Microsoft has announced that the Facebook ‘social connectors’ that link products like Outlook have stopped working. No warning, it’s just happened. This affects a wide range of Microsoft products including Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013. We’ve copied below Microsoft’s full list of affected products. Microsoft is blaming Facebook for this but,
Microsoft has pushed out an update for the Office 2016 Preview with some feature updates and, presumably, bug fixes. The company is highlighting the following things in the update: Real Time Presence in Word–While Real Time Typing will ship in subsequent builds, we are rolling out a key part of
The preview version of SQL Server 2016 has an interesting feature which shows that Microsoft can offer secure cloud storage if they want to. Until now, the focus has been on securing data ‘in transit’ between the server and computers or between different servers. The data itself is ‘in the
Last week we noted that Facebook has joined Google and Yahoo with support for the OpenPGP encrypted email standard. Microsoft in Windows or Outlook doesn’t support this standard. Gpg4Win adds OpenPGP for Windows. It also has GpgOL, an Outlook plug-in but only for 32-bit Outlook. If you have 64-bit Office /
Among all the announcements from Apple yesterday, there’s one that caught our eye – multi-tasking. This is coming in iOS 9 … the next version of the Apple operating system. Source: Apple At least Apple calls it ‘multi-tasking’ it’s really just a split screen so you can have two apps
Skype has an embarrassing bug where a simple set of characters, easily mistyped, will crash the iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows apps plus (as we just discovered) Skype for Windows. The characters are http://: (note the extra colon)which is easily done when typing a web link. We just tried sending
Facebook has made Microsoft look bad with their latest innovation: encrypted email. Facebook probably didn’t mean to do it, but their announcement shows up Microsoft’s lack of proper support for secure email. First the good news … Facebook now has the option to have their maintenance emails sent in encrypted
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
We’ve just released Clever Outlook Contacts, an extensive guide to Outlook’s Contacts list and using that list on many computers, phones and devices. The Contacts part of Microsoft Outlook 2013 & 2010 is quite amazing. It goes far beyond just recording phone numbers and addresses. Far beyond just Outlook on a Windows computer.
This week has seen three bits of news from Microsoft about more apps and features coming our way. Let’s have a look at what’s supposedly in store; Flow, Office Now and OneClip. Two could be interesting and useful, the other will send chills up the spine of anyone with a
It’s somewhat hidden away, but Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Apple devices can now open and save to Apple’s own iCloud storage. It has been a long time coming but the Office for IPad apps have slowly moved from the Microsoft only position (OneDrive and SharePoint only) to now allowing
Microsoft has released preview versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for Android phones. These apps will eventually replace the existing Office Mobile offering. Source: Microsoft These apps will be familiar to anyone who has used Office for iPhone apps or Office for Android tablets. The previews should have 1GB
Microsoft has announced the deployment of their new email management service for Office 365 hosting – Clutter. It will be turned on, by default, for all customers using Microsoft’s mail hosting in June. Clutter works at the server level to read your incoming messages and move the ones that the
The Motley Fool has a look at Microsoft’s latest financial results under the catchy heading 3 Reasons Microsoft Corporation’s Stock Could Fall. They note that there’s been strong growth in Microsoft’s cloud computing service calling it “arguably its single most important business segment”. There are competitors like Amazon Web Services
As we mentioned recently, one way to safely and securely send Office documents around is to use one of the new messaging apps that are available. The many apps vary in features and quality. Any of them have more and better features than standard mobile phone texting. In fact, these
Art A. makes some good points about the cost of Office 365 for business. Microsoft’s CFO admits that Office 365 costs up to 80% more than other buying choices but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a worse choice for business. When Office 365 includes backoffice services (like storage, Exchange
Apple Watch hype has even reached Microsoft. You can use an Apple Watch to control a PowerPoint presentation. All images from Microsoft. PowerPoint Remote for Apple Watch is now part of the PowerPoint for iOs app download. It works in conjunction with PowerPoint running on an iPhone or iPad which
They keep getting younger. A 6 year old London boy has become the youngest ever Word 2013 Microsoft Office specialist. The previous record holder was a whopping 9 years old and took the exams in Nigeria. It’s been news in Pakistan because Humza was born in Lahore and moved to
If you only know one language (like me) then you might think that the language tools in Office don’t matter – think again. Even us solo linguists sometimes need the deep language support in Office. Here’s a quick look at your dictionary and proofing tool options in Office. Proofing Tools
We’d like to tell you more about the English dictionary updates to Office 2013, but Microsoft has chosen secrecy. Is it secrecy, arrogance or apathy? Microsoft has started making more regular changes to the English dictionary. For some reason they’ve decided to do it ‘on the QT’ so few people
Q: On one of my Access reports, strange light grey bands print here and there. What causes them, and how do I remove them? A: This is most likely because of the Access default setting for Alternate Back Color for group headers and footers in reports. Alternate row shading is
Microsoft has released a preview/beta version of Office 2016 to effectively all comers. Here’s how to get it. The Preview version comes with the 2016 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, OneNote and Publisher. Office 2016 requires Windows 7 or later. Similar memory and drive space requirements to Office
Barry G writes “Peter, nice work waking up Microsoft about the broken link in Outlook 2013. Now they should look at the Outlook 2010 link which isn’t broken but it’s quite useless”. Barry is right, the Outlook 2010 link to ‘View social network providers available online’ does no such thing.
It took many weeks and repeated public shaming but Microsoft has finally fixed the social connectors link in Outlook 2013. The ‘Connect to another social network’ link now works – well sort of. Microsoft’s problem, and the reason why the link went to a ‘Page not found’ error, was the
