There’s one glaring omission from Skype that’s an embarrassment to Microsoft It’s been almost two years since Microsoft bought Skype, yet even the simple bits of integration with Microsoft Office haven’t appeared. The most basic mixing of Office and Skype is an Outlook social connector. This would let Skype contacts
Don’t get excited about an ‘Office for iPad’ until we see it. The online commentariat was alight with news about the coming Office for iPad. Not much news really, just a rumor that Office for iPad was still ‘coming’ and probably before a version of Office for Windows 8 touch
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
Making Windows Explorer’s Recent Places feature a whole lot better. Recent Places shows the folders you can recently visited in Windows Explorer. By default it’s in the Favorites section. Unfortunately the standard Recent Places view isn’t a lot of help: The Type and Size columns are irrelevant because they will
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
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
Save money, you don’t always need to pay for the ‘Pro’ version of Windows. In Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, Microsoft has ‘Business’, ‘Professional’ or ‘Ultimate’ versions which, among other features, can login to a Windows domain. This has the effect of forcing organizations to buy a more
Moving from MS Office will be harder than politicians think. A Cabinet Minister in the UK government spoke openly this week about dropping Microsoft Office and switching to open source alternatives. Naturally, The Rt Hon Francis Maude MP was more discreet than that, in fact he said “It’s not about
What it really means for Office 2003 users plus a better countdown to the ‘end’ of Office 2003 and Windows XP Microsoft has a countdown to the end of support for Office 2003 and Windows XP in months, days and hours. We could not resist making our own … Microsoft
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
Why is the word Kardashian in the Office 2013 dictionary? I could happily live without knowing anything about the various Kardashians. I’m informed they are ‘personalities’ of some sort and that I really don’t want to know anything more. But someone at Microsoft seems to think the Kardashians are more
Select the wrong part of a MS Word table and the word count is wrong Benjamin B. writes with an interesting bug in Word 2013 that’s apparently been in Word for a few versions without acknowledgement from Microsoft, let alone a fix. It involves tables and the word count feature.
Office continues to rake in cash for Microsoft Microsoft has released Office sales statistics as part of their latest financial disclosure with Office 365 having over 3.5 million subscribers. 3.5 million subscribers is up from 1 million in May 2013 and 2 million in October 2013. More than 15% of
From: Microsoft Office 2010 sales boasts. A copy of a Microsoft blog post from Jan 2011 – now removed from their site. Back in January 2011 there was an interesting blog post by Microsoft which gave some hard numbers to Office 2010 sales – notably that a copy of Office
Screen reader software now available for Office 2010 and Office 2013 users. Microsoft has done a deal with GW Micro to make their Window-Eyes software available free to licensed users of Office 2010 or Office 2013. Details of the offer are at http://www.windoweyesforoffice.com/ Window-Eyes is screen reader software for the
Can you call a Translation service to return results in Excel? After checking out the clever European word translator, we started wondering about loading translations into Excel. It should be simple to have some code to call a web server and return a translation of a word. Office 2010 and
2014 looks like the year of long movie titles with colons – here’s how to save yourself some typing. More and more movies are sequels and that means longer and longer movie titles. Most have colons because the studios don’t trust us to figure out that a movie is a
Epson’s new label maker is a far cry from the old ‘Dymo’ labeler. We’d all but forgotten about label makers but the new Epson LW-600P made us think again. This is a laser printer for labels that’s battery powered with apps for both Android and iOS devices to link via
An industrial dispute involving CAPS has ended. One of the most interesting industrial disputes of 2013 has now ended with a new agreement between staff and management of the Melbourne Fire Brigade in Australia. Being an emergency service, the administrative staff didn’t feel that a full ‘stop work’ strike was
What wins in a conflict between custom and exclusion dictionaries? In Office-Watch.com we’ve talked about the custom dictionary (which lets you add words to the Office dictionary) and the exclusion dictionary (which removes words that would otherwise be considered OK. But what happens if a word is in both the
Among the December 2013 patches is a fix for the latest TIFF image bug. The most recent ‘zero day’ exploit for TIFF images has now been patched by Microsoft. The security lapse is the latest in a long line of problems with the Windows system for handling images. There seems
Examine US public health data in Excel. One of the great things about the recent Internet is the availability of previously hidden data. Large blocks of information have been collected, checked and published online. Combine that with a tool like Excel and you can do your own analysis! Here’s just
An example of web scraping from BestBuy.com into Excel. We’ve already talked about getting prices from the Amazon.com web site into Excel with automatic updates. Now let’s look at how to do it for BestBuy.com prices.Excel has had a method of web scraping for many versions you can find it
How to check Amazon product prices automatically in Excel. With Black Friday coming in the USA, it’s time to carefully check prices and look out for bargains. Ideally get those prices automatically and put them into Excel for comparison. To do that for Amazon means ‘scraping’ or trying to grab
