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
Here’s the complete list of non-security updates for Office 2016 for Windows and Office 2013 plus our notes on some bug fixes that caught our eye. As usual, these updates will be pushed to most Office computers automatically. No action is necessary. Unexpected Issues Microsoft is always using different words
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)
A few years ago we had a close look at the Oxford Comma (‘Comma required before last item’, serial comma, Harvard Comma etc) in Word 2013. We’ll now repeat those tests with the new “Microsoft’s own” grammar system to see if there’s any improvement. Office-Watch.com has already noted that the
Office 2013 won’t be available for Office 365 Enterprise customers from the end of February 2017. Incomplete reports have unnecessarily raised concerns, so Office Watch will try to clarify. This deadline applies to Office 365 ProPlus client applications customers only. It does NOT apply to Office 365 Home or Personal,
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
Office-Watch.com ebooks give great value to our readers. The low price is just the start. There’s also free updates to the book available to past and new customers. Real-Time Excel has just been updated to include more chapters and example documents. The update is available now to past purchasers who
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
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 (see below). Currency symbols.
There’s a piece of malware about that tries to trick Microsoft Office users into ‘activating’ their Office software when there’s really no problem. Here’s how to deal with it if you get caught. Once it’s running, the malware appears ‘on top’ of your screen with a phone number to call.
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
