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
A quick look at Apple Pages vs Microsoft Word The New York Times has a fairly glowing review of Apple’s word processor, Pages in comparison with Microsoft Word. The review notes that Pages has a less cluttered interface which may suit some people with basic editing needs. But some features
How to copy an image from the web into an Office document. Getting an image from your web browser to a Word document is quite easy, though easier with some browsers than others. In your browser, right-click over the image you want and look at the options available. At the
Does Microsoft Office have planned obsolescence? What does that mean for Office subscriptions/rental. An item in The New York Times Why Apple wants to bust your iPhone talks about how there’s deliberate design elements in iPhones to encourage people to buy a new model. It’s a ‘carrot and stick’ approach. There’s the ‘stick’
Mixed signals about the core anti-virus protection in Windows. These days, most IT professionals will recommend Microsoft Security Essentials. MSE is the free anti-virus program that’s included with Windows 7 and Windows 8. It’s also available as a free download for Windows Vista and XP users. Security Essentials is all
Filtered.com is offering a week long trial of their online courses. In conjunction with Skilledup.com – you can get a 7 day free trial of the Word, Excel and PowerPoint courses offered by Filtered.com Details at skilledup.com – scroll down to the bottom of the article for the sign-up form.
Win 8 ‘not fit for purpose’? Today’s Financial Times has an interesting letter and sharp indictment of Windows 8 “….For anybody doing real work, Windows 8 has concrete design errors which should never have reached the business user. Leaving aside trying to work with spreadsheets, the start button, the right
How to use Office for Windows on the Mac. Sometimes Office for Mac isn’t enough, you need its big brother, Office for Windows to run on a Macintosh computer. That’s certainly possible in various ways. It’s done using virtual machines, in effect running Windows ‘inside’ Apple’s operating system. VM’s, as
Another way to have real Microsoft Office. Cloudon, makers of an app to bring MS Office to Apple and Android devices has now expanded to browsers as well. Now you can use Chrome or Safari browsers to open up a Cloudon window with Word, Excel or Powerpoint running. The base
Apple’s office compatible apps are now free. Buried in the new iPhone hype was some interesting news for anyone editing Office documents on iPhone or iPad. The ‘iWork’ apps are now free on new devices. That’s Pages (word-processing), Keynote (presentations) and Numbers (spreadsheet). Each app cost $9.99 in the past
What can Office for Mac users do instead of font embedding? Since Office for Mac won’t let you embed fonts, what can you do instead? We’ll look at the options that Office for Mac users can try when sharing a document with Office for Windows. Going the other way (Office
Microsoft makes Office for Mac compatibility harder by omitting an important feature. In the feature list of Office for Mac is one vital omission, one that Microsoft definitely doesn’t like talking about. It effects anyone trying to operate in a ‘mixed’ Office Windows/Mac environment. In theory, a document made on
Some reader suggestions for a renamed Skydrive. With the news that Microsoft’s Skydrive service will be renamed, came some suggestions from readers. Microsoft Cloud Storage 2013 Home and Student edition Office 365 Drive Bob Drive – time to give the ill-fated Microsoft Bob a new job. Universal Microsoft hasn’t used
Microsoft loses a court battle – Skydrive is no more. Microsoft has lost a court case regarding use of the term ‘Sky’ and is being forced to rename their ‘Skydrive’ cloud storage service to something else. While the case was held in the UK and only covered use of the
Office apps, of a sort, come to Android phones. Hot on the heels of Office for iPhone comes Microsoft’s version of Office for Android phones. The Android release is very similar to Office for iPhone, which effectively means both are quite limited in features and availability. Office for Android (officially
How Microsoft keeps bugs secret until it suits them. For as long as we can remember, an Office Service Pack has been accompanied by the revelation of previous undisclosed bugs in the software. Microsoft has an ongoing policy of keeping bugs secret from customers until they have a fix. Here’s
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
Does the latest shuffling of chairs at Redmond make any difference to Office users? Microsoft has announced their latest corporate reorganization which has been analyzed to death in the press. You can read the email to Microsoft staff here – and catch up on the latest in corporate buzzwords and
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
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
