After last week’s revelations about Microsoft’s cooperation with the US government, we asked some questions …. Still waiting for a reply of any kind. After last week’s revelations about Microsoft’s cooperation with the US government, we asked some questions to Microsoft. They asked for more time to reply, so we
Microsoft closes their Technet program giving an unlikely reason. Microsoft has announced the closure of their popular Technet program from 31 August 2013. You can continue to buy a Technet subscription until that date and current subscriptions will be honored until they expire. So if you were thinking of getting
Microsoft’s official response to the latest news about their work with the NSA and FBI. Office-Watch.com has posed a series of specific questions to Microsoft which we hope will get a response in the next few days. In the meantime here’s their official response to the Guardian article about Microsoft’s
New disclosures about how Microsoft actively collaborates with the NSA to infiltrate Skydrive and encrypted messages on a large scale. The Guardian newspaper today has damaging revelations about how Microsoft had gone beyond simply responding to specific requests from the US government for information on individuals using Outlook.com, Skydrive and other
An Office-Watch.com reader with an excellent idea for Outlook rules and there’s a part workaround available now. Larry D saw our article on limitations in Outlook Rules and came up with a great idea: ” I think the most important function this feature could offer (which it doesn’t) would be,
Why doesn’t Outlook find the messages you expect? Getting an Outlook rule to work with an incoming message can be an exercise in frustration because the on-screen instructions aren’t very clear. Outlook rules let you automate the process of managing incoming messages. For example, tagging or moving messages from a
How to rid yourself of the spam ‘Dr Oz.’ emails since Outlook can’t do it. The latest plague on Outlook Inboxes are ‘Dr Oz News’ emails. It truly is a plague too; here’s our unfiltered Outlook Inbox showing nothing else! Maybe you’re lucky enough that an ISP or mail host
Microsoft doesn’t want Office for iPhone to be good or popular. We’ve received a lot of emails from people disappointed with Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone. Disappointed that it’s so limited in features and options for saving documents. Disappointed that the new app requires an Office software rental to use
‘All’ has a different meaning at Redmond. Microsoft plays word games with Office 365 and iPhone Microsoft could be clear about entitlement to Office Mobile for iPhone. Instead they play word games including re-defining the word ‘All’ to mean something less than the dictionary definition; All: “used to refer to the
Not all Office 365 subscribers can get Office Mobile for iPhone and there’s a hidden limit. From the public statements you’d think that all Office 365 subscribers can use Office Mobile for iPhone but that’s not so. Only Office 365 subscriptions that include Office software rental can also install Office
Office Mobile for iPhone is locked into SkyDrive with few other choices. For most people, the new Office Mobile for iPhone is locked into SkyDrive as the sole location for saving files. It’s a 21st Century version of Henry Ford’s famous quote “you can save a document anywhere as long
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
Some Windows tablets will be bundled with Microsoft Office for no extra cost. As a sign that the sales of Windows Tablets are not as good as the Redmond hype, Microsoft has announced that Office software can now be included free with the hardware. Later this year (not right away)
Because the kids can spell words that Word can’t! The 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee in the USA got us wondering how Microsoft Word would cope. So we fired up Word 2013 with the latest English (US) dictionary as supplied by Microsoft. We selected 30 words used in the final
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
We found a worrying bug in Excel 2013 when inserting rows into an existing worksheet. While investigating the Excel ‘coding error’ in an economics paper we uncovered a worrying bug in Excel. It occurs in our testing of Excel 2013 in the cell ranges of formulas like SUM and AVERAGE
Microsoft Word has it’s say on how to pronounce ‘GIF’ Steve Wilhite really set us geeks on fire this week. As the creator of the popular GIF image format he revealed that he preferred the soft-g pronunciation ‘jif’ (as in ‘jiffy’ or ‘gin’) not the commonly used ‘gif’ (with a
Is there any difference in the software buying Office 365 or Office 2013 Microsoft uses the terms ‘Office 365’ and ‘Office 2013’ interchangeably and confusingly so it’s no wonder Office-Watch.com gets asked about differences between the two. Strictly speaking ‘Office 2013’ is the software – the successor to Office 2010
Other ways to make a new document based on an existing one … There’s more than one way to get a similar result as ‘New from Existing…’ that are worth keeping in mind. They apply across all recent versions of Word as well as Excel and Powerpoint too. You can
Why did Microsoft remove a useful feature from Word 2013? In Word 2007 and Word 2010 there’s a nifty little feature called ‘New from Existing …‘ which quickly made a new document based on an existing one. Why was it removed from Word 2013? ‘New from existing …‘ wasn’t just
A useful Word 2007 and Word 2010 feature – but not Word 2013? A common way to make a new Word document is to use an old document at the starting point. Word has a few ways to do that quickly. Why do it? Often you want to make a
An email sent to Gmail appears blank to the receiver with only a .p7m file – why? If you send your emails with a digital signature they might appear ‘blank’ to a Gmail receiver … something like this: The above message had HTML text in the message body but neither
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
