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’
A previously theoretical way to misuse Office documents to infect your computer is now ‘in the wild’ and Microsoft isn’t interested in stopping it. Last week we told you about a new way for Office documents to get malware onto your computer. Cymulate discovered that the Online Video feature could
Cymulate is reporting how embedded video in Word or other Office documents are another way for criminals and hackers to infect your computer. It’s yet another example of how Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents can be used to get malware onto computers to steal data, becomes bots or other nasties.
Speed Running, a gamers pastime has come to Microsoft Word. Finding ways to type the numbers 1 to 100 in the fastest time. If you’re unfamiliar with speed running, as we were, it’s playing and recording a pass through a game aiming to complete as fast as possible. Someone came
The 2018 Scrabble World Championship is over. How does the Microsoft Word spell check fare against the Scrabble champs? Microsoft Word has slightly different dictionaries for many English language variations (US, UK, Australian etc). Word’s English dictionaries different from the official Scrabble dictionary. Among the words in the final rounds
A judgement from the US Court of Appeals turned on the Word Count feature in Microsoft Word and how it differs from the rules for court submissions. Most courts have rules about the length of submission which, in this case, were accidently exceeded. The plaintiff is representing himself (‘pro se’)
Microsoft has added the Dictation feature to the browser based versions of Word and OneNote. You can speak and words will appear in Word/OneNote using the cloud ‘speech to text’ feature. Source: Microsoft Dictation is already available in Word 365 for Windows. Office for Mac users have a ‘voice to
Office for iOS (iPhone / iPad ) is getting the Icons or SVG support already available in Word 365 for Windows. Icons now available to Office iOS Insiders on the Insert tab. There are 500 to choose from … Source: Microsoft Available in the Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for
Coming to Word 365 for Windows are more Ink Editor gestures plus a pop-out pane to explain the gestures available. Ink Editor is on the Draw menu. It’s a way to use a digital pen to edit existing text. For example, draw a squiggly line through some words to delete
A New York Times article about parents writing their kids college entrance essay reminded us of a forgotten feature in Microsoft Word. A feature of modern ‘helicopter parenting‘ is helping, if not entirely writing, essays for their children. The article How I Know You Wrote Your Kid’s College Essay by
An Australian university has developed a font that will help you remember what you read. It sounds like an April Fool’s joke, but the font is real and works in Office for Mac or Windows. Sans Forgetica was made at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Unlike most fonts, Sans Forgetica
Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office apps for Windows 10 have been sidelined by Microsoft with no new features planned. Bad news for anyone still using a Windows Phone. The Windows 10/Mobile apps will continue to work but no more features are planned. This ‘no more features’ decision appears to
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
A fun new font using famous logos for letters also demonstrates where Windows 10 and Windows 11 color font features become useful with Microsoft Word. Brand New Roman is a fun mashup font made up of famous logos. It looks best in color so it’s handy that Windows 11/10 supports
Ever wanted to stretch out your essay or report so it fit on more pages? Times Newer Roman is a font that will help you do just that. Any student knows the standard tricks for making an essay seem longer. Adjust the margins, stretch the Font | Advanced | Spacing,
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
A new report from Sophos shows how hacking via Office documents has changed of lot in 2018 with new attacks coming much faster than in the past. Microsoft’s assurances that a security bug (sorry ‘exploit’) hasn’t been used ‘in the wild’ doesn’t mean a lot. Office document hacks made in
Each Word document has various hidden data fields and some are called mapped content controls. They let you set some text or date in a document which is automatically repeated any other place in the document that has the same control. Mapped Content Controls are an alternative to other ‘repeating
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
There are a dozen bug fixes for the Windows versions of Word 2016 buried among the non-security updates for Microsoft Office this month. And an extra feature for PowerPoint 2016 and 2013 for Windows. We’ll look at this important Word 2016 update first before listing the other bug fixes for
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
