The Vatican’s latest mistake can be blamed on Microsoft … if you try hard enough. A good laugh can be had with this news from the Vatican: “A commemorative coins issued by the Vatican has been withdrawn because it spells the word ‘Jesus’ incorrectly”. You’d think that knowing how to
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
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
Does Microsoft have a list of blocked words like Apple does on the iPhone? One of the more amazing examples of over-control by a software maker is the news that Apple has a ‘Kill List’ of words that it won’t spell-check. It seems that iOS v6 devices have a list
A quick look at your dictionary options in Word Even if you, like me, only speak one language there are still some powerful language and dictionary options in Word to keep in mind. All copies of Microsoft Office (recent versions anyway) come with English dictionaries. ‘Dictionaries’ plural because there’s many
The ‘secret’ is out, Outlook is coming to Windows RT tablets. Windows RT tablets, like Microsoft’s Surface, are to get proper Outlook software later this year. The news was announced by Microsoft in a blog post but the work on Outlook RT had been an open secret for months. Windows
There’s SUM and then there are all the useful SUM variations to choose from. Excel’s SUM() function is probably the first one we learn but there’s a lot more to it than simply clicking on the button to add up a list of numbers. In this article we’ll look at
The new Wikidata site should provide hours of Excel ‘fun’. The WikiMedia foundation, operators of Wikipedia among others, is developing a new site called Wikidata. It will be a home for public ‘structured data’ in other words, lists. There are plenty of lists already in Wikipedia. Wikidata will link with
Really obvious spam/phishing messages not caught by Microsoft’s spam filters. You’d think that a very short message with only a web link that has an IP number not domain name would go straight to the Junk Email folder but no. On our test machines (Exchange Server and Outlook 2013 with
StartSSl offers free digital certificates for your Outlook email – here’s how to get yours Email digital signatures aren’t used a lot which is a shame because they are very useful. Signed emails are verified to come from you while it’s possible to encrypt your messages (to prevent anyone else
A little Excel quirk to mention using LEN() with large numbers. A little Excel quirk to mention. For as long as we can remember you could get the number of digits in a number by simply using =LEN() even though the input is a number, not text. But have a
Make the famous WW2 poster yourself, and countless variations, in Microsoft Office. Make the famous WW2 poster yourself, and countless variations, in Microsoft Office Keep Calm with Microsoft Office is the latest in our series of practical ebooks for Microsoft Office users. We don’t just tell you how
Add better multi-monitor support for Windows As you put your Office applications across more than one monitor, you’ll find the need for better controls than the ones in Windows. That’s where UltraMon comes in. These days it’s common to see two monitors with Office programs and browser windows open across
What to look for in emails that might be up to no good. Ernst and Young in conjunction with the FBI has developed a tool to check for fraud via email conversations. The software looks for key phrases that are often used when people are discussing something they should not
Some common characters don’t need help from Autocorrect in Word. Our good friend and budding woodworker, Rose Vines adds her $0.02 to our AutoCorrect suggestions, especially for accented characters. This is something we’ve talked about in Office-Watch.com before, but is worth repeating. “There’s very simple built-in shortcuts for accented characters
Tips for making Autocorrect shortcuts that are easy to remember. Bob C writes: ” I use MS Word autocorrect to insert longer words of phrases that I’m too efficient.. OK,lazy.. to try to spell or type out completely, usually duplicating several leading consonants in the word or leading letters
Microsoft security patch causes new bugs. It has to happen some times a new Microsoft security patch has caused a new bug to arise in PowerPoint among other software. In the last set of security patches there was MS12-078 but the patch itself is faulty and will have to be
How to keep getting your Gmail even when it’s not working Gmail had another outage which continues as we type this, at least that’s how it was reported. In fact the core Gmail system was still working, only the web interface was broken. This has happened before and Office-Watch.com has
There’s many ways you can arrange your Inbox in Outlook. Whenever we look at the Outlook setup used by other people, two things are striking. One is that few people change the default layout provided by Microsoft to something that suits them. We’ll look at that another time. The other
Is Journal in Outlook of any use to you? You might have noticed the Journal part of Outlook and wondered what it’s all about. Possibly you’ve clicked on Journal and got no further than this dialog: In this article we’ll look at Journal and help you decide if it might
Microsoft changes the Office compatibility for Windows 8 but doesn’t explain why, so we do. Microsoft has changed the Windows 8 compatibility statement for Microsoft Office versions from the promises during the Windows 8 Preview. Our new book is Windows 8 for Microsoft Office users with the stuff you need
A new ebook from Office Watch, more detail, less hype. We’re delighted to announce a brand new title from Office Watch. Windows 8 for Microsoft Office users is now available. After the success of Office 2010: the real startup guide we decided to do something similar for Windows 8. Windows
Get the full medal tally into Excel for your own analysis. We close our Olympics coverage (sorry “Quadrennial Corporate-sponsored Rings-based Sporting Event”) with links to some looks at the medal tally. The Guardian continued their data analysis of the medal wins. In the end they produced a simple interactive which
Find the size of your Outlook data files, then don’t worry about it. Checking the size of your Outlook data files is pretty easy, you can also find out which folders are taking up space. In any version of Outlook (we checked Outlook 2010, Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003) right-click
