It’s that time of year again and Office-Watch.com has a little fun seeing how Microsoft Word’s dictionary compares to the winners of the Scripps (US) National Spelling Bee. Surprisingly, Word did better in 2016 than past years, despite the words being harder. Still, no chance of Word reaching the finals
The stream of updates (or feature ‘catch up’ depending on your point of view) continues with Office for Android getting the ‘Tell me’ help system that’s already in other incarnations of Office. The ‘Tell me’ icon is a lightbulb. Office for Android (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) has it on the
The Norwegian experiment of reading out Terms and Conditions got us wondering about how long the Microsoft Office Terms and Conditions really are. It’s a bit like asking ‘How long is a piece of string’? It depends on what you think is part of Office. There’s the initial software licence
It’s almost hard to believe it’s 2016 and yet Office for Mac customers still can’t rely on password compatibility with Office for Windows. In Office for Windows we’re used to making password protected documents with long passwords, up to 255 characters long if you’re enthusiastic. But Office 2016 for Mac
If you like The West Wing, you’ll probably enjoy http://thewestwingweekly.com/ a podcast that’s going per episode through the series. What makes it special is that the co-host is Joshua Malina, who joined the cast in later series as Will Bailey. He gives some insight into the making of TV from
Gotta love the Norwegians (Hi Jannicke!) when they make a point by reading aloud the Terms and Conditions for popular services like Twitter, Instagram etc. It took them over 31 hours (31 hours, 49 minutes and 11 seconds) to read 250,000 words (Moby Dick is around 206,000 words). Which got us
Microsoft Store is offering a discount on Office 2016 subscriptions and single perpetual licences, but it’s not much of a deal. These deals aren’t bad, but you can get pretty much the same prices anytime from other stores. Other stores also have discounts for other Office 365/Office 2016 products that
How to lock your PowerPoint presentation from editing – the whole thing or just part of it. This is to complete our look at the locking/read only options in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and now PowerPoint. Read only x 2 There’s two ways to make a PowerPoint presentation ‘Read only’
The Guardian in the UK has a nice summary of the latest advice for making secure, but memorable, passwords. Having a long password, at least 12 characters, makes it harder for brute force attacks on your account. To make a memorable password, think of a phrase you remember from a
The Office apps for Windows 10 continue to receive updates of ‘new’ features. These ‘new’ features are things any Office for Windows/Mac user would take for granted. Microsoft makes it harder to use these apps with truly awful and disorganized documentation. There’s a much linked page but the first section
Microsoft is adding Urdu language support to Office for Android, but Office 2016 for Windows got there first. Urdu is one of the many languages of India and Pakistan, spoken by at least 60 million people. Coming ‘soon’ will be the option to use Office for Android devices in Urdu.
Here’s how to save an Outlook message or other item to PDF. Use this to save copies of important or reference emails like airplane bookings, hotel reservations etc. After all Microsoft’s talk about PDF support in Office, it’s disappointing to realize that you can’t Save As … from Outlook to
Microsoft has announced some upcoming changes to Outlook for Mac. The email editor is getting a long-overdue revamp, starting with better image and text choices. Outlook for Windows users will be amazed that these features aren’t in the Mac version already. While Microsoft is putting a positive spin on these
Winnebago County, Illinois has to pay Microsoft $283,000 for installing the wrong version of their Office suite. The Country had bought a volume licence for Microsoft Office Standard but had been installing Office Professional instead. Office Standard has all the usual Office programs including Outlook. Office Professional Plus adds Access,
Eagle-eyed regulars may have noticed that Office-Watch.com is now a secure connection. The web pages sent to your computer are now encrypted so no-one can see what you’re browsing (for example, intercepting your use of an open wifi connection). The little information sent to us is also encrypted en-route. The
A nasty, infected message managed to avoid Peter’s (supposedly) high-quality mail filters and the check by Outlook for Windows to arrive in his Inbox. These messages or similar efforts are a relatively new trick. It uses the person’s name to populate the message, subject and attachment. In Peter’s case, the
There are a few options for compressing your Outlook data file (PST or OST) which often get promoted as solutions. What you’re not told is the pros and cons of each. Let’s have a look at each options plus some comments for our friends with Outlook for Mac. Compress on
How to lock your document from editing – the whole document or just part of it. Allow some people to edit the document but others can only view it. There is also a useful option to ensure that the Track Changes is always on. This ensures no one sneaks unnoticed
We’ve completely revised and updated Office BACKUP Handbook and it’s now available. The 2rd edition covers all versions of Office with Windows 8, 8.1 or Windows 10. Keep safe your documents, settings and emails, and get them back when things go wrong. The Office BACKUP Handbook help you do that automatically
News has leaked of a new and interesting offering from Microsoft called Flow. Thanks to WalkingCat we saw this image of Microsoft Flow and an introductory blog posting – both of which have now been removed from public view. What is Flow? Don’t let the talk of ‘workflows’ mislead you,
Softmaker has released FreeOffice 2016 as an alternative to Microsoft Office. It has word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs called TextMaker, PlanMaker and Presentations. A few notable feature caught our eye: Will run on Windows XP which recent versions of Office for Windows will not. Also a release for Linux but
Microsoft had an interesting challenge for Preview users of Windows 10 – unplug the mouse for a day. They challenged previewers to use only the keyboard for an entire day. They want to ensure that Windows and its apps have keyboard shortcuts for everything – as they should. You can
One of the main differences between Microsoft Office and other suites is the direct cloud connection. The ability to share documents via cloud storage (usually OneDrive) or sync between your devices. Enter ‘Office365’ (no space) is based on LibreOffice Online to give you 20GB of cloud storage for document sync.
In Australia you should be careful when visiting the local Microsoft Australia site for Office related matters. You could pay a lot more for Office products. If you visit office.com.au be aware – it’s NOT from Microsoft and they charge more for Office than anywhere else we’ve seen. Microsoft owns
