for you. Excel’s PivotTables are a great feature but one that seems way too hard for most of us … so here’s a simple and practical example of how PivotTables can help. A little fear of PivotTables is understandable. It’s one of those […]
Microsoft confirms Office across devices, including Android. There has been plenty of unquestioning press reports from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2014. Statistics and commitments are quoted without much consideration for their worth. The good news is another commitment to Microsoft Office ‘cross platform’ meaning, for the moment, not just Windows and Macintosh. Here’s one […]
Word: how to find the character code used for a particular letter or symbols. Last week we talked about the Unicode v7.0 symbols and how to use symbols in Word. With over 100,000 characters in the Unicode specification, it’s important to know the character code number for the symbol you want. That raises the question, […]
A funny example of how you can’t trust the spelling and grammar checks in Word. We laughed at this sign, seen in a Tesco’s supermarket in the UK. Guess what – according to Word 2013 that entire document has no grammar mistakes at all! Even ‘incontinence’ doesn’t get a contextual spelling query. It’s the same […]
Microsoft delivers 1,000GB for Office 365 users. As we mentioned last month, Microsoft decided to greatly increase the OneDrive storage available for Office 365 subscribers. The base storage for paid customers is now 1 Terabyte. That change has now been implemented. If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, go to OneDrive in your browser and look […]
What is Delve and what does it mean for Microsoft Office? At the recent Microsoft conference there was mention of Microsoft Delve. But what the ?^%$ is ‘Delve’? It’s an enhanced search tool for your documents and online info. Not just standard Office documents but also videos, audio, links to web sites etc that are […]
How can you get the new Unicode symbols in Office documents? There’s plenty of new symbols included in the Unicode 7.0 standard, here’s how to get them into your Office documents. Most fonts do NOT have all the Unicode characters, after all, there are over 133,000 of them. There are far too many characters so […]
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 […]
Miracast gives you a wireless external screen for PowerPoint and a lot more. Miracast is a clever trick that lets you wirelessly connect some Windows 8.1 portable computers, Android and other devices to any HDMI capable monitor or TV screen. All you need is a Miracast dongle available online for around US$20 or perhaps a […]
Microsoft makes a ‘one stop’ page for the latest Office update details. Figuring out what are the latest updates for Microsoft Office isn’t easy which is why we’re delighted to see Update center for Office, Office servers, and related products from Microsoft. It’s been a long time coming but as Sam Seaborn once said ” Let’s […]
Plenty of free ebooks about Office 2013, Office 2010, Office 365 and more. Microsoft has released another 130 free ebooks for anyone to download. It includes titles about Windows 8, Office 2013, Office 2010 and Office 365. A list of the Office related titles with links is below. Free ebooks should be enough to boast […]
A guide to getting more life and value from your printer. The Guardian has a nice little guide to maintaining an inkjet printer and saving money. We’ve never had good experiences with recycled ink or toner cartridges and have always found their quality to be poor. But others swear by recycled/refilled cartridges so if you […]
A smaller Surface machine isn’t coming soon but Office for Android surely is. The rumor mill is running hot about the Surface Mini (comatose, possibly deceased) and Microsoft Office for Android (in gestation). Microsoft did have a plan for a smaller version of their Surface computers but it was apparently killed. Buy why? Surely Microsoft […]
Join the list of testers for future versions of Microsoft Office. Microsoft has opened their waiting list for people to test future versions of Microsoft Office. Businesses and individuals can apply here http://prereleaseprograms-public.sharepoint.com/ There’s no guarantee you’ll be selected nor which version of Office you’ll be offered (Office for Windows, Mac, iPad. Maybe the upcoming […]
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 […]
Finding web pages some people don’t want you to see. The European Court of Justice has decided that citizens have a ‘right to be forgotten’ when there are web pages that are “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive”. The results of that ruling are now being seen with Google removing links to certain web pages at […]
Some great tips on table formatting. Joey Cherdarchuk has a nice posting on a very different table styling to the type that Microsoft prefers. Under the banner ‘Clear Off the Table’ he suggests getting rid of gridlines and colors to simplify the look of tables. In his example, Joey takes a standard Microsoft auto formatted table […]
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 […]
Updates to Office Mix – a new way to make PowerPoint interactive. A while ago we told you about Office Mix, Microsoft’s way to put a presentation online with quizzes and other interactive elements. Mix has been updated with a wider range of examples via a Public Gallery It’s nice to see that Mix is […]
QuickOffice is no more but Google improves MS Office document support Google has announced improvements to their direct support for Microsoft Office document formats as part of a reshuffle of their apps. The Google apps for viewing and editing documents will be updated to include editing of Microsoft Office document formats, without conversion. On Android […]
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 […]
Another update to Office 2011 for Mac, mostly Outlook 2011. Microsoft has released another patch for Office for Mac 2011 called the 14.4.3 update. The update is available from here or AutoUpdate on your Mac should grab and install the patch. Microsoft is typically cagey about what’s changed in the patch. The only three disclosed […]
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 […]
