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
If you’re interested in the hard numbers about the 2016 US election, David Wasserman @redistrict has done the work for you. Channel your inner ‘Nate Silver’ <g>. Go to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133Eb4qQmOxNvtesw2hdVns073R68EZx4SfCnP4IGQf8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=19 to see a ‘read only’ Google Docs worksheet showing the state-by-state results. Not visible above are columns with the total
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
Here’s a ‘no fuss, no muss’ way to grab the latest exchange rates and use them in Excel. No need to lookup a rate and type it in, let Excel do all that work for you. You might expect Excel to do this out of the box. After all, Microsoft
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
Sometimes we wonder what happens in Microsoft development meetings because the software we get from those discussions seems so out of touch with reality or even sense. Today’s example comes from Outlook for Windows and it’s curious ‘one way’ translation feature. Office for Windows has good language translation options, though
It’s that time of year again and Office-Watch.com has a little fun seeing how Microsoft Word’s dictionary compares to the winners of the Scripps (US) National Spelling Bee. Surprisingly, Word did better in 2016 than past years, despite the words being harder. Still, no chance of Word reaching the finals
Emoji are those funny little icons that appear in text/SMS messages and some emails. Emoji have become quite the thing. More are being added to mobile phones, especially Apple devices. Originally intended to show emotions in text messages, they’ve expanded to other uses and overlap with many common symbols from
Editing an image in Office is not a way to hide the original details or redact a photo. Images in a document can be fully redacted by replacing the image with black box (or other full color block). But what if only want to hide/redact part of the image? That’s
The US Scripps National Spelling Bee is over for another year with another tie between two amazing young people. Both winners are impressive to us mere mortals but also compared to Microsoft Office. As we have for the last few years, we’ve made a list of the championship words to
Almost a year ago we sarcastically complained about the lack of words from ‘Game of Thrones’ in the Office dictionary. We didn’t expect Microsoft to do anything out it and, if they did, thought they’d tell customers. Slate magazine has noticed that many Westeros names now don’t get a red
Microsoft has made yet another Office announcement … not a big announcement but an opportunity to explain the idea of Universal apps for Office and how they compare with traditional desktop apps. The Microsoft announcement was that a preview version of Office for Windows 10 for phones will be available
The days of carrying a separate presentation ‘clicker’ may be over as Microsoft brings it’s Office remote app to Android. Office Remote turns a smartphone into a controller for a PowerPoint presentation, Excel worksheets (including Slicers and PivotTables) plus Word documents. Image supplied by Microsoft. The smartphone connects to your
In Outlook 2013 you may have noticed the ‘Link Contacts …’ item on each contact card. We’ll explain why it’s there and what it can do for you. Link Contacts is different from ‘Contact Linking’ that’s been available in many versions of Outlook. Contact Linking lets you connect a contact
Getting Outlook windows into the positions you want, and keeping them there, is one of those mysteries that Microsoft offers to us mere customers. We’ll try to explain what’s going on but, alas, can’t guarantee any solid answers. Most Outlook users have more than one window open at any time.
ZDnet is reporting that an ebay merchant is offering an Office 365 Personal subscription for $29.99. The ebay item is here and we’re wary about it. Many have been sold (1,154 as we type this) and there’s good feedback both for the merchant and the Office 365 purchases. An Office
Finally, in this series about the ‘not so permanently’ deleted Outlook items, how do you recover a supposedly ‘permanently’ deleted item? Or maybe check to see if something you want wiped from your computer has truly been removed. All this is embarrassingly easy (embarrassing to Microsoft). There are various tools on
The fact that Outlook doesn’t ‘permanently’ delete items (like it says it does) has advantages or disadvantages depending on your need. Both needs are, thankfully, rare but worth keeping in mind. Cons These days we’re all more concerned about data privacy and where information can be stored without us realizing
So now we know that an Outlook item is not ‘permanently deleted’ even if Microsoft says so. How can you truly delete an Outlook message, appointment etc. You might want to truly delete when you’ve received something in error (as in the Aussie case) or simply want to prevent sensitive
There’s a vital but broken web page link in Outlook 2013 that stops people adding to one of it’s most promoted features. Outlook 2013 comes with some ‘Social Connectors’ to link contacts to Facebook and Sharepoint. For others you click a link ‘Connect to another social network’ (In Outlook Contacts,
Here’s a simple way to speed up Outlook when connected to accounts via IMAP. In short, make Outlook work offline at all times except when connecting to send/receive messages. Go to Send / Receive and click Work Offline On the Outlook status bar it’ll show ‘Working Offline’. Then go to
