The latest updates to Office for iPad are good for Microsoft marketing but not existing customers. Microsoft has just released updates to their Office for iPad apps (Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iPad). What’s new and fixed for Office 365 customers? Nothing …. If you’re already an Office 365 renter/subscriber there’s nothing new at all. […]
Dropbox plays ‘catch up’ on OneDrive and Google but still lose the cloud storage lead. And there’s a competitor that might beat them all. Dropbox has announced price decreases / storage increases to match offerings from Microsoft and Google. The lowest level of paid Dropbox is ‘Pro’ for $9.99 a month or $99 per year. […]
In-depth and clever tricks with sorting in Word. Following our look at different alphabetical orders, here’s a look at the sorting options in Word. You can sort paragraphs, lists and tables in a Word document. Select the list or paragraphs then choose Home | Paragraph | Sort. For tables there’s similar sort options are at […]
Which version of alphabetical order does Microsoft Word use? I thought that alphabetical order was, well, alphabetical order. That’s what I was taught at school and apparently I was taught wrong. There are at least three ways, two used by dictionaries, another by Microsoft and that’s for English alone! Reading Sue Butler’s delightful book ‘The Aitch […]
The ‘Modern’ version of OneNote gets Ink highlighting, Printing and PDF insertion. There’s a new version of OneNote for Windows 8 out today with some ‘new’ features that help it catch up ‘real’ OneNote for PC or Mac At this stage let’s be clear, we’re talking about the OneNote app for Windows 8 in Modern/Metro […]
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 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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Microsoft raises the bar for cloud storage quantity but not quality. Microsoft has laid down a serious challenge to Google, Dropbox and other online storage provider with big increases in OneDrive storage limits for free and paying customers. Sadly, no mention of improvements to OneDrive itself, especially security and privacy, but we digress. Over the […]
What does the new Amazon phone have for Office users? The new Amazon Fire Phone is interesting though it remains to be seen whether features like ‘Dynamic Perspective’ are useful or gimmicky. For us, the main question is Microsoft Office compatibility both for users of the Fire Phone and anyone else sending documents to a […]
An interesting font idea from Spain – handwriting of homeless people turned into fonts. HomelessFonts.org is a series of fonts based on the handwriting of homeless people. For example, here’s the Francisco font. There are five fonts at present with more promised. Priced per font at €19 Euros for individuals and €290 for companies The […]
How can you tell which type of Office 2013 installation you have? Office 2013 comes with two quite different installation methods. Ideally there should be no difference between the two but the latest patch bug only affects some users with one type of installation called ‘Click to Run’. Since there’s some differences between the two […]
What’s in the latest Office 2011 for Max update? In late May, Microsoft quietly released an update for Office 2011 for Mac taking it to version 14.4.2. If this was Office for Windows, it would be called a ‘Service Pack’ but somehow, not Office for Mac. Update Secrecy One thing that is the same of […]
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 simple solution to uninstall problems with Office 2013/Office 365. If you’re trying to uninstall Office 2013 you might get some unhelpful error messages like: Couldn’t uninstall OfficeWe’re sorry, Office couldn’t be uninstalled. Please try uninstalling Office again. ‘Try later’ isn’t a very useful suggestion. How much later? A minute, an hour, a day? Office […]
The competition among cloud storage providers continues with Box improving their Android app. The competition among cloud storage providers continues with Box improving their Android app. The new Android app for Box includes ‘lightning fast’ document viewing including for Word, Excel and PowerPoint as well as PDF and images. Specifically the content preview supports .doc […]
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 […]
Does this Microsoft document give a peek at the touch screen version of Office aka Office Gemini? A document from Microsoft Research has got some people excited because it might reveal how Office software as a touch/Metro/Modern app (aka Office Gemini) will look. As part of a discussion about ‘Great Inking’ – the future possibilities […]
Behind the latest attempt to make Surface popular. Microsoft has announced Surface Pro 3, the latest incarnation of their tablet device. This time the focus is on replacing traditional laptops with something that has the power of a laptop but also portability of a tablet. There’s a larger 12-inch screen with various Intel Core options. […]
A new way to publish PowerPoint presentations with videos, web pages and quizzes. Office Mix is a way to turn a Powerpoint slide deck into what Microsoft calls an ‘interactive online lesson’. It’s squarely aimed at the educational market. The idea is to expand a PowerPoint presentation into a full online lesson containing: The presentation […]
Or survey gives results that suit those paying for the survey. It’s an old PR trick, put together some report or survey that will get lots of free publicity for the company that’s footing the bill. It’s easy copy for overworked journos so you can’t blame them for using them. Microsoft has done it themselves. […]
Microsoft likes us noticing changes – so why not tell us first? Jenny N. writes: ” I totally agree with you about Microsoft’s habit of making changes and fixing bug without telling customers. But it’s more ironic than you realize. Look at a comment from an Office for iPad product manager on the MS blog. He’s […]