Office apps, of a sort, come to Android phones. Hot on the heels of Office for iPhone comes Microsoft’s version of Office for Android phones. The Android release is very similar to Office for iPhone, which effectively means both are quite limited in features and availability. Office for Android (officially
How Microsoft keeps bugs secret until it suits them. For as long as we can remember, an Office Service Pack has been accompanied by the revelation of previous undisclosed bugs in the software. Microsoft has an ongoing policy of keeping bugs secret from customers until they have a fix. Here’s
Even Office-Watch can jump on the royal baby bandwagon To celebrate the birth of a son and heir to the Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge, Office-Watch.com is delighted to add a limited* edition sign to their popular ebook Keep Calm with Microsoft Office This one of a kind sign can
Does Microsoft have a list of blocked words like Apple does on the iPhone? One of the more amazing examples of over-control by a software maker is the news that Apple has a ‘Kill List’ of words that it won’t spell-check. It seems that iOS v6 devices have a list
After last week’s revelations about Microsoft’s cooperation with the US government, we asked some questions …. Still waiting for a reply of any kind. After last week’s revelations about Microsoft’s cooperation with the US government, we asked some questions to Microsoft. They asked for more time to reply, so we
Microsoft closes their Technet program giving an unlikely reason. Microsoft has announced the closure of their popular Technet program from 31 August 2013. You can continue to buy a Technet subscription until that date and current subscriptions will be honored until they expire. So if you were thinking of getting
Microsoft’s official response to the latest news about their work with the NSA and FBI. Office-Watch.com has posed a series of specific questions to Microsoft which we hope will get a response in the next few days. In the meantime here’s their official response to the Guardian article about Microsoft’s
New disclosures about how Microsoft actively collaborates with the NSA to infiltrate Skydrive and encrypted messages on a large scale. The Guardian newspaper today has damaging revelations about how Microsoft had gone beyond simply responding to specific requests from the US government for information on individuals using Outlook.com, Skydrive and other
An Office-Watch.com reader with an excellent idea for Outlook rules and there’s a part workaround available now. Larry D saw our article on limitations in Outlook Rules and came up with a great idea: ” I think the most important function this feature could offer (which it doesn’t) would be,
Why doesn’t Outlook find the messages you expect? Getting an Outlook rule to work with an incoming message can be an exercise in frustration because the on-screen instructions aren’t very clear. Outlook rules let you automate the process of managing incoming messages. For example, tagging or moving messages from a
How to rid yourself of the spam ‘Dr Oz.’ emails since Outlook can’t do it. The latest plague on Outlook Inboxes are ‘Dr Oz News’ emails. It truly is a plague too; here’s our unfiltered Outlook Inbox showing nothing else! Maybe you’re lucky enough that an ISP or mail host
Microsoft doesn’t want Office for iPhone to be good or popular. We’ve received a lot of emails from people disappointed with Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone. Disappointed that it’s so limited in features and options for saving documents. Disappointed that the new app requires an Office software rental to use
‘All’ has a different meaning at Redmond. Microsoft plays word games with Office 365 and iPhone Microsoft could be clear about entitlement to Office Mobile for iPhone. Instead they play word games including re-defining the word ‘All’ to mean something less than the dictionary definition; All: “used to refer to the
Not all Office 365 subscribers can get Office Mobile for iPhone and there’s a hidden limit. From the public statements you’d think that all Office 365 subscribers can use Office Mobile for iPhone but that’s not so. Only Office 365 subscriptions that include Office software rental can also install Office
Office Mobile for iPhone is locked into SkyDrive with few other choices. For most people, the new Office Mobile for iPhone is locked into SkyDrive as the sole location for saving files. It’s a 21st Century version of Henry Ford’s famous quote “you can save a document anywhere as long
A quick look at your dictionary options in Word Even if you, like me, only speak one language there are still some powerful language and dictionary options in Word to keep in mind. All copies of Microsoft Office (recent versions anyway) come with English dictionaries. ‘Dictionaries’ plural because there’s many
The ‘secret’ is out, Outlook is coming to Windows RT tablets. Windows RT tablets, like Microsoft’s Surface, are to get proper Outlook software later this year. The news was announced by Microsoft in a blog post but the work on Outlook RT had been an open secret for months. Windows
Some Windows tablets will be bundled with Microsoft Office for no extra cost. As a sign that the sales of Windows Tablets are not as good as the Redmond hype, Microsoft has announced that Office software can now be included free with the hardware. Later this year (not right away)
Because the kids can spell words that Word can’t! The 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee in the USA got us wondering how Microsoft Word would cope. So we fired up Word 2013 with the latest English (US) dictionary as supplied by Microsoft. We selected 30 words used in the final
There’s SUM and then there are all the useful SUM variations to choose from. Excel’s SUM() function is probably the first one we learn but there’s a lot more to it than simply clicking on the button to add up a list of numbers. In this article we’ll look at
We found a worrying bug in Excel 2013 when inserting rows into an existing worksheet. While investigating the Excel ‘coding error’ in an economics paper we uncovered a worrying bug in Excel. It occurs in our testing of Excel 2013 in the cell ranges of formulas like SUM and AVERAGE
A simple Excel worksheet mistake caused a change in economic policy. Was it a user’s mistake or Microsoft’s? A few weeks ago, came the news that a much-quoted academic paper was based on a faulty Excel worksheet. The paper titled “Growth in a Time of Debt.” from Reinhart & Rogoff
Microsoft Word has it’s say on how to pronounce ‘GIF’ Steve Wilhite really set us geeks on fire this week. As the creator of the popular GIF image format he revealed that he preferred the soft-g pronunciation ‘jif’ (as in ‘jiffy’ or ‘gin’) not the commonly used ‘gif’ (with a
Is there any difference in the software buying Office 365 or Office 2013 Microsoft uses the terms ‘Office 365’ and ‘Office 2013’ interchangeably and confusingly so it’s no wonder Office-Watch.com gets asked about differences between the two. Strictly speaking ‘Office 2013’ is the software – the successor to Office 2010
