Well, that’s been an ‘interesting’ year for all of us <sigh> . Here’s some of the articles that have been popular with our worldwide audience over 2020. Getting more from online video calls With the global lockdown, Office Watch switched roles for a while and added lots of advice for
Microsoft India is raising the price of their commercial and online services from 1 February 2021. The news is out despite a pointless attempt at secrecy by the local subsidiary. As reported by DQChannels Commercial on-premises software goes up 11% Online services like Microsoft 365 hosting goes up 9% The
Argo UK is offering Microsoft 365 Family for just £39.99 saving £40 or half the regular price of £79.99. But there’s no deadline given so we suggest you grab one or more packs asap. UPDATE The price has changed to £59.99 which is still a good deal on a 12-month Microsoft
Microsoft has announced some changes to the Editor feature in Word and Outlook to improve access to spell-check and grammar tools. Look for these changes in upcoming releases of Word and Outlook for Windows and later for Mac. Many reports on these changes say that the Editor is a ‘new
NewEgg is offering a 15-month new or renewal of Microsoft 365 Family for just $75 saving about $45. There’s a special discount or promo code that we’ll tell you below. UPDATE The price has changed to $99 which is still a good deal on a 15-month Microsoft 365 Family. $99
If you like to jazz up your Zoom, Teams or other presentations, try out mmhmm . It looks like an interesting tool you might like to try out over the break. mmhmm lets you create an online presentation for live broadcast or recording with many effects combined. Here’s an example
Commercial users of Microsoft Teams can now quickly switch to a personal account without shutting down the app or browser window. Personal Teams can keep in contact any group of people, family, extended family, school friends, study group, class, sports team or club. See Teams gets personal for families and
Pantone has announced not one but TWO ‘colors of the year’ for 2021 and, as usual, we’ll explain how to use those exact colors in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The colors of 2021 are … Illuminating and Ultimate Grey As usual what’s more amazing than the color is the description
Microsoft has released some ‘sweater’ backgrounds for Christmas, Hannukah or anytime of year. The PNG images are intended as backgrounds for Teams calls but can be used anywhere. A PowerPoint slide, Word background, Zoom call background or whatever. Adding Virtual Background or blurred video to TeamsAdd your own background image
The only specific 2020/2021 calendar template in Microsoft Word is an academic calendar from August 2020 to July 2021, here’s how to use it and make it better. In File | New search for ‘academic calendar’ there are a few options. We’re looking at ‘Academic year calendar’. A few notes
Microsoft 365 for Mac is getting a revamped look for the Home or Start menu in early 2021. Here’s all the new and old features in the Home pane or as Microsoft calls it “Office Start experience” (no kidding) The Home panel changes to be more consistent with what’s visible
Microsoft Office 365 and 2019 for Mac (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) now work directly on the new M1 chip. There are a few ‘gotchas’ but support for Apple Silicon is almost complete. Apple is moving away from Intel chips to their own ‘Apple Silicon’ hardware, starting with the M1
Microsoft Forms is now available for everyone, not just businesses. It’s available to collect information or opinions for any reason. One example is party planning, virtual party at the moment. Ask people for their preferred date, number of people, diet requests etc. All the info is collected and comes to
Google’s Gmail can now directly edit Microsoft Office documents arriving in email attachments. It’s available to all Gmail users, free and paid accounts. It removes a lot of the hassles of exchanging Office documents with Gmail and Google Docs/Sheets/Slides users. No more document conversion hassles … at long last! Email
Microsoft Teams users are getting similar ‘Insider’ or ‘Beta’ options to trial new and changed features. It’s setup similar to the existing ‘Insider’ options for Windows and Office. The naming of Insider levels is similar, but not the same as for Office. Public Preview Channel – the last step before
PowerPoint Mobile for Android is getting an ‘Outline View’ but it’s not like Outline View in Windows or Mac versions of PowerPoint. This Outline View is really an ‘Outline to Presentation’ wizard that lets you make an outline or bullet point list then choose a slide theme to quickly make
You don’t have to write directly onto each PowerPoint slide. Instead write an outline of headings and text, then convert into slides. There are two ways to do it, with Word or directly into PowerPoint. Outline View View | Outline View shows each slide title with bullet points within a
Mac computers aren’t immune to hacking and viruses. There’s a new backdoor infiltration out there posing as a Word document and directly targeting Macintosh computers. OceanLotus is interesting because it targets MacOS, trying to open a backdoor through which hackers can get data from Mac computers. Another noteworthy part of
The Microsoft 365 Productivity Score has been raising concerns about staff privacy and intrusion into their ‘Work from Home’ life. We’ll look at what Productivity Score actually does, how it’s changed after public pressure and why administrators might prefer to be intrusive. Productivity Score applies to Microsoft 365 hosted organizations.
The Microsoft 365 logins on top executives are being sold on the dark web, allowing hackers direct access to the emails and files of chief executives, directors and managers. ZDnet is reporting that a forum for hackers has an offer to sell login details for Microsoft 365 / Office accounts
Discounts on Microsoft 365 Family (formerly Home) are rare these days but Amazon in Europe (Deutschland, France etc) have a Cyber Monday offer worth grabbing. Save more than €30 on the regular price of a one year renewal. Amazon Deutschland are selling the £99 package for just £62.07 on Monday
Discounts on Microsoft 365 Family (formerly Home) are rare these days but Amazon UK has a Cyber Monday offer worth grabbing. Save more than £30 on the regular price of a one year renewal. Amazon UK are selling the £79.99 package for just £47.99 on Monday 30 Nov only. The
If you’re thinking about getting Microsoft 365 email hosting with full Teams and SharePoint, Microsoft has a limited time offer this week only. However, before you jump into their deal, there’s another very similar option that’s even cheaper. Until 30 November 2020, Microsoft is offering 25% discount on their Business
Microsoft can’t help themselves when it comes to naming their ‘Insiders’, ‘Preview’ or beta test versions. The names change for no good reason and timing is different for each platform rather than all Office apps changing at the same time. The latest changes are for MacOS, iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Android
