Bluetiful will be the new Crayola color. It’ll be generally available from January 2018 or you can use it right now in Microsoft Office with these tips. Office-Watch.com told you about the demise of Dandelion, the now defunct Crayola color. And we showed how to keep Dandelion in your Office
PivotTables really are great and we’re not just saying that because it was one of Bill Gate’s favorite features. The original PivotTable feature was clumsy and difficult so you’re forgiven for trying them and giving up in disgust. Mayurakshi wants to show you some of the nifty parts of PivotTables
10 October 2017 was an important date for Microsoft Office. It marks the end of support and updates for all ‘flavors’ of Office 2007. From now on there’ll be no updates or patches. Not even security patches to fix vulnerabilities available to hackers. It applies to the entire Office 2007
The October bundle of Office security patches includes one for a bug that’s already known and being used by hackers. Known as CVE-2017-11826, this is a Word bug which allows a malicious RTF/DOCX combination to access your computer. The attack uploaded all the documents, images etc that it could find
Here’s how to control what Outlook does when it gets a Read Receipt request with an incoming email. The setting is at File | Options | Mail | Tracking, just below where you set the options for outgoing Read Receipts. That’s Outlook for Windows, see below about Outlook for Mac.
A new vulnerability in Word was discovered and patched by Microsoft earlier this month. Again, the source was an RTF (Rich Text Format) document. There’s still a widespread myth that RTF files are ‘safe’ supposedly because RTF’s can’t contain macros. That’s FALSE. .RTF documents aren’t designed to accept code, they
Make smarter decisions with Excel’s tables and lists. Excel is a great place for comparison shopping or deciding which product to buy. Unlike Word or OneNote, Excel has tools to sort, filter and do calculations to help you narrow down many choices to just a few or one. In this
A new bit of spam or phishing got past our multiple spam filters and into our Outlook 2016 Inbox. It’s a good example of what check in an unexpected message. The message uses the name and link from a real law firm but they’re not to blame. It appears to
If you love digging into US election details you’ll love these spreadsheets with US Presidential Election results, by County and Party from 1836 to 2016 Unleash your inner Nate Silver, see how your county or state voted over the years, starting at Google Docs There are tabs for each state
Organizing your time at a busy conference, arts festival or other composite event is easier with Microsoft Outlook. Either for yourself or coordinating with others. Here’s how. These are ‘real world’ Office suggestions you can use for any busy conference, festival or event. Not just the official Microsoft advice but
The New York Times has a nifty new calendar of upcoming space related events including eclipses, meteor showers, launches etc. Here’s how to add the NYT Astronomy and Space Calendar into Outlook software. The service is directly linked to Google and Apple iOS devices (iPhone / iPad ) with Outlook
Can you believe it, PowerPoint is 30 years old? Originally called ‘Presenter’, in 1987 it was renamed to ‘PowerPoint’ by Robert Gaskins. Later in 1987, Microsoft bought the software out of petty cash (i.e. $14 million). 22 May 1990 was the first release of Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows, the birthday
Where does Outlook hide its main data files? The .PST or .OST files which have your email, calendar, contacts and more. Outlook data files can be anywhere on your computer, but the default location is usually in a hidden folder: \Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook \Users\<username>\Roaming\Local\Microsoft\Outlook The location can vary a lot, depending on
A common Windows Indexing / Search problem is Outlook itself. Windows Search stops while indexing Outlook data and never reaches the end. Here’s some suggestions on how to fix it. An indexing problem means your Outlook data can’t be searched or not everything has been indexed (partial search results). Even
The British Library has a collection of over a million copyright free images for use in Word documents and PowerPoint presentations. They are on Flickr and a good place to start is the albums. A few that caught our eye are: Women of the World Illustrated Letters and Typography –
PowerPoint has been used for many things and how you can add romancing to the list. Twitter user @velzzb was asked for first date suggestions. As a helpful Microsoft Office user, he replied in the form of PowerPoint slides … as you do. For his trouble, he got blocked by
If Windows / Outlook indexing isn’t working properly, there’s a buried tool that should help identify the problem. We’ll show you where this tool is and what to do with the information it has. It’s the Event Viewer, Windows logging of what happens on your computer. Windows Search notes its
Paint is gone, it’s not gone yet and then it’ll survive – Microsoft Paint spent some time in limbo. The headlines were confused and sometimes downright wrong. After the dust had settled, Paint was given a long term life. Microsoft Paint has been around for over 3 decades. There are
“Word Processing is Dead” makes for a snappy op-ed headline but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The Australian Financial Review has tales of Word woe from the legal community. Badly formatted contracts, especially inconsistent numbering, is the bane of many organizations. “…work was done by dedicated operators with expert
The Irish are talking about ‘pink text’ used in a court ordered apology. Text that’s so faint it’s almost impossible to read. Here’s how to do it and post on a web site. TheLiberal.ie site was ordered to apologize for copyright breaches and did it by posting an image of
Yet again, Microsoft has released buggy patches for Office and Outlook. We have details of the faulty patches and the bugs they’ve added to Outlook. This time it’s Outlook users who have the hassle and time-wasting dealing with Microsoft’s bungling. All these security updates cause bugs in Outlook, various versions.
Excel is main focus of this month’s security patches from Microsoft. It’s a familiar story, so Microsoft recycles their stock phrases from similar security lapses in the past. A ‘specially crafted’ document can cause a ‘memory corruption’ in Office. The July 2017 patches fix not one, but two separate design
A political corruption row is brewing in Pakistan with questions about Word and the Calibri font. We dug into the Office Watch archives for more info than simply checking Wikipedia. A report into possible corruption by the Prime Ministers daughter, suggests that some documents were faked. The documents are dated
We won’t bore you with yet another article about today’s Petya ransomware attack We do have some notes and reassurance that arise. Security Patches Microsoft have this one covered. Back in April 2017 they released relevant patches for Windows Vista and Windows 7, 8.1 and Windows 10 plus server editions
