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
The Oxford English Dictionary has new last entry on the final page of the ‘Z’ chapter. As Office nerds, we immediately went to see how Microsoft Office handles this obscure word and its predecessor. Turns out Office handles the ‘last word’ very well. The new last entry is Zyzzyva (“zih-zih-vah”)
Get Microsoft Office for no money, nil, ziltch, nada, bugger all. It’s legal, easy and this article explains the many options available. We’ve not talking about ‘Office wannabes’ but Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote from Microsoft itself. They won’t have all the features of Office 2016 for Windows desktop. There’s
The Royal Shakespeare Company has made its image archive available online, adding another resource for PowerPoint and Word users. The pictures go back 80 years of the company’s history and features images from (now) famous names like Sir Patrick Stewart, Dame Judy Dench and many more. Beyond the stage You
A new way to infect your computer, via PowerPoint and simply hovering your mouse over a web link. It’s a malicious PowerShell script inside a PowerPoint file. Either a .PPSX (Microsoft PowerPoint Open XML Slide Show) or .PPS (PowerPoint Show ) file. When the PPSX/PPS file is opened, Office will switch
Each year Office-Watch.com has a little fun seeing how Microsoft Word’s dictionary compares to the winners of the Scripps (US) National Spelling Bee. Word did better in 2017 than past years. Still, no chance of Word reaching the finals in 2013, 2014, 2015 , 2016 and now 2017 despite being
Here’s how you start writing an Outlook email drafts on one computer and later continue writing it on another machine. If you’re using Office 365 hosting or Exchange Server with Outlook for Windows/Mac only a little tweak is necessary. For others, there are workarounds. We do this often. Most commonly
Most color printers have a secret tracking or forensic code added to every page that lets governments and others know when and where the page was printed. It’s just one result of last week’s NSA leak and later arrest. One piece of evidence against Reality Winner was the secret code
This is a really screwy error message. You try to start an Office desktop program and are stopped with the message ‘This app can’t run on your PC’. Here’s the fix. To make it even stranger, some Office programs will work while others say they can’t run? We’ve seen the
Windows will automatically index and let you search Office documents on your computer or network – how can you stop that happening? Maybe the document is personal or so private you don’t want anyone to find it with a Windows Search. Or discover that the document even exists! Password Protection
The US Supreme Court (aka The Supreme’s) has sided with consumers in a case about refilling printing toner or ink cartridges. Alas, printer makers still have other ways to grab extra money from you. Lexmark sued Impression Products who have been refilling ink/toner cartridges. The case alleged that Lexmark’s patents
Emoji in emails should be used with great care because what the receiver sees can be very different from the emoji you entered. This isn’t Microsoft’s fault. It’s in the complex nature of emoji with different fonts etc. The ‘take away’ is that emoji’s are great but keep in mind
Shrill headlines talking about the ‘death’ of MP3. Here’s how Microsoft Office is affected (hint: not a bit but you might start moving away from MP3 to the better MP4). Audio and video support mostly applies to PowerPoint. Microsoft Office supports a range of different audio formats including MP3 but
A New York Times article raises our blood pressure and not because the paper is a mouthpiece for left wing bleeding hearts and fellow travelers.* In Ransomware Attack, Where Does Microsoft’s Responsibility Lie? accepts the standard line that Microsoft is doing its best to solve security problems as they arise.
Everyone is talking about ransomware now that the WannaCrypt has spread like crazy across the world. These nasty viruses target your documents and precious files including Microsoft Office files and Windows backups. This is a little embarrassing for us because Office-Watch.com has just released a new book that’s suddenly become
There’s no doubt that the Microsoft Surface is a nice piece of kit but you pay extra for it and even more than that! Microsoft’s usual trick in promoting their Surface machines is to EXclude the price of the keyboard. That lets them promote a lower headline price which most
Adding fonts into Microsoft Office is easy but the standard advice doesn’t always work. We’ll show you how to install a font and avoid the trap. Font installation has nothing to do with Word, Excel or PowerPoint. It’s all done in Windows. Firstly, download the new fonts. There are many
Last week, Microsoft released the Dubai font to their Office 365 customers only. Now the city-state of Dubai has released it to everyone. Dubai is a new font which has both western and Arabic characters in the one package. It was created by the Dubai government with assistance from Microsoft.
At last the cries of eager Signal supporters have been heard – the latest releases allow secure transfer of Office documents, PDF and more. Signal is a well-respected, very secure and private messaging system. The makers of Signal licence their open-source encryption to other messengers like Google, Facebook and WhatsApp.
Sensepost has revealed an interesting way to hack your computer via Outlook. Microsoft’s public response has been to deny there’s a problem and put the responsibility on customers. The method hasn’t been used ‘in the wild’ and it’s not easy to infect Outlook. But we’ve heard that before (especially from
The Dubai font inspired us to look at the currency symbol for the United Arab Emirates – the Dirham. A quick guide for those of us who don’t know any Arabic! There’s no direct symbol for the Dirham – unlike the dollar, Euro or Yen/Yuan. The usual prefix is DH
