Here in the UK there’s a very good deal on Office 365 Home, saving more than ₤10 on the street price or 50% off the full retail price. Use this offer to extend your Office 365 plan for a lot less than Microsoft will charge. Office 365 Home is the
The new iPad has a great price tag and good features but a hidden price trap for Microsoft Office users. It has a 10.2” screen with support for important accessories like an external keyboard and Apple Pencil. Source: Apple. The trap is in the screen size, at 10.2” it’s 0.1
It’s time again for the monthly drop of security updates for Windows and Office. Here’s what caught our eye; two Excel security bugs and a Windows update which kills VMWare Workstation. Commentators are calling this a ‘light’ month for security patches because there are a mere 59 patches instead of
Mac users can now update their computers to MacOS Catalina release but there’s important things to do before updating and some good reasons to wait a little while. Microsoft Office compatibility As we warned back in June, older Office for Mac will not work with MacOS Catalina. If you have
Microsoft is pushing out a new Office app for iPhone and Android devices however most Office users won’t need to bother with it. Paid Office 365 subscribers already have better choices as part of their annual plan. The new app is called ‘Microsoft Office Mobile’ and it’s a single app
There are many situations where you need to split up text into separate columns. Names, phone numbers, dates, addresses and lot’s more can be managed with Excel’s Text to Columns, Text to Columns allows you take data from one column, and split it out into multiple columns. This can be
Outlook on the web is now blocking another 38 email attachments because they can be carriers of viruses. But Microsoft doesn’t block the most commonly used files for infecting computers. Far and away the most common infected email attachment is old-style Word documents, with .doc extensions. Excel .xls worksheets and
Here’s a complete, searchable and sortable list of all the email attachments that are or soon will be blocked by various types of Microsoft Outlook. There’s confusion and inconsistencies in the Microsoft documentation and application of these new blocks. They have a list of blocked attachments for Outlook in “Office
There are new computers sold with ‘free’ Office 365, what does that mean and how does it work? The offer isn’t what a lot of people expect. Happily, Microsoft has a way to still use the offer even if you already have another Office 365 plan. It’s not ‘Free’ Let’s
Some ‘money saving tips’ for Office 365 aren’t what they seem. We’ve noticed some wrong tips that keep being repeated. Also a vital money savers that are usually not mentioned even though it’ll save you more money over time. Office Watch has specialized in Microsoft Office for over twenty years.
A recent forced disclosure by the US government demonstrates the use of NSL’s which access your personal data from Microsoft OneDrive and Outlook without a warrant or regular oversight, let alone notice to you. Microsoft, Google, Facebook and many other tech companies (including gaming services) have received National Security Letters
The Upload Center, that annoying little extra in modern Office is being closed down. It’s being replaced with ‘Files Needing Attention’ alerts within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Visio. The Upload Center controls documents being uploaded from Office to online storage like OneDrive and SharePoint. If you haven’t noticed Upload
As we suspected, there are more holes in the Office Document Inspector. Our clever readers came up with some possibilities for revealing secrets in documents, worksheets and presentations. Document Inspector is good but could be better. As you’ll see, there really should be a warning about objects with multiple layers.
Slowly but surely we’ve moving towards another name change for Office 365. The main Office consumer products are likely to be renamed ‘Microsoft 365’ and here’s just four indicators that a change is coming. This has been looming for some time. Microsoft has been mostly successful getting organizations and consumers
Surface pens will now turn on the Draw tab in Word, Excel and PowerPoint automatically. When you pick up a Microsoft Surface Pen, the Draw tab in Office 365 will automatically appear to choose color, thickness of the digital ink. There are a few requirements, but they are pretty obvious:
Word 365 for Mac is getting what’s called the ‘Edit PDF’ feature, already available in Word for Windows. Don’t get too excited, Word can’t really edit a PDF file and the results might not be what you want. The ‘editing PDF’ feature is now available to Office for Mac insiders
PowerPoint has many choices for printed/PDF handouts to go with a presentation. Here’s a guide to the options spread in different places on the PowerPoint ribbon and menus. Quick PowerPoint Handouts Under File | Print is the basic handouts option to print slides and lines for people to handwrite notes.
In long overdue news, Microsoft has finally agreed to synchronize email signatures between Outlook on different platforms. The news came in the form of a post on the Uservoice site: “We’re happy to report that we’re working on sync’ing signatures across devices. More details to come as we have them.”
A funny story from satirical ‘The Chaser’ shows what could happen when corporate PowerPoint presentations are taken too far. LinkedIn executive presents moving PowerPoint eulogy at mother’s funeral “Before a packed congregation of relatives and friends, the senior executive paid tribute to his mother through a series of bullet points,
The famous game, Civilization, has been impressively recreated in Excel as Solly’s Cellivization. Civilization was an early computer game that started in 1991 for MS-DOS and has undergone many reincarnations for Windows, Mac and gaming devices now almost forgotten. Here it is in Microsoft Excel … Even with the power
Here’s a list of the known Office install/update error codes with possible fixes. All thanks to a diligent and long-suffering Office Watch reader. Ron S has compiled these lists from web sites and forums based on experiences of other people. Doesn’t Microsoft have all this? Yes, they probably do but
There’s no direct ‘watermark’ option for PowerPoint Handouts which is a shame because it would be very useful to add ‘Confidential’, ‘Draft’, ‘Private’ or other very obvious notices. You can fake it with a little PowerPoint trickery. Add a Watermark Picture In short, make an image with the watermark text.
The newer File | Open panes include a Search option to quickly find Recent Documents by name. That means it’s practical to expand the Recent Docs list to a higher or maximum value in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. In any of the three programs go to File | Options |
Here’s this months non-security bug fix updates.for Office 2016 and Office 2013. They are only for .msi installs, not ‘Click to Run’ modern installations. For most systems, they’ll be applied automatically. This is the full list with extra notes on a few fixes which caught our eye. Office 2016 updates
