From the crazy bureaucracy department is the news that IBM has been granted a patent for Out of Office emails! That’s right, those automatic emails that go out when you’re poolside are now the property of IBM. From the patent application: “When the out of office agent is enabled, it
Last year we renewed one of our ongoing gripes with Outlook, the lack of an incoming email translation feature. See a ‘side-by-side’ translation of an email you’ve received. After many years, Microsoft has finally done something to fix this obvious gap, but they’ve done it in a typically self-serving way.
It’s not just politicians who get into trouble using public email services. They are just the headline-worthy tip of a much larger email problem. AOL has a way to secure a AOL mail account but too few people (and politicians <g>) use it. We’ve talked before about Two Factor Authentication
CyberX Labs has identified Operation BugDrop, which uses Word document to attack targeted businesses and steal corporate information. They send emails to the business they want to raid that trick people into enabling macros. Opening the hacked document displays the Security Warning and ‘Enable Content’ button are real; created by
You’ve chosen an image, now you have to get it into your Office document. You’d hope there was a single way to do that but, as usual, there’s plenty of options. Outlook has its own special needs, different from Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There’s also privacy and image size issues
Check out this video from SciShow which goes some way to explaining how an email gets from your computer to another. Emails get routed through a series of computers to reach it’s destination. It’s not a direct connection from your computer to another. That’s important to all email users because
The paid upgrade version of Outlook.com is now available with the usual, but enticing, opening offer. For an annual fee you get extras beyond the usual free offering: No Ads – on the browser interface version of your mailbox. Custom Domain – instead of using outlook.com, email addresses with your
Here’s the complete list of non-security updates for Office 2016 for Windows and Office 2013 plus our notes on some bug fixes that caught our eye. As usual, these updates will be pushed to most Office computers automatically. No action is necessary. Unexpected Issues Microsoft is always using different words
Would you like to try adding an Outlook appointment, just to see how it works? We’ve made a simple test .ics you can download: Add a test appointment It’s a normal .ics file that can be added to Outlook for Windows/Mac or any other compatible programs (most calendar programs do).
Microsoft announced Touch Bar support with much fanfare back in October 2016. Over 3 months later and paying customers are still waiting. There’s been lot of talk about this feature including web sites with ‘tips’ on using Office with the Touch Bar without noting that it’s not got into ‘insider’
A few years ago we had a close look at the Oxford Comma (‘Comma required before last item’, serial comma, Harvard Comma etc) in Word 2013. We’ll now repeat those tests with the new “Microsoft’s own” grammar system to see if there’s any improvement. Office-Watch.com has already noted that the
Microsoft has restored an important missing part of Word 2016 for Windows; the Grammar and Style checking! It’s available for all Word 2016 for Windows users including the ‘perpetual licence’ users who normally don’t get ‘new’ features. This important improvement hasn’t had the usual Redmond hype, presumably because it’s more
Microsoft continues to expand the uses for their cloud storage of calendar information with the introduction of StaffHub. It’s an extension of the existing calendar and resource scheduling to include shift workers and especially those who mostly use mobile devices. Staff can download a StaffHub Apple or Android app (no
Shared calendars are now supported in the Outlook apps for Apple and Android devices. At this stage, you have to setup the calendar sharing from an Outlook web interface. Both the sharing and acceptance of the share have to be done on the web site. Only view and edit permissions
a look at some commonly used characters used in Office but are missing from the standard keyboard. How to insert symbols on a ‘one-off’ basis or insert quickly for more commonly used characters. Degree mark for temperature. Has no special shortcut but you can make one (see below). Currency symbols.
MailSortr is an interesting Outlook addin for anyone who arranges their emails into folders and sub-folders. This utility creates a custom Inbox view which combines the contents of any folders you wish into a single view. Source: MailSortr It’s a clever use and extension of Outlook’s Search Folders feature. Other
Office 2016 for Windows will soon support scalable vector graphics (SVGs). Preview/Insiders can try them now and it’ll be available to all Office 365 subscribers in 2017. That means you’ll be able to make your documents look even better with vector-based SVG files that won’t pixelate when increased in size.
Microsoft has announced that they’ll stop updating the Outlook spam filter (“Smartscreen”) at the end of this month – on 1st Nov 2016. This might be a worry, but not a disaster, for most Outlook users and we’ll explain why. What’s Happening From 1st Nov 2016 there will be no
Sometimes we wonder what happens in Microsoft development meetings because the software we get from those discussions seems so out of touch with reality or even sense. Today’s example comes from Outlook for Windows and it’s curious ‘one way’ translation feature. Office for Windows has good language translation options, though
Emoji are those funny little icons that appear in text/SMS messages and some emails. Emoji have become quite the thing. More are being added to mobile phones, especially Apple devices. Originally intended to show emotions in text messages, they’ve expanded to other uses and overlap with many common symbols from
Ellen F writes: ” Thanks for this: Outlook Categories – Why and How , which Microsoft of course doesn’t tell us about. However, I’m using Outlook Web Access and I can see how to apply categories to my emails but cannot figure out how to assign text labels to the
How can you send an Office document safely and securely to another person? A simple question with no simple answer. Who you are guarding against? A random snooper at the recipient’s end who accidentally finds the document, or someone targeting your or your data, such as a commercial rival,
In Outlook 2013 you may have noticed the ‘Link Contacts …’ item on each contact card. We’ll explain why it’s there and what it can do for you. Link Contacts is different from ‘Contact Linking’ that’s been available in many versions of Outlook. Contact Linking lets you connect a contact
Getting Outlook windows into the positions you want, and keeping them there, is one of those mysteries that Microsoft offers to us mere customers. We’ll try to explain what’s going on but, alas, can’t guarantee any solid answers. Most Outlook users have more than one window open at any time.
