BitGlass and Cylance have found some new ransomware called Shurl0cker that managed to fool both Google and Microsoft’s scans to arrive on their customers cloud storage. According to the researchers: “Two well-known cloud platforms with built-in malware protection, Google Drive and Microsoft Office 365, failed to identify the ransomware. In
“Why Microsoft Office is a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush Saga” says one of our favorite podcasters, Tim Hartford. Is he right? Hartford isn’t any random blogger. He’s a respected writer with a regular column in The Economist, a series of wonderfully readable books and a great radio program/podcast,
You might be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft Office isn’t so much software as a ‘trojan horse’ allowing hackers the opportunity to destroy, copy or ransom your valuable information. That’s overkill, of course, but each week there’s yet another new attack on millions of computers relying on Microsoft Office. If
Back in Excel 2013, Flash Fill was added, a nifty way to join or separate a string from other cells by example. If its seems to have disappeared from Excel 2016 for Windows, here’s how to get it back. In Excel 2013, Flash Fill worked automatically. Just typing the first
We’ve talked, at length about Excel’s Rank()/Rank.EQ functions and coping with joint or equal rankings. What about Rank.AVG()? Rank.AVG() works differently for equal rankings because it returns an average of the combined rankings. For example, joint 3rd place getters will return the value ‘3.5’ by Rank.AVG() which is the average
Rank() and Rank.EQ() are fine while each value/score is different but in the real world you’ll see cells with the same value and ranking. We’ll show you how to detect equal rankings, display a note when there are equal rankings. Let’s start with an example of equal rankings. See Venus/Vulcan
While Microsoft is busy patching for the Spectre/Meltdown chip flaws there’s another serious and more easily abused security flaw in Word. It’s fairly simple and not yet detected by any of the anti-virus programs. It’s called ‘SubDoc’ and was discovered by Rhino Security Labs who have gone to the extent
So many patches for Microsoft Office and Windows in this month’s package of bug fixes. Few parts of Windows or Office aren’t patched this month, either directly or indirectly. According to Microsoft there’s ‘only’ 56 patched security holes in their products, this month alone. In reality there’s a lot more
When you update your Outlook rules with Exchange Server, why does it take so damn long and you have to wait? Each time you change your email processing rules, Outlook for Windows/Mac has to update the server. But it takes an unreasonably long time, even when there’s only a few
Back in Excel 2007, Tables were added. That simple name hides a quite different and powerful Excel option that, in our view, Microsoft hasn’t explained very well. Excel is often used for lists and Excel Tables make managing and extending those lists a lot easier. In fact, ‘Excel Lists’ was
Slicers are a better and easier way to filter lists and it’s available in Excel Tables as well as PivotTables. From Office 2013 Slicers appeared in the Tables tab, before that Slicers were only for PivotTables. Which is great because it makes filtering an Excel table a lot more obvious.
Microsoft’s Word Comments feature has popped up in the news again over the break, this time to embarrass Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Brietbart commentator. Mr Yiannopoulos is in a legal battle with his publisher over a proposed book and some of the court papers are now public. What’s catching attention
Here’s how to merge the travel details in your Tripit itinerary into your Outlook calendar. Just like our previous Tripit article, Tripit tips for Microsoft Outlook Tripit isn’t involved in this piece in any way. There’s no money or consideration in exchange for this article. Outlook software can link to
All the ‘End of 2017 news reviews’ reminded us of the great ‘Covfefe’ debate. President Trump made a tweet typing error, adding the previously unknown ‘covfefe’ to the language. It’s believed to be a mistype of ‘coverage’ though neither the President nor his staff would admit that. Word 2016 for
Tripit is an online system for managing your travel which includes live updates on flight information, seat assignments and other goodies. Here’s how you can make Outlook work better with Tripit, or similar systems. Peter finally tried Tripit after his friend, Phil, reminded him about the service for the umpteenth
Microsoft has finally admitted what was obvious to everyone else, that the DDE part of Office is dangerous and should be disabled. The latest patches have finally provided a way to disable the DDE feature in Office, either completely or in part. Something that’s looooong overdue. Sidebar There are two
Crossover, the Windows emulation for Mac computers, has released v17 which adds support for Office 2016 for Windows. With Crossover v17, the default compatibility has changed from Windows XP to Windows 7. That’s a big improvement and opens the way for a lot more recent programs to run like Quicken
It’s time again to see how Microsoft Word’s spell checker goes against the newest words in the English-speaking world. We’ve taken the “Word of the Year” from various dictionaries plus some other 2017 contenders and typed them in Word to see if the red squiggle appears. We used Word 2016
How can you filter the Outlook contacts list to show just the Contact Groups or not? You can’t … amazingly there’s no direct or easy way to separate out the two types of contacts: individual or groups. Look along the Search tab for Contacts and there’s many options but not
Use less print toner or ink simply by changing to a font designed to save you money. Ryman Eco is an Windows/Mac font which the makers say uses a third less ink or toner than regular fonts. In smaller sizes it looks normal but as the point sizes grow you
The FBI is using evidence from Microsoft Word to oppose a change of release conditions for former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. We’ll show you the mistakes that were made and how to avoid them. We’re not interested in the prosecution itself nor the politics, here’s a summary. Our focus
PivotTable Slicers and Timelines can be combined to filter by time and other criteria in Excel. Let’s first add a slicer to filter the data by following the below steps: Click inside the PivotTable and go to the Analyze tab Click Insert Slicer under the filter group. From the Insert
Timelines are a special form of Excel Slicer for PivotTables, to make filtering dates easier. Timelines are slicers that allows you to filter date fields and only date fields in PivotTables. The feature shows you a series of events grouped by time. Here’s a Timeline filtering a PivotTable to show
Here’s how to save yourself money but still be up with the latest color hype from Pantone. 2018’s color of the year is ‘Ultra Violet’ and we’ll show you how to get that exact color in your Office documents. Source: Pantone Color of the year We’re meant to take this
