Back in 2002 I wrote an Access Archon article dealing with reference issues, among them the problem of certain references being upgraded when a database is opened in a higher version of Access, but not downgraded when it is again opened in a lower version. You might think that over the last 16 years Microsoft […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Outlook adds holidays from various countries but it’s not very clear or clever about it. Recently we’ve been looking at Outlooks Holiday support. We thought it would a simple matter of clicking ‘Add Holidays’ but instead we found an old-fashioned, unclear and poorly designed system that’s causes lots of hassles and frustration. From File | […]
A better way to view your email in Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 Outlook Conversation view is a different way to arrange your email. It groups messages with (usually) the same subject together making it easier to follow an email thread. Conversations also makes better use of valuable screen real estate. When Microsoft first showed […]
What makes a conversation in Outlook? In the Outlook world a conversation is a series of emails with the same subject line or conversation ID. It’s as simple as that. In the past these were called email ‘threads’. Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 can group messages by conversation or thread. For most people the conversation […]
Should Outlook be adding marketing holidays as well as real ones? The US Holidays list in Outlook 2013 adds some unexpected and non-holiday items to your calendar – the full list is below. There were some surprising entries in the list supplied by Microsoft. Administrative Professionals Day There’s no doubt that Administrative Professionals, Executive Assistants, […]
How to delete ‘duplicate’ holidays in Outlook. When you add holidays to Outlook, sometimes you can end up with duplicate entries because Outlook isn’t smart enough to detect simple duplications in the calendar. Here’s an example of triplication of holiday items in the Outlook Calendar. It’s easy to do given Outlook’s poor holidays support. Removing […]
Put Easter and other public holidays back into Outlook If you check your Outlook calendar for the coming weekend, you might not see Easter Monday marked for Monday 21 April, Good Friday marked for Friday 18 April 2014. Or maybe US Thanksgiving on 27 Nov 2014 isn’t listed? Why? Doesn’t Outlook come with public holidays automatically […]
How to get rid of an email conversation or thread. Sometimes you get emails on a topic that doesn’t matter to you and is cluttering up your Inbox. Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 have a fairly simple solution – the Ignore button. Ignore tells Outlook to move all existing and future emails with a certain subject […]
Outlook tricks you may not have considered for New, Reply, Reply All, Forward and Resend. New / Compose The simple and easy one first. Click on the New Email button to start a new message. At the very least fill in the TO, Subject and some message text then click Send. There can be more […]
Microsoft’s ‘Scroogled’ campaign gets partial endorsement. The British Advertising Standards Authority has agreed with Microsoft after a complaint about their ‘Scroogled’ campaign. ‘Scroogled’ is an attempt by Microsoft to attack Google over its targeted advertising which looks at Gmail messages and displays ads based on the keywords in the email. It’s an extension of 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 that appear when you hover […]
Grab high-res pictures from movies to insert into Office documents or emails. We’ll show you how to capture or grab a proper, full size, high-resolution still image from a high quality video file then paste that picture into an Office document or Outlook email. Why do this? Sometimes a video turns out badly but has […]
How to find your pictures to insert into an Office document. Even a simple thing like adding a picture to an Office document or email has subtleties and annoyances. When you choose Insert | Picture in recent versions of Office, it opens, by default, in the Picture Library. That seems sensible, at least to Microsoft. […]
Get Outlook to show changes in Dropbox folders Dropbox has one excellent feature, the ‘Events’ view that lists files added, deleted or modified. You can use that feature to get custom Outlook alerts when certain things happen to your Dropbox account, like when a file is added to a shared folder. That list can be […]
How to get a message when certain RSS feeds are updated As you probably know, it’s possible to get an alert or an action when certain email messages arrive into Outlook using the Rules feature. Office-Watch.com shows how to do the same thing for an RSS feed. It will let you filter down a larger […]
What can you do with a file attachment that has no file extension? Sometimes you get a file, probably an email attachment, that has no file extension. Without something after the dot/period (.doc .docx .xlsx .pptx etc.) Windows doesn’t know what program to use. This is most likely to happen with files sent from Mac […]
A simple guide to sending files via Dropbox. There are many ways to send files that are too big for email (usually over 20MB). In this article we’ll look at how to do that with Dropbox either sending a ‘one-off’ file or regularly exchanging files with someone else. Dropbox is very popular, generally free and well […]
Why and How to remove words from the main Microsoft Office dictionary. Sometimes the supplied Office dictionary has words you don’t want or you’d like a warning about. Here’s how to put the red squiggly line under words that would otherwise be OK according to Microsoft. Why? Why would you want to remove words from […]
Where are Outlook email signatures stored and how to copy them to another computer There’s no import/export option for Outlook email signatures so how can you move them to another computer? Office-Watch.com has an introduction to Outlook Signatures . You might think there would be a simple way to move signatures around, but no, you […]
An email pretending to be ‘Outlook settings’ will actually lock up your data until you pay a fee – aka ransom. The tricks to separate you from your money and computer files continue to get more elaborate and this latest brazen effort from Russian scammers shows. For the last few years there’s been virus attacks […]
Keep your calendar clear by hiding private appointments like reminders to take medicine. Sometimes we have appointments or events that we want to keep private or at least hide from the regular calendar views. You can have appointments in Outlook which will pop-up reminders when necessary but not show up in your regular calendar view. […]
How to have email signatures for all the different roles in your life. Most of us wear different ‘hats’ – a family member, friend, person, employee or volunteer. Each of those roles can have a different Outlook email signature. Which signature you use depends on the situation and, perhaps, the email account you’re using. Clarification: […]
With Windows 8.1 for Surface RT comes a new Outlook – what’s it like? If you have a Surface RT device then there’s an update to Windows 8.1 available* and within that is a new Office program – Outlook RT. The ‘RT’ versions of Office programs look much like the traditional Windows programs but have […]
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 even for the most aggressive […]