The latest updates to Word, Excel and PowerPoint is the usual mix of good news and a mystery. The good news is for Excel and PowerPoint. You can now format multiple objects at once. Move, resize, or format them by taping and holding, then tap another object. It’s the equivalent
Office Lens, a way to convert pictures of documents or whiteboards into text is finally available for Apple iPads. Back in 2015 Office-Watch.com demonstrated some of the clever crop and rotation tricks in Office Lens, plus the ‘convert to text’ option shameless stolen from OneNote. Source: Microsoft Images can be
Microsoft has released a new version of Office 2016 for Windows to the ‘Slow’ insiders. This means Office 365 customers have more goodies to look forward to in coming months. You’ll need Office 2016 Version 1612 (Build 7628.2048) or above. The new features, as described by Microsoft are: View and
If you’re looking for a new PowerPoint background, desktop or screen-saver image, NASA always has something to impress. The latest from NASA and JPL is an image of Earth and the Moon, from Mars. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) needed calibration and pointing it ‘home’ allows that. The brown blob,
Another festive season (marketing) tradition is the Pantone ‘Color of the Year’ which gets a lot of media coverage. It gives us an excuse to explain how to convert (as best you can) a Pantone color into something to use in Microsoft Office. Pantone colors don’t have a direct match
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 is gradually adding to Office some interesting new Ink related features; Replay and Math. Rewind and Replay Until now drawings or ‘ink’ in Office documents has been static and fixed, much like real ink. OneNote Mobile for Windows 10 is the first Office app to make ink additions animated.
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
The days of carrying a separate presentation ‘clicker’ may be over as Microsoft brings it’s Office remote app to Android. Office Remote turns a smartphone into a controller for a PowerPoint presentation, Excel worksheets (including Slicers and PivotTables) plus Word documents. Image supplied by Microsoft. The smartphone connects to your
LiveLoop was an interesting product. You could share a PowerPoint presentation via the web to any computer or phone. But not anymore. We use the past tense because new customers aren’t being accepted and existing customers have until 24 April 2015 to retrieve any data from the system. There’s nothing
Yet one more for the list of things you’d never thought you’d see from Microsoft. They now have a deal with major Android phone and tablet makers to include Office software in some of their products. That’s right, Microsoft is paying companies to put their software on non-Windows devices. At
After a preview period, Microsoft Delve has gone public for Office 365 Business users. More links into Delve have also been announced. Delve is a new form of search tool which bring in relevant data from a selection of sources. Some are private like a Sharepoint site, corporate address book
One of the automatically installed patches for Office causes a new bug! Ouch. The new bugs aren’t common but even so, they are embarrassing. You can find the details under the Knowledge Base article headed ““Cannot insert object” error in an ActiveX custom Office solution after you install the MS14-082
When you type or paste a web link into Office, it normally converts it into a web link automatically. But occasionally that feature doesn’t work right. We found one example when researching the famous artist Roy Lichtenstein and one of his best known works. Click on the image to see
An iOS 8 trap for iPad users who have an external video connection cable. Many people have a little plug-in for their iPad that lets them put the video on any HDMI display … like most monitors and TV sets. This is great for anyone who needs big screen support,
We’ve already looked at Microsoft Office document properties features. They are fully featured in Word and have limited availability in Excel so now we look at PowerPoint. PowerPoint has little document automation. Word users are often surprised to discover that even basic field codes don’t exist in PowerPoint. As a
Document Properties is one of those long-standing parts of Office that is worth another look. It can be quite useful and not always in the ways that Microsoft intends. At first, document properties looks like a fixed and rigid feature with limited use. However it can be used in much
Microsoft has announced the existence but not availability of a new part of Office, Microsoft Sway. https://sway.com/ Sway is a new way to make a web based presentations with text, images, video, social media integrated. It certainly looks interesting. We think of it as a 21st Century version of PowerPoint,
A few months ago we told you about Office Mix, a way to put PowerPoint presentations online. Microsoft has given us several attempts at sharing presentations online. Office Mix is probably the best integration of PowerPoint slides and some features only possible online. For a plain showing of PowerPoint slides
The Insert | Symbol feature in Office is overdue for an overhaul. Our venture into the new Unicode symbols and symbol fonts highlighted how much work Microsoft needs to do on this part of Office. Insert | Symbol has changed for a long time and many versions of Office. Here’s
What is Delve and what does it mean for Microsoft Office? At the recent Microsoft conference there was mention of Microsoft Delve. But what the ?^%$ is ‘Delve’? It’s an enhanced search tool for your documents and online info. Not just standard Office documents but also videos, audio, links to
Miracast gives you a wireless external screen for PowerPoint and a lot more. Miracast is a clever trick that lets you wirelessly connect some Windows 8.1 portable computers, Android and other devices to any HDMI capable monitor or TV screen. All you need is a Miracast dongle available online for
Updates to Office Mix – a new way to make PowerPoint interactive. A while ago we told you about Office Mix, Microsoft’s way to put a presentation online with quizzes and other interactive elements. Mix has been updated with a wider range of examples via a Public Gallery It’s nice
A close look at how to Mix your PowerPoint presentations. Office Mix is a way to turn a PowerPoint 2013 slide deck into what Microsoft calls an ‘interactive online lesson’. It’s squarely aimed at the educational market. The idea is to expand a PowerPoint presentation into a full online lesson
