The March 2021 Windows patches have caused at least two major bugs (sorry ‘issues’) that can affect Office users or anyone trying to print. Here’s the fixes and workarounds. Printing bug This is a nasty bug caused by the Windows patch KB5000802 not being properly tested before release. An update
Mouse without Borders is a little-known Microsoft Garage project, it’s worth keeping in mind if you’re trying to work with two or more Windows computers. All these situations can be handled easier with Mouse without Borders … Maybe you have a desktop and laptop computer side-by-side? Working with another computer
Excel in a web browser has some new improvements, many of them are familiar Excel desktop features moved online but one is unique to the browser-based version. Version history for collaboration, more zoom options for keyboard and screen, multiple range selections and changing regional settings are all now available online.
Microsoft has added more protections against nasty Excel 4.0 macros aka XLM macros. XLM or Excel 4.0 macros are an older pre-VBA system that’s still available in modern Excel 365 for Windows and Mac. XML macros have been around since 1992 but gradually replaced by VBA which debuted only a
There are types of Office documents that you should NOT open, even if they come from someone you trust. Here’s the full list of file extensions for the older Office document formats which are much more likely to be ‘malicious’ docs from hackers and criminals. We’ve talked about the risks
Microsoft Exchange Server software has been comprehensively hacked over the last few months, focusing on US systems but spreading across the world. What happened, who needs to act now and what everyone should watch out for. Exchange Server is the mailbox technology used by many, many companies around the world.
Without notice, the main forum for Office customers to tell Microsoft what they want has disappeared. No explanation of what’s happened and what, if anything, will replace it. For many years, Microsoft has boasted about their UserVoice pages such as https://office365.uservoice.com/ but it’s gone dark. All the years of suggestions
WhatsApp desktop extensions (Windows and Mac) can now make and receive voice or video calls. Until now the desktop apps where limited to texting and sending attachments. If you use WhatsApp (or Signal), the desktop extensions are really great. Instead of pecking away on a tiny screen, you can type
Gmail has a very different way of organizing mail to the Outlook/Microsoft system of folders. Gmail’s Labels, Important and Categories have different or no meaning in Outlook for Windows. Labels Gmail has Labels which are tags that can be applied to messages. Outlook shows those labelled messages as if they
You can choose which mail folders are synchronized with Outlook but you won’t find this option with the rest of the Gmail account settings in Outlook. Instead go to the heading of the Gmail account in the folder pane, right-click and choose IMAP folders. Subscribed folders Let’s stop for a
No need to right-click to see spelling and grammar suggestions in Word and Outlook 365. It’s changing so only a single left click will show the suggestions, corrections and more. On the downside, fewer options are initially displayed. Useful features are now multiple clicks away and hidden from view. It’s part
Word online (in a web browser) can now embed live web content like videos from YouTube or a quiz from Forms Embedded content is fully interactive within the Word document. Play the video, fill in the form/quiz. No special command or ribbon button necessary. Just paste in the web link,
Word online (web browser) is getting a way to convert a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation. For the moment it’s available as a preview feature in Word online. See if you have it at File | Transform. Transform document to presentation Start from File | Transform | Transform to
Type the Not Equal ≠ sign into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Not Equal ≠ symbol is used in equations, obviously but it’s also handy shorthand in a heading or slide. The official Unicode name is ‘Not Equal To’. How Not Equal ≠ looks in different fonts. Here’s some
Outlook for Windows can connect to Google’s Gmail here’s the simple setup available in Outlook 365 and 2019. It’s just the start of a longer process that Microsoft doesn’t openly explain to customers, starting with an important limitation. Free Gmail – no calendar or contacts Outlook for Windows only synchronizes
Microsoft has announced two ‘perpetual licence’ or non-subscription versions of Office that will be released later in 2021. Both continue Microsoft’s unstated but bleedingly obvious attempts to push customers to annual ‘subscription’ payments. Here’s what Microsoft has disclosed so far with an explanation of the continued reduction of value for
The Office ‘all in one’ app, already available for iPhone and Android, is starting its arrival on Apple iPad. The app combines Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other goodies into a single app. The ‘all in one’ app, officially called just ‘Microsoft Office’ has started a limited preview. We’ll explain how
‘Spy Pixels’ is the new name for a common tracking method used in commercial emails. We’ve written about them many times over the 20+ years of Office-Watch.com, the only new thing is the name. What are Spy Pixels? So called ‘Spy Pixels’ are tiny images (1 pixel only) linked in
Microsoft has announced seven extra languages added to their ‘speech to text’ Dictation feature in Outlook and Word. The new languages announced are: Hindi Russian Polish Portuguese (Portugal) Korean Thai Chinese (Taiwan) Your milage will vary As a cloud service, the available languages will vary. It depends on the version
Microsoft is hyping natural language searches in Outlook for Windows and Mac, so we dug down to see how it works and for whom. There’s a lot of ‘gotchas’ overlooked in the boasting. According to Microsoft, Outlook now has better searches: “With Natural Language in search, you simply type the
Visio now has an option to export diagrams directly into Word. Export to Word has been in preview for about a year. It’s now available to all users on Visio Online Plan 2 The feature doesn’t just export the diagram images. Metadata is also exported in a table. Process |
PowerPoint is getting a new feature ‘Auto Fix’ that Office users have wanted for many, many years. We hope it’s the start of deployment to Word and Excel across all platforms. Auto Fix is a way to automatically arrange a collection of shapes and other objects into neat rows and
How to insert the Currency ¤ or scarab symbol into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Currency ¤ symbol is used to denote an unspecified currency. It’s the generic sign you could use if the correct symbol isn’t available. It doesn’t
