One of the latest Excel patches causes more trouble than it’s supposed to solve. Patch ‘KB3178690‘ is supposed to fix some non-security bugs in Excel 2010, ironically bugs that cause Excel to crash in certain situations. Guess what the patch does to Excel 2010? That’s right – Excel 2010 crashes.
Shared Calendars is now available for the Outlook apps for Android and Apple devices. The Outlook app for iOS was recently updated to include shared calendars. This brings the Outlook apps into line with this important Outlook for Windows/Mac feature. Shared Calendars let one person make their appointments visible or
The debate about the Oxford Comma continues with news that a Maine company has lost a court case for the lack of a vital extra comma. Oxford Comma is one of the lesser known grammar checks in Microsoft Word. Sadly, Word would not have warned of the problem and saved
From the crazy bureaucracy department is the news that IBM has been granted a patent for Out of Office emails! That’s right, those automatic emails that go out when you’re poolside are now the property of IBM. From the patent application: “When the out of office agent is enabled, it
Last year we renewed one of our ongoing gripes with Outlook, the lack of an incoming email translation feature. See a ‘side-by-side’ translation of an email you’ve received. After many years, Microsoft has finally done something to fix this obvious gap, but they’ve done it in a typically self-serving way.
It’s not just politicians who get into trouble using public email services. They are just the headline-worthy tip of a much larger email problem. AOL has a way to secure a AOL mail account but too few people (and politicians <g>) use it. We’ve talked before about Two Factor Authentication
Avecto’s analysis of Microsoft’s security lapses and patches shows a worrying increase in the number of security vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office when you’d hope to see fewer. Most of the coverage has been on the issue of Administrator access but we’re more worried about the security holes in Office. It’s
Avecto has released an analysis of Microsoft’s security lapses and patches over the last few years. It makes interesting reading even though the headline conclusion hasn’t been well understood. Administrator Rights problem Most media have focused on a quote from the report that says “94% of Critical Microsoft vulnerabilities would
Office Picture Manager, the much loved and simple image editor was dropped by Microsoft, but it’s still available. Picture Manager has some features that aren’t in Windows 10 to this day. Here’s how to get it for free. There are two ways to get Office Picture Manager (OPM). Both involve
CyberX Labs has identified Operation BugDrop, which uses Word document to attack targeted businesses and steal corporate information. They send emails to the business they want to raid that trick people into enabling macros. Opening the hacked document displays the Security Warning and ‘Enable Content’ button are real; created by
You’ve chosen an image, now you have to get it into your Office document. You’d hope there was a single way to do that but, as usual, there’s plenty of options. Outlook has its own special needs, different from Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There’s also privacy and image size issues
The paid upgrade version of Outlook.com is now available with the usual, but enticing, opening offer. For an annual fee you get extras beyond the usual free offering: No Ads – on the browser interface version of your mailbox. Custom Domain – instead of using outlook.com, email addresses with your
Would you like to try adding an Outlook appointment, just to see how it works? We’ve made a simple test .ics you can download: Add a test appointment It’s a normal .ics file that can be added to Outlook for Windows/Mac or any other compatible programs (most calendar programs do).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is the latest gallery to put many of their images into the public domain. Now you can, legally, use them to decorate your PowerPoint presentations or Word documents. The Met has released about 375,000 images under Creative Commons Zero CC0 licence. That
To many people the Oxford Comma is an obscure grammar issue but, boy!, can it get people excited. We’ve had lots of messages, pro and con, from readers. This all started because Microsoft dropped one of the options available for the Oxford Comma check. In Office 2016 (Windows or Mac)
In How to share a single Excel worksheet or tab we explained how to send or share a single Excel worksheet or tab from a larger workbook. That’s OK as a one-off measure to send out a sheet but how can you do it easily as a share or ongoing collaboration?
There’s a new type of infected Office document that can bypass some protections and trick people into installing a keylogger on their computer. A keylogger is software that records each keypress and send it to a hacker. They can use that info to get your login details for many sites
A style is a collection of formatting choices combined under a single name. Any word or even a single letter has a collection of formatting settings as well. Font: size, color, bold/italic/underline/strikethrough/subscript/superscript, highlighting and more. Position: Left, Center, Right, Justified. List: bullet, numbering. Line Spacing, Borders, Background color and a
We’ll start 2017 with a look at some commonly used characters used in Office but are missing from the standard keyboard. How to insert symbols on a ‘one-off’ basis or insert quickly for more commonly used characters. Degree mark for temperature. Has no special shortcut but you can make one
Another festive season (marketing) tradition is the Pantone ‘Color of the Year’ which gets a lot of media coverage. It gives us an excuse to explain how to convert (as best you can) a Pantone color into something to use in Microsoft Office. Pantone colors don’t have a direct match
There are long-standing but hidden parts to AutoText that’s worth checking out – the field codes. Two Word field codes apply to AutoText: {AutoText } – inserts or updates the named AutoText field automatically. {AutoTextList } makes a menu of some or all AutoText entries to select from. These field
A story in the UK’s Daily Telegraph got us thinking about some of the traps when buying Microsoft Office with a new computer. The Telegraph reader bought a new computer and was told by staff that Office 2007 wasn’t supported on the new computer. The reader was sold, as a
Microsoft has announced that they’ll stop updating the Outlook spam filter (“Smartscreen”) at the end of this month – on 1st Nov 2016. This might be a worry, but not a disaster, for most Outlook users and we’ll explain why. What’s Happening From 1st Nov 2016 there will be no
A new report shows that Excel is causing errors to creep into genetic studies because of data conversion problems. Excel tries to figure out the type of information you are typing or importing into a worksheet. Those rules work most of the time, but not always. If Excel converts a
