The US Scripps National Spelling Bee is over for another year with another tie between two amazing young people. Both winners are impressive to us mere mortals but also compared to Microsoft Office. As we have for the last few years, we’ve made a list of the championship words to
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,
Almost a year ago we sarcastically complained about the lack of words from ‘Game of Thrones’ in the Office dictionary. We didn’t expect Microsoft to do anything out it and, if they did, thought they’d tell customers. Slate magazine has noticed that many Westeros names now don’t get a red
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
Microsoft has released an Android version of their Office Lens app. What is Office Lens? Office Lens main feature is an image to text conversion. You can take a photo of a document, receipt etc and it’ll convert into plain text (OCR) for use in OneNote, Word etc. It comes
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
We love words, especially old words that have been largely forgotten. This Valentine’s Day there’s a short item in The Independent UK about 10 old words that modern romantics might like to revive. We tried them out in Office 2013 to see if the in-built dictionary could cope. No real surprise that
The BBC has an interesting piece on the effect of AutoCorrect and word suggestions for quicker typing. I dunno about ‘boring’ but AutoCorrect in Office does have a downside – it makes you and your typing fingers stupid. If you type stupdi into Word it will fix it to
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
While delving into the details of Office document properties, we found some curious anomalies. They aren’t major but worth keeping in mind if you use document properties in Word documents. When you enter a document property it should just add the text and the same document property will show the
Microsoft Office has Ebola … meaning it’s in the supplied dictionaries for Word 2013, Word 2010 and Word 2007. As a proper noun, the disease name has a capital letter. Without it, Word marks it as a spelling error. The surname Pooley isn’t in the dictionary and, as we’ll see,
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
While Microsoft Word lumbers along, there’s some interesting and genuinely creative word processors out there. We’re not talking about direct rivals to Microsoft Office 2013 like OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Kingsoft Office Free, Google Docs, iWork or earlier versions of Office. Instead we’ll look at software that takes a very different approach to
Eventually we all need to find a deleted document or a past version of an existing document. You never know when it’ll be needed or for which document. There’s many options available for keeping older versions of a document or file, most of them you have to setup in advance.
Choosing the sort type is really important and Word doesn’t always guess correctly. Office-Watch.com reader Peter M. reminds us that choose the sort type is really important: Text, Number or Date. “I just thought it worth pointing out that, for example 8, 70, 600 would sort in one order as
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
A funny example of how you can’t trust the spelling and grammar checks in Word. We laughed at this sign, seen in a Tesco’s supermarket in the UK. Guess what – according to Word 2013 that entire document has no grammar mistakes at all! Even ‘incontinence’ doesn’t get a contextual
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
How can you get the new Unicode symbols in Office documents? There’s plenty of new symbols included in the Unicode 7.0 standard, here’s how to get them into your Office documents. Most fonts do NOT have all the Unicode characters, after all, there are over 133,000 of them. There are
Unicode adds more characters to an already large list. Unicode has added another 2,834 new characters in the Unicode 7.0 specification, mostly support for 23 new scripts. That takes the total to a whopping 113,021 characters! But we’ll have to wait for these new characters to appear automatically in Office,
Some great tips on table formatting. Joey Cherdarchuk has a nice posting on a very different table styling to the type that Microsoft prefers. Under the banner ‘Clear Off the Table’ he suggests getting rid of gridlines and colors to simplify the look of tables. In his example, Joey takes a
Office 2013 has some clever tricks when you touch the screen. Tony G writes: ” … there are some subtle features in Office 2013. I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 and I have observed that the right click menus and some other features are different when called up by the
