Back in 2002 I wrote an Access Archon article dealing with reference issues, among them the problem of certain references being upgraded when a database is opened in a higher version of Access, but not downgraded when it is again opened in a lower version. You might think that over
While North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, was busy in Singapore, his government hackers were busy with new malware called TypeFrame and delivered by, you guessed it, a Microsoft Word document. Typeframe has eleven different elements bundled with a Word document. As usual, the hackers send the document and try
Here’s how to convert the Last Trade time in Excel’s Stock data type into an Excel date/time that’s usable in other parts of Excel. UPDATE: near the end of September 2018, the Last Trade Time date format changed to an Excel serial date. No conversion or text parsing necessary. So
Microsoft has announced that the community support forums for Office 2013 and Office 2010 are ending next month, July 2018. The Community Support Forum are online forums where Microsoft staff and volunteers answer questions from Microsoft customers. From July 2018 Microsoft won’t be responding to queries in these forums: Office
Modern Excel can grab information from multiple files in a single folder. Just open the worksheet, refresh the query and it’s up to date! This article is a condensed version of just one chapter in Real Time Excel – the new 2nd edition has a lot more detail and example
Criminal have found another way to (mis)use Microsoft Office and infect computers using the latest ‘zero-day’ hack. You may know that Adobe’s Flash was a popular add-in for web pages to display multi-media content. But Flash was very insecure and unstable so it’s been mostly replaced with other secure systems.
As usual, Microsoft has released non-security updates and bug fixes for Office 2016 and Office 2013 on the first Tuesday of the month. A few caught our eye: Late last year, Microsoft was caught out leaving a horribly vulnerable Equation Editor in Office for 17 years. A new patch restores
Two Indian banks clamped down use of unlicensed Microsoft Office, leaving staff to use calculators or open-source alternative spreadsheets. Mid-Day.com reported that Bank of India and Saraswat Bank had some licenses for Microsoft Office but not enough for all the computers the bank had allocated to staff. Branches were instructed
Office Watch reader, John Hoffmann has some more detail on variable fonts, supported in Windows 10 and Windows 11 Variable fonts are a single package that includes many variations (Light, Heavy etc), instead of having separate font files for each variant. That takes up less disk space (important on tablet
It’s time again to put the mighty brains and resources of Microsoft against the best and brightest of American youth. Yet again, the kids put Microsoft Word to shame. Each year, Office-Watch.com get the word lists from the finals of the US Scripps National Spelling Bee and runs them through
An overdue and very welcome addition to OneDrive for Office 365 customers is password protected sharing links. Until now, you could send a link to a OneDrive stored file or folder but there was no control over who used that link. If the link ‘escaped’ to other people, they could
Microsoft has extended their OneDrive Files Restore feature to all Office 365 customers, not just their business users. It’s a simple way to recover files that have been lost, in particular if you’ve been caught in a ransomware attack. Ransomware will encrypt all the files on your computer and network
New and improved ‘Pro’ fonts are a lesser known part of the April 2018 update to Windows 10. You can install, free, updated alternatives for Windows standard fonts like Arial, Georgia, Gill Sans and Verdana. Windows 10 now supports ‘Variable Type’ fonts where a single font file contains many variations
Looking for 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar calendar info? … click here The upcoming Football World Cup (soccer) is a little more complicated than usual. There are 64 matches playing across three time zones in Russia which makes it hard to figure out what time the live broadcast will be
It seems every other business is using the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as an excuse to sell something, so Office Watch has joined the bandwagon … with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Our book Keep Calm with Microsoft Office has sample Word documents and PowerPoint slides
It’s nice to see journalists used advanced Microsoft Word skills to keep government officials and politicians on their toes. CBC News, Canada received an early copy of a Manitoba government report on mental health. The final report was officially released a few hours later. The smart reporters at CBC compared
The so-called ‘Efail’ security bug affects Microsoft Outlook for Windows (among others) but only if you’re using a PGP encryption plug in like Gpg4Win and S/MIME. The bug means that messages that should be encrypted can, instead, be viewed in plain text. The current advice is to uninstall Gpg4Win. The
Excel has three PercentRank() functions to give you the percent ranking of a value in a list of numbers. It’s different from the Excel rankings we’ve discussed before, because this is a percentage or percentile ranking Let’s start with a simple example. There’s a list of values from 1 to
One of the recent security patches from Microsoft is being actively exploited by hackers hoping to trap people who don’t update their computer quickly. The security bug can use an Office document to infect your computer. The security hole is in the Internet Explorer browser and the VBscript engine. It
Another month, another set of security bugs in Microsoft Office. It’s Microsoft’s version of Groundhog Day. The May 2018 dump of patches involves 102 updates covering: Office versions from Office 2010 to the latest Office 2016 Core Office features Word Excel Sharepoint and Project server. Most people don’t need to
In case you thought making a Word or Excel virus attack was hard, think again. The ‘Rubella Macro Builder’ will sell you a DIY kit with updates for just US$40 a month. The virus maker will take you through the steps to make a hacked Word or Excel document that
It’s easy to get mixed up between two seemingly similar Excel functions – Vlookup() and Choose() . Here’s how to, er, choose between the two. Choose( index_num, value1, [value2], [value3].. ) lets you select one item from a list within the function. For example: Choose(2, “High”, “Middle”, “Low”) will return
It’s a simple question – How can I delete a blank page in Microsoft Word? The answer isn’t so simple because there are many reasons for Word to add another page and various tricks to getting rid of them. The most common type of extra page is at the end
An infected email supposedly from the UK government appeared in our Outlook Inbox. It’s a good example of what to be careful of in emails and how some Outlook settings protect you from harm. Here’s the message that got through our mail hosts checks and Outlook’s. Many things in this
