How can you tell if you’re reading email in a web browser or using email software like Outlook for Windows or Mac? This might seem obvious to some but many people use ’email’ without understanding the important difference between webmail and email programs. There are two ways to read and
Office 365 hosted customers in Europe are recovering from an outage of about two days. Affected customers should make sure Microsoft gives them the downtime discount they’re entitled to. The outage affected Office 365 email and other hosting in the UK and parts of Europe, like The Netherlands and Belgium
Outlook’s Clutter feature is going away in favor of the Focused Inbox. Both have the same limitation that Microsoft doesn’t talk about much. Clutter was a hyped Outlook/Exchange feature which shunted lower priority messages to a separate folder. Marketing emails, group messages etc could go to Clutter leaving, in theory,
If you like Reddit but want to hide it from your boss, co-workers, partner etc then we’ve got a web site for you. It makes Reddit look like Outlook Web Access (aka OWA). Go to https://attaxia.github.io/MSOutlookit/ or http://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/ There’s a web page with the latest Reddit posts in the familiar
If you’re sending meeting requests or invitations there’s an important Outlook option to check. Normally, Outlook within a company, uses Microsoft’s own method for including meeting details. That’s OK ‘in-house’ where you can be sure everyone has Outlook. But you don’t know what people outside the organization use to manage
Icons are a relatively new part of Office 365 for Windows/Mac but can they be used in emails that go to people not using Office 365? SVG graphics are widely supported in web browsers but not all email programs know what to do with these new images. What do they
Office Watch reader, Meredith M. asks a question we’ve heard many times before. Why can’t you buy individual Office programs instead of paying for an Office bundle with programs you don’t need? “My issue: I need ONLY Word, Excel and Access–but I NEED them. I know that I cannot buy
It’s been five years since the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office icons were given a new look. Now they’ve been announced and, frankly, we could not care less. New look icons don’t make any difference to anyone’s daily use of Office. It’s like supermarket groceries that boast ‘New Packaging’
Cyber Monday at Microsoft wasn’t a sales event so much as an embarrassment. Their Office 365 Exchange Server hosting went down, disconnecting Outlook software from the server. On this occasion, The Register reports that users could continue working via the web browser interface. Only the ActiveSync connection used by Outlook
Microsoft has released four security patches that all Outlook for Windows need to protect from newly discovered bugs. The patches apply to Outlook 365, 2019, 2016, 2013 and 2010 for Windows and are available today. The four Outlook security bugs are related. They involved a hacked .RWZ file that could
The latest ‘Insiders Fast Track’ Outlook for Windows has an interesting but somewhat incomplete new feature for managing appointments called ‘End appointments early’. It’s an overall setting at File | Options | Calendar | End appointments and meetings early. There are ‘end early’ choices for meetings: Less than one hour
A new email trick to fool people into clicking a link from Outlook. It’s a ‘warning’ that your mailbox is near it’s size limit. The message was a little sophisticated by pretending to come from the real company that handles the domain. It was sent to an address with a
It was inevitable that scammers would start using Office 365 as the basis for email scams, here’s what to look out for and how to avoid any dangerous web links. The scams are similar to the fake emails that pretend to come from banks and other large companies. They try
Adding email, calendar and contacts Live Tiles to the Windows Start Menu would seem like an obvious thing to do. Here’s how you can workaround to do it. On the Windows 8 and 10 large Start Menu are ‘Live Tiles’ which are updated to show the latest information. Some of
Office 2019, the new non-cloud version of Office for Windows and Mac, is now available to volume licence and commercial customers. This is the ‘cloud free’ or, as Microsoft call it the ‘on-premises’ version of Office desktop. It has no cloud related features and is ‘feature fixed’ with no future
The Windows clipboard is quite limited but there’s a better one hiding inside Microsoft Office for Windows. It can collect more items, paste in any order and be cleared when you like. We’ll also show how to keep the sometimes annoying pane out of the way. You’re about to hear
After a lot of talk and promises, Office Insiders are getting a look at the proposed Outlook for Windows single-line or Simplified Ribbon for Office 365 customers. As usual, there’s good news and bad news in the interface change. Though it’s early days and there’s still time for changes. Don’t
Outlook has only one date and time related feature in email messages. As you may know, Outlook’s email editor is really Microsoft Word with limited features. On the Insert tag there’s a Text | Date & Time option which opens the same dialog as in Word. Update Automatically inserts a
A small collection of non-security patches for Microsoft Office in September 2018. As usual, all these updates should come to you automatically. Non-subscriber / perpetual licence users can download individual patches if necessary but auto-update should handle it for you. Outlook 2016 The update for Microsoft Outlook 2016 introduces the
Microsoft has announced some truly important improvements in what you get with Office 365 Home, Personal and University plans. The Home plan will be available for six family members instead of five. How Microsoft calculates use of Office software is changing and for the better. All these changes apply from
The latest Office 2016 Insiders release version 1808, Build 10730.20030 shows off some upcoming additions to Outlook, Access, Project and Visio Outlook – block forwarding in meeting invitations When making a meeting invitation in Outlook, go to Response Options and deselect ‘Allow Forwarding’ to stop that invitation being forwarded to
“More of the same” in August 2018’s round of security fixes for Microsoft products including Windows, Office, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Overall there a sixty security flaws fixed this month alone, including two ‘zero-day’ bugs not previously known to the public. We’ve all become accustomed to this never-ending stream of
Microsoft seems to be moving towards a name change for ‘Office 2016’. They haven’t announced anything directly, but their documentation is changing for Windows and perhaps Office for Mac as well. If you’re confused, don’t feel bad because Redmond isn’t making it easy. They are moving gradually towards naming Microsoft
The next macOS release will include a tool to migrate Outlook for Windows data to Outlook for Mac. The upcoming macOS release codenamed Mojave will have an improved Windows Migration Assistant. Apple says it will include more third-party programs including Microsoft Outlook. The news came via a sharp-eyed Twitter user
