Many media reports about an early end to Office 2007 support which are true, but not for the vast majority. Some press either didn’t understand what’s happening or decided to ‘spin’ it for clickbait. Microsoft needs to accept some blame for this confusion because they didn’t publicly announce the change
Microsoft’s explanations for Office bug fixes range from deliberately delayed, to duplicated through ambiguous wording to no explanation at all! We can only hope that the bug fixes themselves were done with more care and professionalism than the documentation. Delayed Disclosure Microsoft has long had a policy of deliberately keeping
Coming soon to Office 2016 for Windows for Office 365 subscribers is a new type of graphic – the icon. Office 365 Insiders have this now and it’ll be sent to all Office 2016 for Windows/Office 365 subscribers in 2017. It’s an addition to the Insert tab and needs an
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 the Access database program will get added database connectors in early 2017. The announcement was a bit vague on date, detail and which Access users will be getting these additional features. Date “Early 2017” before 1 April 2017 or sometime in the next 4½ months. Detail
Microsoft Access, the database part of Office has been added to more Office 365 plans. Access will be automatically included with Office 2016 downloads and updates from 1 December 2016 onwards for Office 365 users on Business and Business Premium plans. Office 365 ProPlus, E3 and E5 plans already include
A collaboration option for the more security conscious is Semaphor, from the same company as the SpiderOak secure cloud storage. An important consideration with any cloud service is the risk of intrusion into the information you’ve saved on the cloud servers. Cloud providers talk a lot about data security to
CodeWeavers, the people behind CrossOver, have announced that the next version will support much of Office 2013. That means it will be possible to run the Windows versions of Word 2013, Excel 2013,PowerPoint 2013 and Project 2013 on Linux or MacOS systems, using CrossOver v16. Office 365 subscribers will be
Microsoft Office apps for Android have been updated in October with some tricks from other Office apps now available on Android. Now individual chart elements can be chosen and manipulated rather than only the entire chart. This applies to all charts in Word, Excel or PowerPoint apps. PowerPoint now gets
Microsoft has released its version of the popular new method of team communication – messaging. Microsoft Teams is an ‘instant-messaging plus’ addition to Office 365 Enterprise plans which offers group communication (similar to instant messaging), private ‘one on one’ messaging, document collaboration, video/audio group calls. It’s Redmond answer to Slack
A new trick in Word for Windows and eventually other Office apps is the Ink Editor. With Ink Editor on, you can use the drawing actions to highlight or delete text using ‘drawing’ actions. Highlight To highlight text, click on Ink Editor then choose one of the highlight options in
Word has many ways to view a document. Some are obvious, others aren’t so obvious. Let’s look at both types. We’ll first look at the shortcuts and quick ways to change view, then go into more detail on some more interesting part of modern Word for Windows – the windows
They didn’t have projection screens, online chats, document collaboration, equation editor, whiteboards, colored shirts or, apparently, women … Source: widely available on the net, supposedly from NASA
Today’s big announcement from Microsoft was mostly about the future and the future is 3D. A small part of that future is in PowerPoint. The new major release of Windows 10 will be in 2017 and called the ‘Creators Update’. It will have a lot of 3D enabled elements. Microsoft
Microsoft’s cloud service and annual ‘subscription’ strategy continues to work for shareholders. The latest financial results showed an 8% increase in revenue from their Office consumer products and cloud services. There are now 24 million Office 365 consumer ‘subscribers’. As always, we put the word ‘subscription’ in quote marks. The
Microsoft Cloud staff have their chests bursting with pride with the announcement that they’ve met some US Dept. of Defence standards. The blog posting is headed How the Office 365 U.S. Government Cloud meets the regulatory and compliance needs of the Department of Defense which sounds impressive. Regular Office-Watch.com readers
Microsoft is teasing an important Office related announcement for next Wednesday, 2nd November. That might not sound like a big deal, after all, Redmond is always boasting about ‘important’ announcements that turn out to be a damp squib. We know this one is truly important because the head honcho, the
The many downsides of ‘Brexit’, the UK’s departure from the European Union, now include Microsoft’s UK customers. Retail Office 365 customer may be next. The company has announced that British sales of “enterprise software and cloud services” will go up in price from January 2017. The increases will be between
Microsoft makes Office updates very confusing with different support expiry dates depending, not just on the software, but how you bought it. There’s talk around that Office 2013 is ‘expiring’ in about 4 months time, February 2017. But that doesn’t match with Microsoft’s own ‘Lifecycle’ subsite which is clear. The
BT Sync is our essential tool for synchronizing and backup between computers and devices. It’s just been renamed to Resilio Sync. Documents, music, video and other files can all be kept ‘ in sync’ between computers (Windows, Mac and Linux) and also devices (Apple and Android). Some NAS devices support
Tap is a new feature coming to Microsoft Office that’s worth a look. It’s a way to find other documents that relate to the document or email you’re currently writing. Then copy from those past documents into the new creation. Or as Microsoft says ‘leverage and re purpose existing content
We’ve been talking, again, about the possibility of hacking via a RTF (Rich Text Format) document. Some readers have asked why the RTF format is so commonly requested for job applications? Is it the fact that RTF is commonly available, even to people who don’t have Word, or any other
Another month, more security holes in Microsoft products being fixed. This month, another problem with opening RTF (Rich Text Format) documents. Almost all Office variations are affected. Office 2016 back to Office 2007 for Windows. Office 2016 and 2011 for Mac. Word Viewer for Windows Sharepoint, Office Web Apps and
An alternative collaboration option is Dropbox Paper, still in beta, but working nicely. It’s a simpler and entirely browser based way to share a document plus messaging/comments on the side. Documents can be shared with people, all of whom can view/edit the document at the same time in their browser.
