Jeff Bezos doesn’t like PowerPoint or any other slideshow system at Amazon meetings. That’s what leapt out at us from his 2017 Letter to Amazon shareholders (published in April 2018). “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos.” Those memos
A KPMG team in Florida, USA are embarrassed and lost an important client all because of a slip of the keyboard and Outlook’s email AutoComplete feature. Miami Today has the story of the proposed new Miami-Dade courthouse and a mistake by the courthouse consultant’s KPMG. A confidential proposal and evaluation
In the UK there’s been a lot of laughs and some red faces about a money raising letter ‘signed’ by the Conservative Prime Minister to a ” Mr Youmustbe F*ckingjoking ” and sent to a pensioner. It’s easy to laugh but anyone who has done large mailings knows that it’s
Microsoft’s half-hearted attitude to security matters is demonstrated yet again with a new patch for Outlook. The patch has taken over a year to be released and doesn’t properly block the security lapse. It all started back in November 2016 when Microsoft was informed of a problem with RTF documents
Will R. an Office-Watch.com reminded us of a trap when dealing with .doc and .docx files. “I opened a command prompt and did a del *.doc. Imagine my surprise when it deleted both .doc and .docx files (I have backups). ” Firstly, a teacher’s gold star plus wise owl stamp to Will
Last Friday, Office 365 customers in Europe and especially the UK had to stop working as the Microsoft hosting servers stopped working. When trying to use email online, users only saw an ‘AADSTS90033’ error, and the message: “Service is temporarily unavailable. Please retry later.” As usual, Microsoft’s communications were mixed.
Should you even bother bulk converting old documents (.doc .xls .ppt) into the newer Office formats (.docx .xlsx .pptx etc.)? It’s tempting to look at your older documents (doc etc) and think about converting them into the newer Office formats. There’s some advantages to conversion but it’s more difficult than
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times … ignore or delete any .DOC .XLS .PPT files you get via email or shared. The main carrier of virus infection is Microsoft Office documents, a fact that Microsoft doesn’t like to talk about. What Microsoft doesn’t say is
What should you do when Microsoft asks to see one of your documents? Submit the files or not? There’s no easy answer when Microsoft asks to see a file from your computer for their anti-virus system, Windows Defender. Do you send the files or not? This can happen with Defender
One thing we can rely on a Office-Watch.com is the regular flow of emails asking about Winmail.dat attachments to emails. What they are and what to do about them. Winmail.dat is part of Microsoft’s own Rich Text Format for emails. RTF has been mostly superseded by the more open HTML
You’ve all heard about “The Cloud” as if everyone knows what it is. It’s clear from recent reader messages that not everyone knows about The Cloud. Or they think they know. Or they don’t realize how much the cloud can and will do. Office-Watch.com explains the cloud and how it
Outlook has a really annoying and inconsistent physical address glitch that Microsoft has ignored for years while it’s rival at Google got it right from the start. The problem comes when you paste an address into the Location field of an appointment. Very often, addresses are formatted across two or
Here’s some better VBA code for converting a private document (contract etc) into one with anonymous words. A useful trick if you’re trying to fix a Word formatting problem but can’t share the document. Legal numbering problems is a common issue that this macro can help with. Office-Watch.com has already
Politico EU is reporting that Microsoft Outlook was used to trigger a hack on the German government’s computer network. There’s the horrible possibility of an email attachment opening in Outlook without human intervention. The article and the original source at Süddeutsche Zeitung are light on details but the attack seems a
Last week we got a peek at the current White House notepaper and could not resist trying to make our own in Microsoft Word. White House notepaper in the President’s hands – 21 Feb 2018 It’s a simple, classic look that anyone can use and adapt to their needs. We’re
Here’s a manual method of replacing text with filler or anonymous words in Microsoft Word Use this when you need help with a Word document formatting problem but can’t share the troublesome .docx because it contains confidential information. Our head honcho, Peter Deegan, had this problem himself. A friend asked
Here’s how to stop Office Watch, or other newsletters, from being moved from the Gmail Inbox to the ‘Spam’ folder or their ‘Promotions’ tab. At the moment neither Office Watch nor our friends at Popbitch are considered ‘spam’ by Gmail, but that can change. Any changes you make to Gmail’s
A new report confirms what most Microsoft Office customers know; there’s more security patches in Microsoft products, despite years of promises. Not just the latest Word, Excel and Powerpoint but even new products like the Edge browser are increasingly vulnerable. An Avecto report shows 87 vulnerabilities in 2017 – a
Here’s how to stop Outlook.com/Hotmail from wrongly marking email as spam. These are messages that end up in the Junk Email folder. We’ve already explained how to move messages from the Junk Email folder to your Inbox. But that doesn’t stop future messages from the same sender going to the
The Corel patent dispute raises the interesting question, can other developers use the Ribbon interface in their own products? The answer isn’t clear. There was a clear path to follow but Microsoft has managed to confuse the issue. The Ribbon with it’s tabs, buttons, galleries, collapsing view as the window
Here’s how to share Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) for viewing or editing via Dropbox. Document collaboration works a little differently in Dropbox compared to OneDrive. There are different methods and limitation for sharing on Dropbox. We’ve already shown how to install Dropbox, enabled the Microsoft Office Online
Dropbox Badge is their document collaboration option that provides Dropbox specific features inside Microsoft Office programs, It works with a refreshingly wide range of Office version. Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows and Macintosh. Office 2007 to 2016 for Windows. Office 2011 and 2016 for Mac. It only works
Just in time for Valentine’s Day <g>, Microsoft has released yet another set of patches for security holes in their products. There’s about 55 patches including a particularly nasty Outlook bug and problems with Microsoft new ‘safer’ Edge browser. Microsoft has or will push these fixes out through Windows/Microsoft update.
There’s joy and celebrations in the streets of Maine as their Oxford Comma dispute is settled. Even Microsoft Word approves the new law! The missing comma only cost $5 million plus legal fees. A quick follow up to our 2017 story about a legal dispute around the lack of an
